An applied research
and design practice
building environments
where people can hear
themselves think.
Lo/Be Lab grew out of a simple observation: the institutions responsible for helping people move through life transitions, universities, career centers, advising offices, were optimized for throughput, not understanding. Students were being sorted, assessed, and placed without ever being asked to slow down and examine what actually mattered to them.
We started building tools to address that gap. Not advice platforms. Not assessment engines. Environments (spatial, narrative, conversational) where people could get their thinking out in the open, see what was actually there, and start putting together a story about who they are and where they're headed.
The lab also grew out of seven years of education-consulting practice through Studio Looper LLC (2015–2022), working with students and design firms across the United States, Korea, China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The patterns surfaced there, about how students move into firms, and how firms absorb early-career design talent, became some of the empirical questions Lo/Be Lab now studies.
Everything we make is a prototype first. We build a tool, put it in front of real students in a real classroom, watch what happens, collect data, and redesign. Every semester is a research cycle. Across the lab's projects, this has produced multiple tools and programs at Dartmouth and Kent State, each documented as a working report and revised term-by-term.
The lab is, in the literal sense, a working notebook. The website you're on is the public-facing edge of it.
Career development is a form of learning, not a service-delivery problem. That framing, borrowed from learning sciences and identity development theory, is the one substantive commitment the lab is unwilling to argue. Everything else is up for revision. See research for the animating questions and the working papers for the intellectual lineage.
The work sits at the intersection of design-based research, narrative psychology, decision science, and spatial and computational design, applying tools from each to a problem none of them owns on its own: how people reflect, reframe, and decide during life transitions.
Six commitments the lab works by. They are stated so a reader, a student, or a collaborator can hold the work to them.
I am a practitioner-researcher working at the intersection of design education, design integration in firms, and the career and life transitions of design students. Trained as an architect at the Rhode Island School of Design (M.Arch, 2010), with work drawing on cognitive science, learning sciences, and design pedagogy, I previously practiced at Danny Forster & Architecture and William Rawn Associates before co-founding and leading Studio Looper LLC (2015–2022), an international education consulting firm operating across the United States, Korea, China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Since 2024 I have been 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. I founded Lo/Be Lab in 2024 to formalize a decade of design-education work across teaching, consulting, and program-design practice into a single research program.
M.Arch, Rhode Island School of Design (2010)
Founder, Lo/Be Lab (2024–present). Program Manager, Career Design Lab, Dartmouth College Center for Career Design (2024–present). Adjunct Faculty, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, Kent State University (2024–present).
Assistant Director, Center for Career Engagement, Washington University in St. Louis (2022–2024). Co-Founder and Managing Director, Studio Looper LLC (2015–2022). Director of Design, Danny Forster & Architecture (2010–2015). Designer, William Rawn Associates (2007–2008). Designer, Axi:Ome (2005–2006).
Industry-education partnerships in design · designer formation and life transitions · SME design capability acquisition in technology firms · reflective practice and studio pedagogy (Schön; Shulman) · cross-cultural design education and consulting practice
seth.looper@gmail.com · Hanover, NH · 
0009-0002-8683-1632 · LinkedIn · Vimeo · sethlooper.com (selected design work)
Lin Liu, Xiaoxi Tan, Tianyi Tan, and Hanjing Wang (2025).
Lo/Be Lab maintains a sustained research partnership with Dartmouth's DALI (Digital Applied Learning and Innovation) Lab on the design, deployment, and longitudinal study of digital products. Through DALI, the lab investigates how cross-functional product teams, software engineers, product managers, and UI/UX designers, negotiate shared frameworks, vocabulary, and design language across academic-term iteration cycles. Additional collaborations: Kent State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design (Threshold project). The Career Design Lab program runs at Dartmouth through the lead author's program-management role there.
Lo/Be Lab's research includes sustained engagement with the firm side of the design-education-industry partnership. Through Threshold, the lab maintains a compiled database of 2,192 US architecture firms used as both research site and student infrastructure. Earlier consulting work through Studio Looper LLC (2015–2022) built relationships with design and architecture firms across five regions: the United States, Korea, China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Forthcoming research extends this work into the study of small-and-medium technology firms and how they acquire design capability.
The lab is small and we read everything that comes in. Questions about a particular project, requests to cite or build on the work, prospective research collaborations, and especially pushback or counter-evidence, all welcome at seth.looper@gmail.com. We typically reply within a week.