Studio Lab BH
Modeling invisible human systems.
Studio Lab BH is an independent systems studio and research practice founded by Brendon Hawkins. It studies the invisible systems through which human experience becomes legible—to ourselves, to one another, and to computation—and builds models, products, artworks, environments, and programs to investigate them. Affect is its first formal field of inquiry.
Current inquiry
The studio’s current research centers affect: how internal states are described, represented, interpreted, externalized, and encountered by people and computational systems. This is one field within a broader practice of systems research.
Emotion as System →Operating model
The practice moves recursively between theory, research, and application. A theory may produce an experiment; research may become an application; an application may expose a new research question; an encounter may revise the theory. Movement is reciprocal rather than sequential.
Practice commitments
Color as Language
Explore how color carries meaning through perception, culture, and the systems we build.
Culture Has Value
Attend to the histories, contexts, and shared meanings that shape how a system is made and encountered.
Affect Has Value
Treat feeling as consequential to human experience, without reducing it to a score or assuming it is fully measurable.
Fluid Boundaries
Let questions move across disciplines and forms, and let encounters change the terms of the inquiry.
Engineering and inquiry
Build with a problem-solving mindset. Some work resolves a practical need; other work investigates, represents, questions, or creates conditions for observation.
Forms of work
The studio works across software, visual systems, research papers, installations, environments, workshops, and commissioned applications. Different questions require different forms. Applied product and design work can also begin with a practical brief, without becoming a formal research project.
Explore the work →Current work
Chroma — available for iPhone
A private place to give feeling a form. The released product brings questions of description, representation, and personal authority into an everyday journal.
Visit Chroma ↗Tell Me How You Feel: Chroma
A completed workshop at Plated Studios brought drawing, flowers, food, and conversation into a shared encounter with emotion and perception.
Workshop record →