A day in the life of Robert Hooke, one of the world’s first bona fide experimental scientists working in London in the1660s, would start with a hearty breakfast with his domestic staff, the stray cousins and nieces he had taken into his home and the skilled technicians he worked with.
According to his diaries, Hooke would then do some experiments – “Tryd experiment of gunpowder” is a typical entry – in his own laboratory, close to his rooms at Gresham College on London’s Bishopsgate. He might then visit the fledgling Royal Society, where he was “curator of experiments”, to conduct an experiment in front of a group of fellows, thereby ensuring that gentlemen whose word could be trusted were witness to his findings.
Afterwards, he would repair to a nearby coffee house or tavern for discussion with other serious-minded and “competent philosophers” to debate theories that merited testing. In the evenings he was a regular at the discussions that took place around the dining tables of the society, with the likes of his patron and employer Robert Boyle and his friend Christopher Wren. But Hooke was no snob. He liked the company of clockmakers such as Thomas Tompion and the instrument maker Christopher Cocks. Often he would have tea with his laboratory assistant Henry Hunt.
In a remarkable career spanning many different fields, Hooke discovered the laws of elasticity governing the behaviour of springs, enabling the development of the watch, he pre-empted Newton with his theories on the laws of gravity, he coined the term “cell” to describe the basic unit of plants and he even developed a theory of memory. Somehow he also found time to act as London’s city surveyor, overseeing much of there building after the Great Fire of 1666, and provided Wren with the method he needed to build a dome for St Paul’s Cathedral. But perhaps Hooke’s greatest insight was not a scientific discovery but that of a place – the experimental life of the laboratory.
The mode of work Hooke invented in the 1660s is now the new mainstream. Experimentalism is no longer confined to formal scientific labs. It has become an organising method for social policy, startup businesses, venture capitalists, tech companies and the creative arts. Everyone, it seems, wants to experiment their way into the future and to do so they want labs, which are proliferating well beyond their traditional habitat in the natural sciences.
The Guardian newspaper has a lab devoted to creating digital content with sponsors. Nesta has a 70-strong lab, just one of a new generation of public innovation labs, including MindLab in Denmark and the Human Experience Lab in Singapore, focused on tackling public policy challenges such as ageing population and youth unemployment. Stanford University has its ChangeLab, and Brac, the social welfare organisation in Bangladesh, has a Social Innovation Lab. Hong Kong has a Good Lab, the Lien Centre in Singapore has a Social Collaboratory, and in Toronto there is the Mars Solutions Lab. Fab labs, where hobbyists and small-scale entrepreneurs experiment with new ways to build products, are springing up all over.
What does this recent profusion of labs in so many novel settings tell us about ourselves, and what can they do that was not possible before? Sceptics will argue that this new generation of non-scientific, socially-oriented labs, armed with a mission to devise new approaches to learning, education, ageing, fashion and consumer products, are little more than a style statement. They will claim they just want to cash in on the kudos of scientific labs as places where people engage in unconventional thinking, have eureka moments and make breakthroughs that change the world. One criticism is that these new “social labs” do not do hardcore scientific research, so they risk devaluing the term “lab”, a convenient tag sometimes lazily applied to a place where people can engage in creative brainstorming without employing any of the patient rigour of scientific research.
Such a blanket dismissal of the labification of every part of the economy is at least premature and most likely wrong. To understand why, we need to go back to Hooke and the way of working he created back in 1660 where experimenting and testing went hand-in-hand with discussion and debate. Sometimes one dominates the other, but both strands – testing and talking – need to be part of a successful lab. Take testing first.
Labs are places where people conduct experiments to test theories. The new labs proliferating outside the hard sciences are a symptom of the spread of experimentalism as an ideology for how we should shape the future. Curiosity is at the core of experimentalist culture – it holds that knowledge should develop by being testable and therefore provisional, and that the best theories should be designed to be examined by both data and open debate. That commitment to experimentalism is at the leading edge of a wide range of fields.
In political philosophy, Roberto Unger, the Brazilian theorist, has called for a mass experimentalism in civil society to come up with alternatives to the exhausted repertoire of the traditional state. In political practice, Mike Bloomberg, when mayor of New York, created the Centre for Economic Opportunity to experiment with new approaches to job creation, unemployment and welfare, all based on practical testing. Bloomberg liked to tell his staff: “I believe in God but the rest of you have to bring data.” The centre is just one of scores of public innovation labs created over the last decade.
The Lean Startup, Eric Ries’s bible for young entrepreneurs, recommends seeing business as a real-world experiment, making a hypothesis about what will work – a minimum viable product – to test with real consumers. As each theory is tested, the business should pivot according to the results and find a new way forward. In the world of digital business, companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google are adept at using real-time data to anticipate our desires, not just respond to them. Meanwhile, the boho-inclined creative class of east London, Brooklyn and beyond adopts the style if not the substance of radical experimenters, inspired not by science so much as the artist’s studio as a kind of lab.
Having a lab is a concrete way to signal an attachment to this experimentalist culture, testing our way into an uncertain future. But if the new labs dedicated to tackling social challenges are to win their spurs, they will have to get used to rigorous testing.
Some social labs are already committed to such testing. Among them is the Behavioural Insights Team, spun out by the UK government and now a part of Nesta, which takes a lab-like approach, running experimental trials and collecting data, to test different ways of changing citizens’ behaviour – small changes to how a tax demand is written can change the response rate. In their award-winning book Poor Economics, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee from the Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set out the case for randomised controlled trials of social policies, akin to those used in medicine, for example to test whether employing a classroom assistant is more effective at promoting learning in poor schools in India than giving children computers loaded with learning software.
Too many well-meaning experiments in social policy proceed without such rigorous testing before they are deployed. A classic example is the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Dare) programme, first developed in Los Angeles, which organises uniformed police officers to go into schools to warn students about the danger of drug abuse. Dare is based on a plausible hypothesis that a uniformed authority figure will persuade young people to avoid risks. As of late 2013, Dare was operating in 75% of US school districts and in 43 other countries. Yet subsequent evaluations of the programme have shown it is ineffective. A meta-analysis of 20 studies by statisticians Wei Pan, then at the University of Cincinnati, and Haiyan Bai of the University of Central Florida, revealed that teenagers enrolled in the programme were just as likely to use drugs as those who received no intervention.
Testing, though, is just one strand of lab work. The other is talking. All labs, including hard-core scientific labs, are places where people debate, discuss, speculate and theorise. That is as true now as it was in Hooke’s time. Next year, when the vast new Francis Crick Institute for biomedical research opens opposite London’s St Pancras station, wedged behind the British Library, the area will welcome an influx of thousands of scientists working in one of the largest new labs to be opened in a major city for years. Those scientists will arrive at work clutching lattes and bircher muesli. After having “tryd some simulations with open-source software” in their high-tech labs, they can retire to one of the restaurants in nearby Granary Square, perhaps in Jamie Oliver’s new hub, where they will rub shoulders with technicians and engineers from Google, which plans to relocate its UK headquarters nearby, and artists and designers attached to Central St Martins art school. As the area develops, startups, angel investors and venture capitalists will no doubt join the throng.
After four centuries, science will have come full circle and emphatically announced its return to where it started, in the heart of the city. The rise of inner-city science will remake cities, science and labs over the next two decades. We used to know where labs were, even if – like farms, factories and mines – we never set foot in them. Labs were sequestered, in discrete places, sometimes behind barbed wire and security gates, where oddball scientists carried out dangerous activities. Not any more.
Over the next few years inner-city labs will sprout all over the world, from the ambitious plans of Novartis, the pharmaceutical giant based at a research campus in Basel to lean biotech startups in San Francisco. In downtown Stockholm a giant life sciences cluster is taking shape in Hagastaden, an area with four universities, the Karolinska University Hospital, 5,300 life scientists, and more than 100,000 students to recruit from both for work and for clinical trials. A major highway will be covered over to create the area known as Stockholm Life, with its slogan “greater science, greater business, greater life”.
The resurgence of inner-city science does not just mean labs will return to the heart of cities, rather than being located in lifeless suburban science parks. It marks a further shift in urban culture, lifestyles and patterns of work towards an explicit and deliberate experimentalism. But this is anything but a new idea. When the scientists at the Crick Institute and the Google campus start migrating into Kings Cross they will feel modern, in their gleaming new buildings replete with computers, wifi, gene sequencers, servers, teleconferencing, smartphones, 3D printers and much more. Yet the fundamentals of the way they work, the way they assemble knowledge, the culture they create, even the lifestyles they aspire to will be following a path first taken by that remarkable, irascible bohemian eccentric who frequented the taverns and coffee houses of Bishopsgate in the 1660s, Robert Hooke – the original pioneer of the experimental life.
Charles Leadbeater is author of The Frugal Innovator. This is an edited version of an article first published in UK innovation charity Nesta’s quarterly publication Long + Short