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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 and academic entrepreneurship
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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B. Iterative prototyping
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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Design and academic entrepreneurship
A. Design-as-translation
B. Iterative prototyping
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