Lounge-based Innovation
In my role as Director of Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art + Design I’ve been working since 2013 to form research projects that look at how art and design can lead innovation and build communities. One aspect of this work has centered on integrating art and design into the operational model of technology accelerators, with two goals: building connection between art & design and early stage startups, and looking at how accelerators themselves, as organizational forms, support innovation. We’ve done this through research partnerships with GrowLab and HIGHLINE, and have now worked with 20 of Vancouver’s top early stage companies, including Cognilab, Foodee, Silkstart, Farm at Hand, Control, Koho, Spacelist, and Retsly.
Accelerators have become ubiquitous. But what, fundamentally, is an accelerator? It is an organizational form that takes in early-stage companies, connects them to space, money and expertise, sometimes in exchange for an equity position, and launches them into a new level of growth such as enabling them to achieve a Series A. But here is what they also are: vibrant, occasionally colourful places where hooded figures who either look or feel young — rarely both — experience stylish webinars in open plan kitchens, have meetings with exciting visitors, use phrases such as “crush” and “kill”, and work really fucking hard trying to build the next playfully titled SaaS that will yield a 10x return for their investors.
And they are something else, too: welcoming but hi-test spaces where people who want to have an impact can learn how to do it — sometimes from the greats. There is a DIY feel about the people who enjoy this environment: they know they have to do it themselves, whatever it is, but they also recognize the value of the shared system-space in order to make it happen.
For me one of the fascinating things about the startups that flow through some incubators and accelerators is that they have spawned a sensibility around business culture that is ... well, almost cultural. It used to be that you’d know you’re in a place of business when the walls are padded with grey burlap and someone is making you wear nylons. Startups and their California pantone plug-and-play youth cloud changed all that. These shifts may seem obvious to those who have been exposed to popular culture in the past 20 years but the infrastructural implications are real. A “real” company used to have thousands of employees globally and have a complicated system for requisitioning Liquid Paper. A company then would have real assets like 14,000 desktop computers and a passive aggressive IT team to manage them. Now, with the technological and cultural shifts of the last decade, many companies don’t even have pens. A company may own no computers and have no phone lines. There is a global engagement and a nomadic feeling.
Which brings us to the subject of the lounge. In partnership with Vancouver-based startup wantoo, named “Canada’s most anticipated startup” by Betakit in 2015, Living Labs has launched a creative research project centering on lounge-based innovation.
The idea centres in the activities of wantoo, because wantoo is pioneering the lounge-as-office. When it opened its doors in 2015 five people walked in, turned on their computers, sat down in a vast sea of sofas and ottomans, and started working.
Just as the accelerators and the startups that coalesce around them represent an evolutionary shift that has changed the aesthetic, demographic, methodological, and functional nature of business, something will force another shift. We think it’s the lounge.
The lounge is bigger than any of us. It brings with it legacies and affordances and ideas that connect to leisure and therefore to the Fordist corollary to leisure — work. The starting condition of a lounge is social and globally displaced. When the lounge is a workplace, new things happen and other things fall away. You do not have a desk, so you do not put pieces of flair near it or sit in the same place every day. You do not have physical file storage or a telephone extension because you have wifi and hangouts. Your feet may be up. There are independent light sources that have been purchased, in the case of the wantoo lounge, along with the sofas and ottomans at a hotel furniture liquidator. The meeting you are having is probably public. Your environment is configurable. You have gotten outside the building. A lounge is a kind of platform — a platform for potential activity, potential events, potential conversation. The lounge has social, local and contextual built right in.
For us the questions are — how does the physical and behavioural infrastructure of the lounge differ from other working spaces? How do technological factors like the cloud enable the lounge, and what is coming next, for social and spatial forms that support work? How can the form of the lounge, which is haphazardly deployed throughout the world via a network of underused, semi-public corporate environments, be re-appropriated toward innovative practices for technology, socially-engaged, art, and design startups? How can we connect to the existing network of lounges in order to explore and test new models to support innovation?
Whether we are talking about the grubby plasticized seating area at the Holiday Inn Express in Cache Creek, BC, the magical zone in an airport where you are invited to enjoy a chickpea salad in the company of fashionable Europeans instead of nursing a warm Clamato near the Harvey’s, the boozy alcove on the other side of the steak restaurant, or the glitzy deadzone of a high-end hotel rooftop patio, we are in the realm of the lounge.
What would be the effect of claiming this network of semi-private spaces as DIY platforms for creative production — whether artistic, entrepreneurial, design-driven, socially engaged or otherwise? By investigating the opportunities afforded by the relatively unexamined social and spatial form of the lounge, we hope to reclaim a network of semi-public spaces as places for discovery and innovation, and to uncover new ways of working and communicating. It is not a question of what happens there as much as it is a question of what could or should happen there, and of what could happen if these spaces were to be occupied toward different agendas, different visions.
