The potential of design to foster academic entrepreneurship: An ethnographic study of metaLAB at Harvard

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The potential of design to foster academic

entrepreneurship: An ethnographic study of metaLAB

at Harvard

Luca Simeone

PhD Student

Malmö University

NordDesign ConferenceAugust 2014, Espoo (Finland)



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Introduction and aims



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metaLAB

• metaLAB is a research and teaching unit at Harvard University

dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked

culture in the arts and humanities.

• metaLAB produces interactive projects, art installations, data

visualization, web-based platforms, ….



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Academic entrepreneurship

• Usually associated with academic entrepreneurship:

– innovation development and commercialization

– intellectual asset management

– university spin-offs

– technology transfer and brokering

• Kingma defines academic entrepreneurship as a way to engage

with external communities to create value

• This paper analyzes how design is used to foster this idea of

entrepreneurship in metaLAB

Kingma, Bruce R., ed. Academic Entrepreneurship and Community Engagement: Scholarship in Action

and the Syracuse Miracle. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011.



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Methods

• Participant observation (12 months)

• Semi-structured conversations

• Archival work

• Part of a multi-year project, where I investigate different design labs

situated within academia (MIT, Malmö University)



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Design and academic entrepreneurship



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Design plays an important role to connect academia with external

stakeholders and to sustain these interactions through processes of:

A. Translations

B. Iterative prototyping

C. Co-design



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A. Translation

• In projects developed at metaLAB, diverse stakeholders coming

from academia, cultural institutions, NGOs, industry, public sphere

are involved at several levels, sometimes as early-stage co-creators,

some other times as final users.

• These stakeholders are located within their own cultural, economic,

socio-material contexts, where diverse and specific languages and

agendas are in place.

• Processes of translation are needed to foster conversation and

collaboration among these different languages and to make

knowledge produced by specific stakeholders (e.g., academia)

relevant for other stakeholders (e.g., people from industry) or

applicable in other contexts (e.g., the market sphere).



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Example: Curarium

• Curarium is a web-based interactive platform for exploring, analyzing,

and making arguments about art collections and the objects they

include.

• Users can annotate objects, tell stories about them and curate

collections in a collaborative way.



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Stakeholders potentially interested in

Curarium• Art curators, museums, general public: as final users

• Industry: use Curarium to offer services to the market

• Government bodies: funding and work at a policy level for open

standards in archival processes and practices

• Academia: use Curarium for research projects

• …



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The need for translation

• Concept of ‘orphan work’: archivists and art curators are familiar with

it, but how about an entrepreneur or an academic coming from

another discipline?

• Concept of ‘interoperability of data models’: professionals with a

technological background can understand it, but how about a

representative from government?



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Design-as-translation

Ideas, concepts and technicalities behind Curarium are translated into

early stage representations, visual storytelling and prototypes in

order to be presented to diverse stakeholders.

Ux design Motion graphics, visual storytelling



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Iterative design loops are strategically important for several reasons:

– to release projects also when they are still at an unfinished

stage;

– to test them in different contexts of use;

– and, ultimately, to gather feedback from diverse audiences.

This unfinished dimension gives external stakeholders the

impression that they can still contribute and shape the design

outcomes.



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Iterative prototyping & multiple presentations

Prototypes at several stages are externally presented according to

multiple formats:

– public presentations, as metaLAB members frequently give

speeches and invited talks both within and outside academia;

– publishing, from academically oriented venues to blogs, from

books - such as a series entitled METALAB PROJECTS with

Harvard University Press - to experimental formats, such as

“artifactual interfaces” to annotating three-dimensional objects;

– studio-based teaching, where students tinker with and hack

interactive prototypes developed at the lab;

– exhibits. metaLAB projects have been exhibited in venues such

as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art or the ZKM Center for Art and

Media in Karlsruhe



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C. Co-design

Participation of multiple stakeholders to various stages of the design

process:

– Brainstorming sessions to define design concepts

– Workshops to co-design prototypes



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A. Design-as-translation


C. Co-design

as ways to define the value of

projects (like Curarium) together with

multiple stakeholders

Academic entrepreneurship: creating value with external communities



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The need to discuss about value



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What kind of value is produced in academic

entrepreneurship?

The value created in these processes takes many forms: from the

production of knowledge that is also of interest for external

stakeholders (e.g., the crowdsourcing behind Curarium), up to the

economic outcomes generated by spin-offs (e.g., Zeega) or patents.



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The economic value of academic

entrepreneurship

• metaLAB is a quite young initiative and therefore it is likely that

spin-offs or other forms of economic ventures (such as patents) will

be generated over time.

• This economic dimension can potentially support some of the

initiatives of the lab and provide opportunities for long-term

financial sustainability plans, especially at a moment when the

access to government funding for research is becoming harder.

In 2013, economic revenues from national and private

industry represented 20% of Harvard operating budget.



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Questions emerged at metaLAB

• Members of metaLAB expressed some concerns as to how and to

what extent research should maintain some degrees of

independence from the market.

– To what extent should researchers be granted some levels of

independence in order to have the freedom to follow their research

trajectories and/or express critical positions?

– To what extent is academic research accountable to external

stakeholders (industry, NGOs, government, citizens)?

– To what extent can or should these external stakeholders be an

active component in shaping the course of academic research?

Nicholas Negroponte’s advice for researchers at Harvard: “If

normal market forces can do it, then stop doing it”.



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Design help discussing about these questions

• Design – as used in metaLAB, as a way to activate translation

processes, as a way to prototype ideas in contexts of use and as a

way of staging encounters with external stakeholders – can

support processes where various stakeholders reflect upon

the above-mentioned questions.

• The conversations elicited in these processes can represent a way

to collaboratively think about the many different modes in

which academia can create value.



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Open points



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Open points

• Focus more on the specificity of entrepreneurship in terms of ‘risk

taking’

• Would the observed design approaches or entrepreneurial mindsets

be appropriate in all/other fields of research?



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for further details:

Simeone, L. (2014), The potential of design to foster academic

entrepreneurship: An ethnographic study of metaLAB at Harvard. Proceedings

of NordDesign 2014, Espoo (Finland) / Melbourne (Australia), 27–29 August

2014.

to get in touch: [email protected]

Image credits: metaLAB at Harvard

thank you

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