Lab-or-a-tol-o-gy: Make time for tinkers
Research is about doing things you don’t know uncertainly, says Matthew Partridge.
There is a constant pressure to be efficient. There is a low-level constant pressure to optimise our days, streamline our workflows and squeeze more output from every hour. Research is far from immune. In fact, science often seems especially vulnerable to this: publish more, finish faster, justify time, justify cost, justify that coffee machine in your office.
But research is not always at its best when run like a production line.
Some of the most valuable time in science can look, from the outside, suspiciously unproductive. It can look like taking something apart and putting it back together again, without actually improving anything. It can look like trying a clearly stupid idea simply because it is interesting and might have some odd outcomes. It can look like making a thing that nobody formally asked for, with materials that happened to be lying around, in a room that absolutely was not designed for it. It can look at lot like tinkering.
That matters because research is not the same thing as development. Development is about careful refinement, scaling and solving (mostly) known problems in increasingly effective ways. Research, on the other hand, is about doing things you don’t know uncertainly. It is about trying to understand things that are not yet clear, more often not well defined and almost always unpredictable.
Proper tinkering time is open-ended enough to allow for dead ends, surprises and the occasional accident that turns out to be useful
Which is why every research project needs a bit of tinkering and every project needs the space and time to do that.
Tinkering is not time crammed into the last 10 minutes of a meeting, and need not justify itself in a quarterly review. Proper tinkering time is open-ended enough to allow for dead ends, surprises and the occasional accident that turns out to be useful. Some of it probably never needs reporting (I’m a great believer in publishing negative results but trust me some tinkering outcomes no one needs to know).
It also needs space. This does not have to mean a gleaming innovation lab full of expensive equipment and motivational wall vinyl. Often it just means somewhere you are allowed to try things. Somewhere that can temporarily become a test bench, a workshop, a sketchpad or a holding area for odd bits of cable, acrylic, 3D-printed brackets and screws rescued from old instruments.
And, ideally, it needs materials. Not necessarily polished, ordered, budget-line materials, but the sort of spare parts and leftovers that invite experimentation. Free materials have a particular kind of power because necessity is the mother of all invention. Yes there are parts you’ll need to order but making do for the sake of getting a silly pet project running is a big part of tinkering.
A surprising number of scientific ideas, tools and even companies have emerged from exactly this mentality. Not from a performance-based optimisation, but from someone messing about in a shed, garage, workshop or spare 30cm of bench space because they wanted to see whether something might work.
There is a long and respectable tradition of science beginning with improvised setups and enthusiastic problem-solving.
Not every experiment in tinkering leads somewhere. But that does not mean tinker time is wasted time.
- Dr Matthew Partridge is senior enterprise fellow and director of outreach at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Southampton. He also draws silly cartoons as ErrantScience
