The Lab: Creativity and Culture

Never has the spirit of innovation been more highly valued than today. Around the world, people see the hard-to-teach skills of creativity as the lifeblood of cultural change and the engine of economic development. In The Lab, David Edwards presents a blueprint for revitalizing labs with "artscience"― creative thought that erases conventional boundaries between art and science―to produce innovations that otherwise might never see the light of day.

At the heart of The Lab is "cultural incubation," whereby ideas translate with free-wheeling public exchange through a kind of innovation funnel—from educational settings (as in The Lab at Harvard University), to cultural settings (as at Le Laboratoire in Paris and elsewhere), to realizations as innovative products or humanitarian initiatives (within LaboGroup and other translation labs around the globe).

With examples ranging from breathable chocolate (Le Whif) to contemporary art installations that explore the neuroscience of fear, Edwards shows how a measured-risk, seed-investment, mentorship-focused network of labs can allow exotic, unexpected ideas to flourish without being killed off at the first hint of impracticality.

Unique to the innovation funnel is how creator risk is encouraged but also managed by mentors and others in each lab, so that the most daring ideas—lighting African villages with microbiotic lamps, or cleaning the air with plant-based filters—can emerge within passionate and sometimes inexperienced creative bands.

Lively and engaging, replete with anecdotes that bring Edwards's unique personal experience in developing artscience labs to life, The Lab approaches innovation from exciting new angles, finding invigorating ways to repurpose our most creative assets—in scientific exploration, artistic imagination, and business model-building.

David Edwards teaches at Harvard University in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His creative work is described at www.davidideas.com.

Six months before opening Le Laboratoire, David Edwards visited Hans Ulrich Obrist, who had co-curated a famous exhibit, Laboratorium, that explored connections between art and science. “Famous, yes,” said Hans, “which I find ironic since almost nobody saw it. You have to be careful getting too near contemporary science.”

But this was precisely where David Edwards chose to be. His book, The Lab, promotes surprising innovations in culture, industry, and society by exploring new ideas in the arts and design at the frontiers of science. In The Lab Edwards argues for a new kind of educational art lab based on a contemporary science lab model—the “artscience lab.” With examples ranging from breathable chocolate to contemporary art installations that explore the neuroscience of fear, he shows how students learn by translating ideas alongside experienced creators and exhibiting risky experimental processes in gallery settings. Idea translation from conception to realization is in turn facilitated by a network of complementary labs whose missions range from education to industrial and humanitarian development.

A manifesto of a new innovation model driven by the arts, this is the first detailed description of an emerging cultural phenomenon in the United States and Europe where artists and scientists collaborate to produce intriguing cultural content and surprising innovations. It also offers a fresh look at the creative process as it applies to experiential education, museum ­exhibition, and industrial innovation.

David Edwards is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University and is founding director of Le Laboratoire in Paris and the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard. His work spans the arts and sciences and lies at the core of a network of multi-disciplinary labs in Europe, USA and Africa. Edwards is the founder of Medicine in Need and the Boston-based Cloud Foundation that oversees Cloud Place, a dynamic center for urban youth arts, and that launched the $100K ArtScience Innovation Prize. The youngest-ever member of the National Academy of Engineering, Edwards was a featured speaker at Davos in 2010. His creative work is described at www.davidideas.com.