Published in Fast Thinking, 2007

By Rosanne Bersten

1985. For two years running, the International Symposium on Organization Transformation has had incredibly dull, very traditional conferences where nothing much got done, except, oddly, when the conference wasn’t officially happening. People start to ask, “how come the best part of the conference is the coffee break? How do we make this one continual coffee break?”

The result is a conference with no agenda, no organising committee, and surprisingly, almost no stress. Harrison Owen writes a book about it — Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide — and these theories later lead to an enormous variety of people trying the method for their needs.

Unlike other conferences where everything is set in stone and there are set times where a group of people are forced to listen to an “expert” who does nothing but talk, open spaces involve the participants at every step.

X marks the spot

Brendan Harkin, who has been running the x|media|lab (pronounced cross-media lab) since 2003, uses open space methodology to run creative incubators for new media projects.

Small teams book in for consultation meetings with mentors over a couple of days or a long weekend. There are also plenary sessions where everyone gets together to share ideas and present progress so far.

It’s this combination of structure and absolute freedom to brainstorm, along with up-close access to successful mentors that feeds the “anything is possible” atmosphere.

Despite having run 10 labs now, Harkin is still hugely excited about the process. “It’s self-organising and self-selecting,” he says. “The teams have a chance to see all the mentors speaking at the conference day, so they can sort out who they want to work with. Then it’s completely up to project teams to program their own lab. No-one is managing that other than them.”
Harkin says that the organisers first let a theme arise that is topical and relevant. Then they find “the best people around the world” to act as mentors. “The x is cross-discipline, cross-media, cross-platform, cross-cultural. We don’t just assume that the cream of the industry is in San Francisco.”

They announce the theme and mentors and let projects nominate themselves. Teams pay a nominal amount to participate — most of the funding is from major sponsor Nokia and government funding. Organisers select teams based on how much value the mentors can add to the project and most likely project to succeed. After that, organisers stand back and let it happen. Harkin says it’s a “really joyful experience”.

x|media|lab is just one creative incubator. Founded almost ten years ago, the American Film Institute runs a Digital Content Lab that director Suzanne Stefanac says “echoes the dual precepts that guide all AFI’s educational efforts: Learn by doing, and study with the masters.”

DCL also chooses projects for prototyping that “promise true innovation with broad applicability” and brings together teams of “first-tier volunteer mentors drawn from the worlds of design, production, technology, strategy, and business”.

Imagining the future

An open space like this is something outside of day-to-day experience; the idea is to kickstart thinking processes that aren’t normally “allowed” to exist. If the aim is creativity and innovation, knocking out stultifying drudgery is step one.

Step two is removing expectations, developing trust and getting back to a sense of play, according to Professor Lizbeth Goodman, Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute at the University of East London. She does this using theatre games and voice work: shouting, singing and laughing. “People remember some previous version of themselves that hadn’t yet been taught to think in boxes. When you free up someone’s body movement, you free up their mind.”

The space has to be safe — nobody has a personal stake, no one is going to lose kudos with their boss. And participants have to be open to what’s about to happen. “In a truly collaborative atmosphere, you have to come to it deciding that you don’t know everything. Someone else may have a more interesting answer than you,” says Martha Ladly, associate professor of design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Some people in the lab would be actively discouraged from interacting in normal circumstances. “The AFI [puts] together people who would normally be separated because of competition,” says Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at Schematic TV who has mentored at x|media|lab, the AFI’s DCL and another lab called Crossover. In fact, he says, DCL has an unofficial motto: “Leave the guns at the door”.

During the incubator, the variety of people makes for fascinating conversation. Marc Weiss was a documentary maker who got involved with the first Crossover lab in the US. For him, cross-disciplinary collaboration opens up opportunities in entirely new directions. “As a new media artist understood what tools an independent film maker used to create stories, they started thinking in new ways about what they’d done before. It was like a third category. Separately they couldn’t imagine it, but once in the room together that third category wasn’t such a huge step to take,” he says.

The speed of information exchange is important too. “From what I’ve experienced [at x|media|lab|, there’s a certain quickness that needs to happen in order to engage creatively with the group,” says Herigstad. “We’ve got an hour to move around with somebody. I’m not unfamiliar with them because each has already given a presentation, but there’s a certain pressure to figure this out fast. I’m freshly confronted with a set of challenges from a group.”

The rapidity of interaction forces intuition, something Goodman thinks is vital. Blink and you miss it. Blink. You know what’s going to happen next. “When you’re forced to trust in a very quick way, you do. Intuition is how you know when it’s safe to move or think differently. In the creative, dynamic land of innovation, we need to reclaim intuition and trust ourselves.”

The conversations that occur in this context are animated and intense. “You’re talking about what you’re doing. There’s a point to your conversation. You’ve got one hour,” says Harkin. At the same time, it’s brainstorming, “unstructured thinking out loud with people who are interested, who will participate in that thinking with you.”

“I think intensive conversational mentoring is a very valuable way of learning, both for a person and a project,” says Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder of the engagemedia project that went through x|media|lab in 2005.

Watching those rapid conversations occur is like watching a professional form of speed dating.

The way Harkin describes it, it’s pretty close. “You’ll meet 30 or 40 people who know all about you, you form relationships and then you’ll know them for ever.”

You’re also getting access to a level of person you normally would not be able to reach: CEOs, creative directors, high-level producers. “There’s such a wonderful spirit to it. You’re almost becoming friends with them. Six months later, they’re sending me e-mail and asking advice,” says Herigstad.

Of course, participants also keep in touch with their peers in a lab. Lowenthal feels that the speed-dating format leaves little time for inter-project learning and that projects can also mentor each other and share mutual challenges.

A longer process allows for a deeper development of the projects. At the AFI lab, for example, teams meet over a six-month period. “The AFI lab was good because there was a long period of time, going from rough to finished prototype,” says Herigstad.

After the thrill

engagemedia went into the lab with a fairly developed concept, a small amount of funding and a basic spec.
What they got out of it was a refining process for their concept. “Each person drilled us on it in a different way. It made us more up-front about what we were doing; we hadn’t been pushing the political aspect. At the end the people were convincing us of the project’s value. That was a real confidence booster.”

After the lab, the serious work begins. There’s a danger that a lab can be a “back-slapping operation” where every one is so chuffed at how bright and creative everyone else is that it becomes a cannibalistic feast of self-congratulation. The engagemedia project, for example, needed funding and a serious level of technology development the team hadn’t been expecting. “I walked out the door feeling good and confident but I don’t think I thought ‘OK, this project’s going to take off now’ because the problem of funding was still very present and no one offered us money during the workshop!” says Lowenthal. Engagemedia launched its open-source video distribution software platform Plumi in July this year and is now set to get back to its original aim of being a video-sharing site for activist video.

Ladly is very familiar with this effect and notes that “you do have to take things to the field and test it out and then bring it back to the lab”. When there’s no room in the lab for this sort of iterative design, she recommends creating “quick and dirty demos” so you can test your assumptions.

Rule of the elite

While the process of an incubator lab is inspiring, thrilling and seemingly innocuous when it’s creative folks wanting to translate a film narrative into a mobile phone game, it sounds less so when applied to “top level professionals from across the biopharmaceutical, FMCG, petrochemical and chemical industries”. Throw in the folks who run governments and control water supplies and it resembles something out of Ben Elton’s Stark.

SmartLab Exchange, held in February this year in London, brought together exactly those people, at an elite, invitation-only do where “each delegate design[ed] their own agenda of interactive workshops, personal meetings, networking sessions and keynote presentations”.

The format can be applied in a number of ways. The same high-level brainstorming and rapid prototyping applied to non-government organisations meeting with key infrastructure providers could kick-start changes in war-torn areas thanks to lateral solutions that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to those involved. Then, just like every other dream that comes out of a highly-charged, mind-altering, adrenalin-filled brainstorming retreat, it’s just a teensy weensy matter of translating it into reality.