Designing Spaces for Collaboration and Serendipity in Science
How can we create better environments for researchers to collaborate with one another?
“Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder […] The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer […] What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.” - Paul Graham
Not only is this true of cities, but history has shown that it can also be true in smaller settings like companies and research environments as well. Mervin Kelly once described Bell Labs as a “living organism”, Sydney Brenner compared the Laboratory of Molecular Biology to a “tightly packed…warren”, and J. C. R. Licklider’s wife, Louise, compared Cambridge, Massachusetts to an anthill.12
All these research environments seem to have their own unique (animalistic) quality, which is perhaps indicative of why they were so successful. They were life-like—not static—and constantly adapting to change.3
One of the key reasons for this, is that they all actively promoted competition, collaboration, and serendipity among their researchers.4 At Bell Labs, there was a rule that nobody could decline to help a colleague: all office doors had to be kept open. Similar rules also existed at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in its heyday:
“Per [Max] Perutz’s order, there were no doors, no locked cabinets— no secrets among scientists.”5
“Saddled with a difficult problem, a new hire there, an anxious nobody, was regularly directed by a supervisor toward the guy who wrote the book. Some young employees would quake when they were told to ask a question of famous mathematicians like Claude Shannon or legendary physicists like William Shockley. Still, Bell Labs’ policy was not to turn them away.”6
In his speech You and Your Research, Bell Labs researcher, Richard Hamming recounts the difference between people working with the office door open versus those who kept it closed:
“I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.”7
In this respect, these great research labs that promote serendipitous exchange are in stark contrast with modern research environments, which tend to stifle collaboration and serendipitous encounters, instead, favouring a hierarchical structure.
University colleges, for example, are often housed in their own unique buildings- sometimes in different parts of the city or campus, meaning that some researchers (who perhaps share identical interests or ideas, or could possibly solve each other’s problems), won’t ever interact with one other.8
When designing Bell Labs, Oliver Ellsworth Buckley and Frank B. Jewett specifically tried to avoid this:
“No attempt has been made to achieve the character of a university campus with its separate buildings […] On the contrary, all buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.”
“The building had long corridors stretching 700 feet, with it being impossible to travel ‘without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas.’ [It was like being] a magnet rolling past iron filings […] By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way.
Spontaneous interactions were far more likely to lead to positive results than in a university department where [everyone] was working on very different things.”
“Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.”9
In a similar way, the British science writer John Whitfield noticed something remarkably similar at the Santa Fe Institute:10
“The institute was intended to be truly multidisciplinary- it has no departments, only researchers […] The institute, now situated on a hill on the town’s outskirts, must be one of the most fun places to be a scientist. The researchers’ offices, and the communal areas they spill into for lunch and impromptu seminars, have picture windows looking out across the mountains and desert. Hiking trails lead out of the car park. In the institute’s kitchen, you can eavesdrop on a conversation between a palaeontologist, an expert on quantum computing and a physicist who works on financial markets. A cat and a dog amble down the corridors and in and out of offices. The atmosphere is like a cross between the senior common room of a Cambridge college and one of the West Coast temples of geekdom, such as Google or Pixar.”11
Geoffrey West, who was personally inspired by learning about the structure of the LMB under Perutz, goes on to say:1213
“It [the Santa Fe Institute] supports lots of working groups and workshops, seminars and colloquia, and hosts a huge flux of visitors (several hundred a year). What a fantastic melting pot. There is almost no hierarchy, and its size is sufficiently small that everyone on-site can easily get to know everyone else; the archaeologist, economist, social scientist, ecologist, and physicist all freely interact on a daily basis to talk, speculate bullshit, and seriously collaborate on questions big and small. The philosophy of the institute stems from the underlying assumption that if you bring smart people together in a supportive, facilitative, dynamic environment that lets them freely interact, good things will invariably result. The SFI culture is designed to create an open catalytic atmosphere within interactions and collaborations that are often difficult to promote within the traditional departmental structure of universities […] Bringing together highly diverse minds prepared to engage in substantive, in-depth collaboration in the search for underlying principles, commonalities, simplicity, and order in highly complex phenomena is the hallmark of SFI science. In a curious sense the institute is an instantiation of the very thing it studies: a complex adaptive system.”
There is something Hayekian about the structure of research institutions that is under-appreciated today. Much like a market where checks and balances, supply and demand lead to an equilibrium of prices for both consumers and buyers, in both scenarios natural selection processes result in the “survival of the likeliest”.
How Can We Promote Serendipitous Exchange Today?
Today, whilst much of metascience focusses on how researchers can open up science and collaborate better online—something I have written about here— less of it is focussed on how to achieve this in person.
One idea that is being developed is what Bret Victor calls communal computing: Imagine a computer where everything physical in a room is an interface anyone in the room can use- simultaneously collaborating, sharing, and interchanging in knowledge.
This is their vision of what a laboratory of the future might look like. The room is the computer.
"Out are people sitting behind screens. In is using the physical space as a computational system. Everyone in the illustration [below] is using the same integrated computational device. The whole room is a computer.
[Overhead] Cameras and projectors turn the physical space into a computational system. You can alter a piece of paper, and have it in turn alter what is being projected in the physical space. People can work collaboratively using real physical objects, not via screens, and have projectors output the result of
the computation.”14“Computation is integrated into the physical world, and scientists see and discuss ideas by constructing immersive environments of dynamic models, in which invisible concepts are made visible and tangible.”15
“In today’s science lab, computing takes place on screens. A 21st-century lab has no need for screens, or even ‘computers’ […] because all physical space and all physical materials can be computed with. Everything from tiny test tubes, to cardboard boxes, to walls and floors are programmable objects.
These models are multiplayer by default. Because they are physical, everyone can see them and get their hands on them at all times. All activities become group activities, and invite spontaneous collaboration.”1617
It’s easy to see how such a system could aid serendipitous discoveries. If you want to find out more about the labs of the future, I highly recommend watching this video by Bret Victor and Shawn Douglas.
Further Reading
James W. Phillips’ blog to learn more about R&D and what connects some of the best research labs history has ever seen.
James has also written about Bret Victor’s work, here
How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? by Eric Gilliam and Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle by Jon Gertner if you want to learn more about Bell Labs.
Communal computing for 21st-century science by Bret Victor, Luke Iannini, and Shawn Douglas. If you want to learn more about what research labs in the future might look like, I’d recommend reading this.
The "Next Big Thing" is a Room by Steve Krouse. A very interesting look at Bret Victor’s Dynamic Land.
High-Performance Government, ‘Cognitive Technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’. If you want to learn more about how Bret Victor’s ideas could improve governance, I highly recommend reading from the 2nd chapter down.
John Seely Brown: Shaping Serendipity - A short two-minute video: “You know the type of question that don’t work too well on Google: ‘Please tell me what I need to know that I don’t know that I need to know yet…’” JSB briefly outlines three ways we can help serendipitous discoveries from coming about:
Choose serendipitous environments
Develop serendipitous practices
Enhance serendipitous preparedness
An hour-long version of the talk can be found here
The Architecture of Serendipity by Ethan Zuckerman
‘‘In the LMB, we were more tightly packed… It may be just a romantic sentiment, but I feel that when you are living in more of a warren, you may be more productive…What’s terribly important in a lab is keeping it open and keeping the conversation going all the time.” - (Sydney Brenner in the 2013 HHMI winter bulletin). [Source]
“Cambridge [US] was like an anthill. Everybody was getting involved with everybody else- finding different challenges, taking up different ideas. I use the word cross-fertilisation because there was an awful lot of that going on. And quite a lot of socialising too.” - [Source]
I would recommend reading James W. Phillips’ blog to find out how they achieved this.
Licklider talks about exactly this at Xerox PARC:
“It was more than just a collection of bright people. It was a thing that organized itself into a community so that there was some competition and some cooperation.”
Source: A hothouse of molecular biology
Source: Jon Gertner, True Innovation. Gertner is also the author of The Ideas Factory - the book on Bell Labs and what made it so successful.
You and Your Research, [Transcription], Richard Hamming
“A fact of any scientist’s life is that you carry a lot of unsolved problems around in your head. Some of those problems are big (“find a quantum theory of gravity”), some of them are small (“where’d that damned minus sign disappear in my calculation?”), but all are grist for future progress. Mostly, it’s up to you to solve those problems yourself. If you’re lucky, you might also have a few supportive colleagues who can sometimes help you out.
Very occasionally, though, you’ll solve a problem in a completely different way. You’ll be chatting with a new acquaintance, when one of your problems (or something related) comes up. You’re chatting away when all of a sudden, BANG, you realize that this is just the right person to be talking to. Maybe they can just outright solve your problem. Or maybe they give you some crucial insight that provides the momentum needed to vanquish the problem.
Every working scientist recognizes this type of fortuitous serendipitous interaction. The problem is that they occur too rarely.
A few years ago, I started participating in various open source forums. Over time, I noticed something surprising going on in the healthiest of those forums. When people had a problem that was bugging them, rather than keeping silent about it, they’d post a description of the problem to the forum. Often, I’d look at their question and think to myself “yeah, I can see why they posted, that looks like a tough problem.” Then, forty minutes later, someone would come in and say “Oh, that’s easy, you just do X, Y, and Z”. Very often, X, Y and Z were quite ingenious, or at the least relied on knowledge that neither I nor the original questioner possessed. The original problem had been trivial all along.
What’s going on is similar to the fortuitous scientific exchange. A problem that’s difficult or impossible for most people can be trivial or routine to just the right person.“ - Michael Nielsen
“The SFI has become internationally recognised as ‘the formal birthplace of the interdisciplinary study of complex systems’ and has played a central role in recognizing that many of the most challenging, exciting, and profound questions facing science and society lie at the boundaries between traditional disciplines. Among these are the origins of life; the generic principles of innovation, growth, evolution, and resilience whether of organisms, ecosystems, pandemics, or societies; network dynamics in nature and society; biologically inspired paradigms in medicine and computation; the interrelationship between information processing, energy, and dynamics of financial markets and political conflicts” (West, p432-433).
Cited from Geoffrey West’s Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies, (page 431-432)
“What was the secret to Perutz’s extraordinary success? Is there some magic formular he had discovered for optimizing how research should be carried out? If so, how could we exploit it to ensure the future successes of the Santa Fe Institute? These were questions that I naturally asked myself when I assumed the leadership of SFI. I learned that Perutz, while maintaining his own research program, gave his researchers independence and treated everyone equally, even turning down a knighthood because he thought it would separate him from younger researchers. He stayed fully conversant with everyone’s work and made a point of sitting with different colleagues at coffee, lunch or tea. Well, at least in spirit, though maybe not always in action, these were all things I was aspiring to do—except for the opportunity of turning down a knighthood in the highly unlikely event that it would have been offered to me” (West, p437).
“What was the secret to Perutz’s extraordinary success? Is there some magic formular he had discovered for optimizing how research should be carried out? If so, how could we exploit it to ensure the future successes of the Santa Fe Institute? These were questions that I naturally asked myself when I assumed the leadership of SFI. I learned that Perutz, while maintaining his own research program, gave his researchers independence and treated everyone equally, even turning down a knighthood because he thought it would separate him from younger researchers. He stayed fully conversant with everyone’s work and made a point of sitting with different colleagues at coffee, lunch or tea. Well, at least in spirit, though maybe not always in action, these were all things I was aspiring to do—except for the opportunity of turning down a knighthood in the highly unlikely event that it would have been offered to me” (West, p437).
This is a direct quotation from: Bret Victor, Realtalk and the ‘laboratory of the future’ vision, by James W. Phillips.