Knew I wasn't going to have to scroll far in the comments section to find discussion about Bell Labs. :)
That's a very cool office structure. I'm glad they repurposed it for a more cooperative use suited to the times.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views.
A great discussion point re: Bell Labs that I read in an HN thread long, long ago was that research labs of this type (Bell Labs, Google X, Xerox PARC, etc.) only arise in monopoly conditions. Basic research only becomes supportable from an organizational overhead and ROI standpoint when there is no meaningful competition to the parent organization.
It implies another large and very interesting question: are the net benefits of places like Bell Labs worth the costs that come with tolerating monopolies?
More to the point of the topic at hand: is the monolithic structure of Bell Labs, the building, worth the costs it has imposed on the shape of its surrounding community?
It's not monopoly conditions per se, I think. It's just the lack of compelled profit motive that gets you the ability to do basic research/exploration.
Society has another mechanism for people to do research without a profit motive - the university - but for various reasons that's been working poorly. (One is that they've sort of developed a profit motive, and at the individual level, researchers need to chase grants.)
I don't think the answer is to tolerate monopolies; I think there are ways society can better support people doing open-ended research without just telling a company "Here, have all the money you want and no accountability." I don't think De Beers, for instance, produced much valuable research for the world with their monopoly.
The other thing with universities, comping from the perspective of someone involved with a fairly small corporate research department (which has close ties to a big one)--is that they can be very divorced from the practical/commercial. And it's not necessarily a good thing to be too ivory tower. In fact one of the reasons universities want to work with us (other than the fact we provide internships and jobs for their students) is that we help them to work on things that people actually care about.
Not that fundamental research is a bad thing but there's often a happy medium between near-term product development and totally blue sky research.
That's a very cool office structure. I'm glad they repurposed it for a more cooperative use suited to the times.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views.
A great discussion point re: Bell Labs that I read in an HN thread long, long ago was that research labs of this type (Bell Labs, Google X, Xerox PARC, etc.) only arise in monopoly conditions. Basic research only becomes supportable from an organizational overhead and ROI standpoint when there is no meaningful competition to the parent organization.
It implies another large and very interesting question: are the net benefits of places like Bell Labs worth the costs that come with tolerating monopolies?
More to the point of the topic at hand: is the monolithic structure of Bell Labs, the building, worth the costs it has imposed on the shape of its surrounding community?