projects
RESEARCH CULTURE & THE ROYAL SOCIETY
This is a collection of work produced as part of a collaboration between Central Saint Martins and the Royal Society to visualise the future of research culture in the UK. ‘Research culture’ includes the behaviours, incentives, norms, values and amenities employed and available to actors (funders, academics, managers and so on) in the research system. The brief from the Royal Society: produce artwork to stimulate a conversation with this group of people about what research culture may look like in 2035.
The problem: naturally we find it difficult to put ourselves in a future world, and instead are more inclined to talk about what bothers about today. These are important conversations, but when a project specifically focuses on the future, it requires imagination to achieve a more future-orientated discussion. Speculative design is a well-tested technique to engineer this kind of discussion. Julie Light and I lead a group of fellow MA students to develop artefacts from a future research system.
The Young’s Translator aims to provoke questions around open access in a future research system. The pyramid (in reality made from resin and then laser cut) represents a futuristic device which translates information from one discipline to another. Our argument is that true open access is not just about getting hold of data and information, it also requires the information to be intelligible and translated between disciplinary codes. The Higgs Boson & Mechanism were chosen partly because it relates to a parallel project on particle physics at CERN, and partly because it is emblematic of extremely complex which people from all walks of life (scientists or otherwise) struggle to understand.
The New Career Map addresses the issue of professional and career development in the academic world. Anecdotally we hear that researchers feel they have limited options in terms of career progression. The academic world has a pyramid management system, and the number of senior academic jobs are small compared to the number of researchers at PhD and even post-doctoral level. Yet there is also a sense that leaving academic represents some kind of failure. The New Career Map provokes a dialogue about what a better future could look like. The map, from the year 2027, visualises skills in terms of overlapping continents, almost like a futuristic Pangaea. Job roles are dotted around the continents like settlements around a map. The map deliberately eschews the more traditional hierarchical job structure; instead jobs are in close proximity if the skills required for them are similar.
