Virtual reenactments of studio practice: assembling a digi-lab through case studies of virtual and online inscription

The DigiLab is a research and enterprise lab in assemblage, based at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. I will focus on the lab's conception phase has lead up to the physical and virtual construction of its studio and website. A sample of online case studies namely — lab, centre, network and hub were studied including; Hyper Island, SiDE, Method Design Lab, Helen Hamlyn Centre (Royal College of Art), Liquid Jungle Lab, IP Business Centre (British Library), Information Environments (London College of Communication), Imagination Lancaster (Lancaster University), the Centre for Fashion Enterprise (London College of Fashion), Charisma (Open University) and CSISP (Goldsmiths University). This paper will question — how are the activities that assemble 'lab life' in the digital sphere (media and design) constituted through online and offline materialities of the creative studio?

Six key terms from Bruno Latour's and Steven Woolgar's theoretical frame were borrowed from Lab Life (1979) as a way to reflect on the textual, audio and visual content of the websites. Running alongside the initial manual content audits, was an automatic web scraper, which used a bot to crawl the websites’ content to highlight orphaned/ghost content. I will argue that the working practices of research and enterprise is an interrelation of online and offline inscriptions that assemble studio practice in design and sociological research environments. This is brought to bear through a combination of STS and design (in particular, IA - Information Architecture) contexts, methods and theory.

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