Emerging Technologies Research Lab
Reimagining our future lives with technology.
The team
The Emerging Technologies Research Lab is led by Professor Sarah Pink, with Professor Lisa Grocott, Professor Naomi Stead, Associate Professor Yolande Strengers, Associate Professor Shanti Sumartojo, Dr Melisa Duque, Dr Hannah Korsmeyer, Dr Kari Dahlgren, Dr Jathan Sadowski, Dr Ilya Fridman, Dr Dion Tuckwell, Dr Jeni Lee, Dr Thao Phan, Dr Emma Quilty, and Dr Ben Lyall.
Enquiries
We encourage enquires for future research projects and collaborations.
Emerging Technologies Research Lab
Building B, Level 6, Room 35
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145
Australia
We are an interdisciplinary and internationally embedded research and knowledge community, which conducts research into the social, cultural and experiential dimensions of the design, use and futures of new and emerging technologies. We are a cross-faculty initiative that conducts research through the Faculties of Art, Design, and Architecture (MADA) and Information Technology (FIT) at Monash University. The lab’s core research programmes are: energy futures; future of health and wellbeing; future mobilities; future of work and learning with the following themes; futures; sustainability; place and methods.
For more information about the lab and its activities, visit the Emerging Technologies Lab website.
Emerging Technologies initiatives
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Our research is at the forefront of design-driven, industry-relevant solutions, from the everyday to the complex.

Net zero precincts: An interdisciplinary approach to decarbonising cities
Helping cities and urban regions reach net zero emissions by taking the precinct as an optimal scale for urban transition.

Re-humanising automated decision making
Bringing together academic colleagues from around the globe to discuss how we re-humanise automated decision making to the benefit of society and everyday lives.

Intelligent home solutions for independent living
Trialling ‘smart’ home technologies with older participants who are living at home to greater understand their accessibility and utility.

Child protection and social distancing
Exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ways social workers help families and keep children safe.

Future Cities
Helping City of Melbourne policymakers understand how residents perceive, value, and use emerging technologies in the urban environment.

The Living Lab: Designing the future of aged care
Improving the lived experience of residents, families, and staff in the Aged Care sector.

Mobility and Accessibility for Children and Adults (MACA)
Understanding the transport needs for children with disabilities to assist in their support of safe transport.

Digital Energy futures
Understanding and forecasting changing digital lifestyle trends and their impact on future household electricity demand, including at peak times.

Geographies of Commemoration in a Digital World
A significant, accessible, and interdisciplinary resource for researchers interested in the geographies of memory, nostalgia, and identity.

Commemoration reframed
Investigating how people make sense of and perceive national commemorative events and what meanings are ascribed to them.

Atmosphere, authenticity, vibrancy
Investingating how the distinctive ‘feel’ - or atmosphere - of the Queen Victoria Markets is linked to its design and built environment.

Co-designing future smart urban mobility systems
Establishing new ways of developing modern vehicles and smart cities for a sustainable social environment.
Past projects
WonderLab initiatives
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WonderLab designs transformative learning encounters.
We work with the practice of design to shift how people see and act in the world. We collaborate with psychologists, health researchers, architects and education scholars to translate evidence-based research into applied interventions. Our practice-led approach uses ethnographic, participatory and creative methods to design and evaluate perspective-changing encounters.
WonderLab investigates transformative learning through three intersecting themes:
- Beliefs, Bias and Mental Models
- Learner Engagement, Mindset and Agency
- Co-design Methods for Social Learning
Learning how to unlearn is essential in the paradigm-shifting world we live in. Recognising that transformative learning is not simply a cognitive activity, WonderLab threads research from organizational change, queer and indigenous studies, neuroscience and psychology. Using embodied and experiential modalities we prototype and playtest activities that help people surface faulty mental models and question unchallenged beliefs. Convivial tools help us share diverse lived experiences and story-making, games and futuring methods help activate the promise of new ways of being and doing.
At the core of designing for transformation is the holistic decision to design for emotions, for connection, for empowerment. The contexts for the research varies from supporting teachers’ transition into new learning environments to making visible the ways our biases shape our work or giving students a felt experience of how mindsets matter. What the situated projects share are strategies for undertaking the disorienting yet rewarding work of reframing our self-understanding, beliefs and actions into new habits and practices.
Select an area of investigation to learn more:
Research
We are driven to consider what design brings to the interdisciplinary field of learning. So material thinking is one contribution design has to offer. But if we resist the power constructed around the idea of expert, we also want to privilege different types of knowing. We wonder not just about material thinking, but the co-creative act of making, the stories designed objects can surface.
We believe design has something to offer to how we learn. But we also believe that design has much to learn from other practices.
WonderLab research is...
- Applied. The design orientation places an emphasis on interventions that translate research into practice.
- Project-grounded. The research is always in conversation with the socio-cultural context of the situated project and informed by evidence-based research from other disciplines.
- Interdisciplinary. We practice disciplinary generosity, an openness to critique design hubris and a commitment to interrogating the contribution of design research.
- Additive. The methodological invitation is to bring prototyping practices, speculative thinking and co-design principles to grounded theory, narrative inquiry, ethnography and participatory action research.
- Emergent. To make interventions that stick generative design research promotes a culture of learning from failure and prototyping together.
- Novel. To forge new ways of researching we bring design materials, mindset and methods to adjacent research methodologies.
PhD cohort
WonderLab at its heart is a pride of PhD candidates and supervisors from across a range of disciplines, cultures.
The WonderLab PhD cohort brings together an international research collective pursuing doctoral work through Monash University. Candidates are exploring practice-based research topics in design and learning through their individual professional practices. The cohort contribute to one another's research and projects through group collaboration, collective contribution and dissemination of research and a shared commons of tested methods, tools and research resources. Supervision is committed to the whole of the collective as well as individual work. Research is pursued and exhibited to include both the individual practice and collective research components of the cohort.
WonderBoxes
We design games, WonderBoxes, that promote hands-on, minds-on social interaction. These games have been created especially for organisations and communities as a way to give agency to participants to drive their own personal and professional growth. The nature of a game means that the direction, experiences and outcomes are not pre-prescribed. There is no expert determining what is of value to know. The peers contribute to and define the game and the end result. Because of this, the WonderBoxes offer a learning strategy that can be revisited, iterated, shared and mastered over time.
Workshops and playdates
Design positions itself as operating in the realm of potential. Design is all about exploring new ways of doing things so we might craft different futures. We no longer find it relevant to think of a designer as someone who designs for a client but as someone who designs with community. To do this well we need to invite others into the process.
One way we do this at WonderLab is to invite communities to a playdate. We don’t invite people to experience some highly resolved learning experience. We are interested in the playdate as a space for negotiating, exploring, imagining. We invite people to join us in co-creating and critiquing what that half-baked learning experience could become.
To share work that is still in play, that is not-there-yet is to feel vulnerable. Which is a big ask in a public space. Yet it also seems apt. For the verb to wonder is also about being in a state of doubt...to wonder if, to wonder how, to wonder what...
Graduate research opportunities
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We don’t currently have any specific graduate research opportunities available with the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, but there are always lots across Monash Art, Design and Architecture – see the full list.
Events
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Past events
Tracing afterlives: Challenging the 'disposability' of plastic waste
25–26 Mar 2022
Missing Persons, Melbourne
The new future of ageing: Smart Homes for Seniors
24 Mar 2022, 5.15–8pm
Gandel Digital Future Lab 1, ACMI
Visions of the road ahead: Experimenting with the future of self-driving cars
19 Mar 2022, 1–3pm
ACMI Swinburne Studio
Commemoration Reframed: Accounting for Sensory and Affective Experience at National Memory Sites
7 Mar 2019, 4–5.30pm
Geelong Waterfront Campus
MADA Queer Creators: Part 2 - Panel discussion
30 Aug 2018, 4.30–5.30pm
MUMA, Ground Floor Building F
News
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‘Superstars’ of Research
Two Monash Art, Design and Architecture researchers have been recognised in the Australian’s 2021 Research magazine list of top performers, with Professor Sarah Pink named one of just 40 Lifetime Achiever ‘superstars’ in research.
12 Nov 2021
The future home: How digital lifestyle trends are impacting energy demands
From powering our devices and heating and cooling our spaces, to working and studying from home, the role of the home continues to change along with our day-to-day impact on household electricity demand.
14 Jul 2021
Header image: Mathew Schwartz, Unsplash