Lo/Be Lab
Lo/Be Lab designs environments that help people reflect their way through life transitions: building the chooser, not steering the choice.
It is a design-based research practice, working through spatial, narrative, and computational environments and through AI used as a mirror, not an advisor, to help people reflect more deeply during life transitions.
Established 2024. Founded and led by Seth Looper, Program Manager of the Career Design Lab at Dartmouth College's Center for Career Design and Adjunct Faculty at Kent State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design.
This site is the lab's public working notebook. Each project is a working report, built with real students, observed across multiple academic terms, revised.
An open research practice. The methods, the instruments, and the working reports, failures included, are public by default, for anyone to use, cite, or push back on. Nothing here is for sale; everything here is for use. Write to us with questions, citation requests, or pushback.
Active reports
- Inclusive Leadership Lab A two-hour workshop reframing inclusive leadership as anchor + hold space, for international undergraduate peer mentors. Single delivery pilot.
- DartWorld A spatial narrative platform with reflective onboarding, 3D environment, and longitudinal journaling. Rebuilt each term.
- Synapse An exploration instrument that replaces the ranked list with a spatial map. 13 questions, 460 occupations from BLS & O*NET.
- Career Design Lab Six tools woven into a semester-long deliberation system. Each term is both a program and a research cycle.
- Narrative by Design A 90-minute workshop built around narrative compression: paragraph → sentence → single word. Paired with card sorts and an AI-as-mirror.
- Threshold Discipline-specific career toolkit for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.
What we're asking
- Can designed environments and guided conversation help people reflect more deeply during life transitions, at the scale of a full undergraduate cohort, not just a single session?
- What design principles help spatial, conversational, and computational tools support people in seeing, reframing, and making sense of their own stories?
- Does personal reflection make people better at group decision-making? Can tools that help individuals understand themselves also improve how communities talk to each other?
- How do we use AI to surface evidence about a person without replacing their own judgment about what it means?
- What's specific to a discipline, and what's universal, when designing reflection tools for a particular profession?
Field notes
Short essays from the lab's working memory, methods being tested, patterns that keep showing up, ideas still being pulled on.
Connected layers
- Methods Working write-ups of the methods that recur across projects: narrative compression, card-sort triangulation, AI-as-mirror, spatial mapping, archetype clustering, longitudinal journaling.
- Lexicon Short, citable definitions of the lab's working vocabulary: narrative compression, AI as mirror, autonomy-preserving design, steering vs. becoming, cross-linked to the methods and projects that use them.
- Publications The framework paper The Architecture of Becoming plus five prototype-level working reports (Synapse, DartWorld, CDL, NBD, Threshold), conference talks, and teaching materials.
- About The team, affiliations, and what the lab is and isn't.
- Correspondence Write to the lab, citation, collaboration, practitioner inquiries, or pushback on a published claim.