Creative Digital Futures Lab
Creative Digital Futures Lab
The Futures Lab is guided by the question:
what does it mean to work with and exist in relation to machines?
Our new Creative Digital Futures Lab enables individuals and organisations to imagine, practice, and sustain digital futures through action research and artistic interventions.
The Futures Lab brings into conversation expertise in human-technology relations in organisations, arts-based change, data science, and systems psychodynamics consulting.
Our cross-disciplinary group of social scientists, organisational consultants, artists, evaluators, data scientists and postgraduate students will work across different sectors linked to a network of partners and sponsors.
Applied social science meets digital media arts
Action research, socio-technological system design and group relations are methodologies that the Tavistock Institute has pioneered globally for more than 75 years with the aim of improving organisational design, and the quality of work and productivity.
The Futures Lab translates these approaches into the digital age, developing new lenses and approaches for Tavistock methods. Applied social sciences meet arts-based methods and emerging technologies, for example AI-driven sensors and ‘small language models’.
Our focus is on creative disruption
We focus on finding the frictions and collisions in digital workflow and human-machine collaboration and encouraging new ways of working with machines.
The Futures Lab will work with re-staging and performance – for instance of the workflow of Human-AI teams or the networked systems businesses create – with the aim to learn from experience and to create new ways of working that are future proof.
The Futures Lab will co-design simulations where teams and groups can learn how to engage with high performance dynamics, both human and non-human, with authority. As new human-technology relations require people to frequently work with multiple professional identities a key focus in these learning experiences is on moments of role-changes.
Our offer
The Futures Lab draws on established Tavistock methodologies and activates new approaches:
— our multidisciplinary team of researchers and creators will explore new ways of relating to emerging technologies in organisational settings
— deep expertise in applied social sciences and data sciences meets creativity, performative and arts-based methods
— imagine, practice and sustain high-performance human/AI integration within your organisation
Who we are
The Futures Lab is led by Dr Annja Neumann, recently appointed as Principal Artist-Researcher and Consultant at the Tavistock Institute. Dr Neumann will bring new arts practice and performance expertise to the applied social sciences and creative practice at the Tavistock Institute. Alongside her Tavistock role she is an Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge Digital Humanities, and Senior Research Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge.
The Futures Lab is a joint project with colleagues at the Institute, external partners, collaborators and sponsors.
Our goal is to build an ecosystem of digital futures in organisations that are relational or informed by learning from experience and embodied practice, employ responsible AI and foster human-centred design and growth.
In partnership with
Image and video credits: © Annja Neumann, Alex Mentzel, Kirk Woolford, Faust Shop: discover your digital double, mixed-reality performance, premiered in Cambridge, 2022; Ruijia Zhang and Eva Aymamí Reñé as AI dancers, funded by Cambridge Digital Humanities as part of a Newton Trust Fellowship, University of Cambridge, and also supported by the Cambridge School of Creative Industries, Anglia Ruskin University. Video edits by Modern Activity. This work is openly licensed via CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0.