379. LSE; London School of Economics, with ukinnovate, owned by capgemini (French), a part owner of...

8/9/2019 379. LSE; London School of Economics, with ukinnovate, owned by capgemini (French), a part owner of 'Working Links'

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Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

76-78 Wardour Street

London, W1F 0UU

Tel.: 020 7434 2171

Fax: 020 7437 6223

www.cgey.com


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April 2003

innovateUK

LSE Lab: Alternative Futures

Designing a Lab for the London School of Economics


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LSE Lab: Alternative Futures

Innovation Series

www.uk.cgey.com/cgeyinnovates

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This White Paper investigates possible futures for a London School of Economics Lab. This papercommunications a summary of the main viewpoints which emerged during a one-day seminar heldat Cap Gemini Ernst & Youngs innovation centre : innovateUK. Participants at the event included

representatives from the London School of Economics, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, IDEO and DEGW.

Each voice in this white paper describes a future scenario for the LSE Lab and represents acollection of opinions expressed by participants at the seminar.

Designing a Lab for the London School of Economics


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My role here at the Lab is tosupport the people coming in tohelp them make best use of it.You get people who wander in,

mostly internal LSE people, butsometimes theyre from outsideand theyve had a meeting andsomeone says, Before you go,you must go and see the Lab.We have an open access bit byreception at the front to offerpeople a space to browse, lookthrough some of the thingspeople have created while theyvebeen here or written later about

what theyve done here, theweb logs, and video summaries.Its hard to capture what doeshappen here because its reallyabout the experience.

People who come in for the firsttime have an idea about what itis, because theyve heard theresinnovative use of multi-media

practitioners with room fordialogue to stretch what differentacademic disciplines, and theschool, defines as research.

In the first year there was a lotof outreach to different partsof the school and an effort toexplain. But since the schoolis made up of academics whocan talk definitions and theoriesof knowledge until the cowscome home, that didnt seem towork as well as giving peopleaccess to the collaborative group

experiences the Lab offers.So that meant instead of theidea that internal LSE groupscoming to the Lab to ask tobe supported, the Lab had toinvent some projects. Thesehad the function of bringingquite different individuals fromacross the school together,across traditional disciplinary

A place like a lab has to be organic and grow overtime and adapt to future needs that havent beenestablished yet. It needs to enable behaviours and

not be stale or intimidating. They need support injumping away from standard academic behavioursand being a lot more playful.

or someone recommended theway interdisciplinary research isenabled here. And they want tostraight away go into the space

start looking at the computersand we have to explain, No, itsnot a computer lab and its nota teaching support centre, itsabout facilitation and support forcollaborative working. And theyhave an idea what these thingsmean, from their perspective. Alot of the first few conversations,and visits to the Lab, involvetrying to find a common

language and approach tocommunicate what the Lab cando and how its different. Everysemester we have a two-day openworking group on collaborativeresearch, which shares whatsbeen happening in the Labsexperimental projects involvingartists and designers and other

Voice 1

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boundaries, as well as expertsand practitioners and companiesfrom outside. By the second yearwe found that we had to do lessof this because people started

coming to the Lab with ideas thatthey wanted us to help with, andwith some of them the languagewas now in place to enable us towork together.

How would I describe the Lab?Its a physical environment,but its also a network or set ofnetworks of people who haveconnected with each other

through working together in thespace somehow. I think peopleget quite different things out of itand certainly some projects seemto find coherence from peoplegoing through a set of processestogether here. At the mostbasic level its about a sharedexperience that a group of people

have, who are trying to dosomething, or discuss somethingtogether. They dont necessarilyend up agreeing, and if theyare academics, theyd argue

about the possibility of reachingconsensus, but the quality ofdialogue is more valuable frompeople having an experience heretogether. Sometimes closer to therealm of theatre or ritual thannormal academia.

The Lab needs to work out how to use technologynow to help sow seeds even at this early stage.How can technology enable ongoing discussionsafter this event?

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The way I came across the Labwas in conversation with anotherperson running a departmentalgroup here. Id received emailsabout it and there was something

on the intranet but I hadnt reallypaid much attention. A couple ofthe staff had mentioned it but itseemed like another government-pleasing RAE-driven innovationinitiative and I cant keep trackof everything. The colleague Iwas talking to was explaininghow she had been trying to getstudents together with graduatestudents to take the pressure off

teaching staff, a sort of unofficialmentoring scheme, and thatthe Lab had provided a way ofgetting people to work togetherthat was helpful. At the time Ihad a situation where there wasa vocal group of students whowanted to develop a projectthat was partially outside of the

department. Wed explainedthe way the school workedand resources available andobviously they understood thecourse requirements but they

were insistent that they wantedto collaborate with some designstudents from Central St Martins.The course leader and I thoughtwe might as well go and see theLab people and invited a coupleof the students who broughtalong some of the Central StMartins students.

And eventually we decided to

arrange a day there to see whatmight happen, no commitment atthis stage. We told the studentsit was up to them to convinceus how this collaboration wasgoing to benefit them, and thedepartment. We left them to it,although I think a couple of theresearch students were actually

quite involved, and the courseleader was very insistent that Iattended for the whole day thatthey arranged. By this stage therewere about 40 people involved

so I had to really and I wascurious to see what they hadcome up with.

The interesting thing about theproject as it then developedwas that it managed to workboth within the department,and between the school and StMartins, without getting toomany backs up. A lot of this

was down to the fact that theLab facilitators had a process forgetting a diverse group of peopleto work together and focus onideas. But they werent the peoplemoving the initiative along. Bothour students and St Martinsmanaged to bring together aninteresting mix of people who

Voice 2

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My vision is a series of possible physical spaces and conceptualspaces where different disciplines within the LSE with differentinterests outside the school, other institutions, universities or corporate orgovernment and individuals. To be a facilitator or champion for that kind ofpractice.

began to feel quite passionateabout exploring design withthe sorts of things we do in ourdepartment. So what resultedwas a very creative project by the

students which met all the courserequirements and challenged ourthinking about what we neededto provide them with.

We then started thinking aboutformalizing the arrangement andgiving it three years so we putin a funding application whichwas successful. Again the Labwas a resource for helping us

work out what we wanted to doand for supporting its evolutionover the three years. It wasntthat the project only happenedin the Lab or indeed that it wastheir initiative. It was useful inproviding a place for us to cometogether and work together, andhelp us track it and document it

by having the students involvedwith their facilitators. Its not justabout a room booking with somevideo cameras and whiteboardsand a website. Its also a way of

working, a design process, thatson offer and thats provided uswith a lot to think about.

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Im from a new media productioncompany and Im here becausesomeone told me about the e-learning tools they have here. SoIve come along to find out more

after looking on the website.Apparently youre only allowedin this bit but they said I canhave a look round inside whenthe people in there have finished.On the Lab website it talkedabout innovative collaborativetools to support learningbut I havent seen anythingparticularly special so far. Theyseem mostly to have web pages

with links to videos and imagesand documents to download, butnone of the three dimensionallearning spaces that my companyhas been developing. Id like tosee if theres a way we could helpthe Lab develop and push thetechnology along.Weve developed a software tool

that allows teachers and studentsto create knowledge objects andmake them available to otherparticipants and edit what theyfind in the space and keep adding

to it, like a Wiki. Our softwareis extremely simple and its alot cheaper than other packagescommercially available. We wantto sell it directly to schools andcolleges in the UK but also indeveloping countries. Ive beenwondering if theres a way forus to have access to some of theLSEs research about learning.Maybe our software could

be a test case for researchershere to study, sociologists orpsychologists. They certainlyhave onsite students and offsitecollaborators, which is exactlywhat we have designed for. Itmight be that researchers herehave insights into how dispersednetworks of people manage their

learning and this could feed backinto our product development.

However Ive seen the Labslist of partners, which includes

several big technology companiesso Im slightly concerned thatthey wouldnt be open to ourapproach. One of the problemsmight well be intellectualproperty if we did create aversion of our lightweightsoftware for the Lab to trial,because we wouldnt be able todefend our IP if one of these bigcompanies adopted our ideas. Or

it might be that we are simplytoo small for the Lab to dealwith. Im hoping someone canhelp.

Voice 3


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My assistant phoned the Labearlier and Im not really surethey were very helpful. Weretrying to find a room for thenew autumn guest lecture

programme and I thought wecould use that space. The schoolsecured sponsorship from oneof the big banks and there are aseries of distinguished speakerscoming. My job is to bring in thespeakers and market it. One ofthe speakers is coming from MITand a colleague suggested usingthe Lab since its the nearestthing weve got to the resources

they have there. We dont needthat large a venue, its inviteonly, and my assistant spoke tothe people who do the bookingfor the Lab. He explained whatwe needed in terms of roomsize and documenting and

catering and so on. But theyseem to think we need to havea walk-through or induction orsomething before even being ableto put a date in the diary so now

I have to do that. I happenedto walk past the Lab the otherday Im not usually in thatbuilding and saw they had areception for a global consultingfirm so its ridiculous if they cantaccommodate a LSE event.

You almost need projects to be the reason for people to come together butthe traditional academic ways of doing this would be too slow.I would hope a research lab like this could at least be quicker to start thingsoff. But the word lab suggests a place where data is gathered so I dont

know what a research lab in a social sciences institution could be.

Voice 4

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Theres a long-standing discussionabout the nature of economics asa discipline, whether its a scienceor not and how sciences emerge.One of the reasons I came to LSE

was obviously its reputation butalso the range of understandingsabout what economics means. Iwas expecting most of the thingswe do on the course to be muchas they are lectures, guestlectures, seminars, tutorials. Idlike to see more visits organizedby the school into locationsrelevant to the subject butpeople here rarely seem to leave

the building. I like going forwalks around London, both theimmediate environment likeCovent Garden or across to theCity to places like the museumat the Bank of England. Its away of embedding myself in thefabric of the city, and researchingin a personal way the economiclandscape. Undergraduate

economics is terribly dry,otherwise.

I have a tutorial next week andI want to use the time to try

and get a bit deeper into thesubject beyond the stuff I haveto do. About a month ago Iwent down to the Lab they havehere and talked to one of thepeople. They invited me to signup for an event that happeneda week ago that was a sort ofinterdisciplinary seminar. Therewere lecturers and researchersfrom the school but a mix of

departments, all looking at thetheme of risk, a research project.Thats central to economics andfinance but I hadnt thoughtabout it in relation to media oranthropology. There were somepeople from outside the schooltoo, journalists, security andsoftware people. Im not surewhat the point of it all was but

it was extremely interesting.One of the things I had to doin exchange for being invited tothe seminar was help with somefilming for their online journal.

I ended up working late withthis filmmaker who works inthe Lab part time and shes nowasked me to spend a morning ona walk on the some of the routesI take round London. She wantsto video me talking about theeconomic aspects to the route. Atmy tutorial I want to see if I cando more of this sort of thing aspart of my course.

How can you get people into the right collaborativeframe of mind? We waste hundreds of hours everyyear. What I want this space for is as a catalyst forincreasing the productivity of research, of teaching,and improving the administration to reduce waste.Look at how we conduct committees.

Voice 5

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When the Lab was first set upthere were ambitions about usingit to expand research agendaswithin academia and improvethe schools interface to the

outside world. But its hard toevaluate to what extent its doneanything like that. In the firstyear we had teething problemswith the school, partially as aresult of misperceptions abouttwo of the commercial partnerswe had involved. There wasthe feeling that they had madecommitments about technologybut in the end there didnt seem

to be an awful lot of new kit inthe Lab, and certainly nothingthat we didnt have already.Various people who hadexperience of multimedia labsand computer training in otherinstitutions were openly critical.But the Lab got on with doing

things and by the end of the firstyear there seemed to be a userbase and a list of external partieswhod been involved somehowin events. It did seem to be

successful at attracting peoplefrom across the school, butmostly the sort of people whoare early adopters.

By the third year the core teamwere talking about the next setof activities we thought the Labcould enable in the school. Bythis stage wed been approachedby a major company who

wanted to invest a huge amountof money into the Lab and thismade the emerging discussion alot more heated. There was onegroup of people who thoughtthe Lab was successful as beingan open, accessible space witha reasonable booking system

which research and teachingstaff, and students, all were ableto use to support their work.Some of the things going on weresmallscale, and some of them

were high profile events, andbrought in a lot of outsiders whomostly seemed to be positive.The designers involved since thebeginning had helped us workout the technology and physicalenvironment we needed andthere seemed to be a group ofstudents, ex-student hangers-onand professional facilitators whokept the place functional and

feeling alive.

The other group of people inthe school were less interestedin the idea of the Lab beinga supportive, discursiveenvironment and wanted touse the Lab as a laboratory, a

One important thing to remember is that theresno one LSE. People talk about it as if it was aunified thing but in fact its very disparate andfractured. Theres a great deal of diversity andthat would need to be reflected in the Lab.

Voice 6

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site for research. The argumentthey made was the familiarone that social sciences havepoor feedback mechanismsfrom theory and teaching into

practice. This group wanted todesign some research projectsthat used the people using theLab, sometimes without theirknowledge, for observation andto try out ideas being developedby researchers in economics andmedia and communications. Thesorts of things this would meanmight include introducing moreobvious market mechanisms

around access to the Lab and soon (the Easyjet book early andit costs less model and Amazonstyle ratings for facilitators hadbeen introduced right from thebeginning).

This debate went on for abouta year while negotiations withthe corporate sponsor werecontinuing. In the end anagreement was reached that

meant that the sponsor wanted tobe involved in helping establishthe research agenda becauseit would feed back into theirproduct innovation work, andthis put off many of the researchacademics. There was a feeling inthe school that the Lab was nowcompromised by the relationshipto the sponsor so the researchagenda lost momentum. After

another six months, the Labstabilized back into being a spacefor collaboration and interfacingwith the outside world but someof the energy was gone.

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If they try to adopt an external model it will fail.They need to work out the values of the LSEitself to create their own model. Theres plentyof evidence of failure of attaching on to anorganization a model that wont work.

I work here in the Lab part time.I started in my third year whenI got involved in a project in mydepartment. Initially it seemeda lot to put in, particularly in

my final year, but I ended uplearning a whole set of skills, andconceptual skills that Ive reallyenjoyed learning. I think whatsinteresting about the Lab is theway it puts into practice somereally interesting theories aboutlearning. On my course we hadto read the key texts and so Ialready knew a lot about learningand decision making in groups,

but when I got involved in theLab it was like seeing it in action.Im freelance like most of thepeople here but there is a jobcoming up which Im thinkingof applying for. It would meanthat I get more directly involvedwith any user group who wantsto work in the Lab. The job

involves a lot of design helpinga group of people work outwhat they want to do and howto use the Labs resources. Itsa bit like being a translator.

You have an understanding ofgroup dynamics and designprocesses and of course so do theacademics but theyre coming atit from a theoretical perspective.They dont actually know howto get the most from a disparategroup of people sitting in aroom together trying to achievesomething. That part of the joball sounds interesting but theres

also a load of paperwork thatsinvolved, performance indicatorsand measurement of expectationsand how the Lab deliversagainst them. The Lab directorencouraged us to work creativelywith what that means but it justtranslates into a load of forms Iwill have to fill in.

Voice 7

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There seem to be conflicting pressuresand possibilities. Theres a dangerthat a solution will be engineered tofit a supply side opportunity becausetheres a space available, rather thanuser need driving the Lab and itsdesign.

This is my third trip to theLSE Lab in a year. Im from auniversity in Berlin that haslinks with the LSE and Iminvolved with colleagues here on

a European funded project. Theway things are organized hereis unusual. The quality of theoutputs is a lot less finished thanelsewhere. On each of the tripsIve been part of a group of 10people spending a day at the Lab.In normal academic meetingssomeone would agree to writeup a summary of the discussionand this would be circulated by

email. What happens here is thatthroughout the day a series ofpapers emerge and get put onthe website so you end up with arecord of all the things that wenton, visual and textual and video.Its all very raw, not well editedor laid out graphically, nothingyou would want to publish. But

I have found it useful to havea look on the website when Igo back to Berlin. Often thedocuments on the web are notwell labelled but I recognize

my colleagues handwriting anddiagrams and it brings back whatwe were taking about. But youreally have to do a lot of work toturn these raw ideas into properdocuments. I still end up writingsomething and emailing it.

Voice 8

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I remember going to a restaurantin Italy on holiday and we weregiven the menu and we ordered.And as we were sitting there wesaw this other party of people,

Italians, who had this amazingpasta brought to their table andwe couldnt see it on the menu.So we asked the waiter and hesaid it had run out. And thenthey had something else andagain, we asked if we couldhave it and we couldnt. And itturned out that they had pre-ordered their food, perhaps theywere local, and so theyd got thiscustomized meal whereas wehad only what was on the menu.We still got food made to orderbut not the lobster ravioli. The

Lab is a bit like this. Sometimesthe space is being used by twoor three different groups at once,sometimes its arranged for onebig group. So as a group you

are in your own discrete areadoing your thing but you get apeep at what the other peopleover there are up to. The groupI am part of includes peoplefrom the school and people fromother universities. I wouldnt saywe are a team but weve beenmeeting on and off for a year orso in the Lab. To continue withthe Italian restaurant analogy,we now know how to order inadvance. We know we wantthe lobster ravioli so we orderenough for 15 people. But I

could see people peeping in atwhat we were doing and theywere definitely wondering whythey only had the spaghetti ontheir menu. The thing is, its not

really about money. Its not thatwhat we had cost more, its moreto do with knowing how the

menu works and what to expect.

Voice 9

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We had a grim meeting the otherday. In this kind of institutionafter a while you learn to loweryour expectations about theamount you can achieve but

that meeting was a particularlydepressing one. One of mycolleagues was proposing a newMSc. Hed done all the research,had the background on whereelse it was being offered andthe kinds of modules the schoolshould offer. So he was at theinitial stage of putting it intothe LSE machine by coming outat a departmental meeting. Hesuggested that it might be anidea to see if there was a wayof the Lab being involved. Hesaid hed been a guest at some

of the activities there, one thinginitiated by another department,another, bizarrely, by someonewho has nothing to do with theschool.

You could see he was quiteenergized by what they do thereand strongly recommended thatthe department, as a department,go and have a look. Thisbrought up a whole discussionabout e-learning and the role oftechnology in education and theusual suspects round the roomshared their expertise and after20 minutes wed completelydrifted off the topic. We didntreally have time to discuss itproperly and although Im

interested I really dont have thetime. He sent round an email theother day a writer talking at theLab and a creative multimediadocumentation workshop. Its not

really my thing but I might sendone of the graduate students.

Voice 10

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This isnt necessarily a teaching environment but it is alearning environment. What are the tangible outcomes thatpeople come out with? Learning isnt a monolithic process;its lots of different things in different contexts. How does theLSE want to interact with the rest of the world?

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About Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Group

is one of the largest management and IT

consulting organisations in the world.

The company offers management and IT

consulting services, systems integration,

and technology development, design

and outsourcing capabilities on a

global scale to help businesses continue

to implement growth strategies and

leverage technology. Early 2002, the

organisation employed more than

56,500 people worldwide and reported

2001 global revenues of more than

8.4 billion euros.

More information about individual

service lines, offices and research is

available at www.cgey.com

Innovation Series

This White Paper forms part of

the Innovation Series being run by

innovateUK, the innovation centre of

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

For further information about

future seminars and events contact:

[email protected]

Tel: +44 20 7297 3984

Fax: +44 20 7297 3985

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