Research

The Policy Lab maintains an active research agenda focused on how institutions make decisions under constraint, how knowledge travels across organizational boundaries, and how design methods can improve legitimacy, cooperation, and outcomes in complex systems.

Rather than separating research from practice, the Lab treats policy design as an applied epistemic problem: how actors come to know enough, soon enough, to act responsibly. This perspective informs both scholarly work and applied advisory engagement, without collapsing one into the other.

A central focus of the Lab’s current research is Technology Resolution Theory (TRT). TRT examines how professionals and institutions experience forced encounters with practice-altering technologies—such as generative AI—and the consequent imperative to resolve their stance toward those technologies. The framework attends not only to adoption or resistance, but to questions of agency, professional identity, legitimacy, and moral standing within institutional settings.

Building on this research, the Lab contributes to ongoing academic and policy debates on sociotechnical change, evidence-based design, cooperative ethics, and knowledge-to-action frameworks.