Jamie’s Weblog

On Friday, Mike broke the news to me that Media Lab Europe (MLE) is to close down. My brother informed me that there’s an Irish Times article on the closure (sub required) and various ex-MLE’ers have blogged about it.

Tears did not form in my eyes. As I’ve written before, my 2 years at MLE were some of the worst years of my life. However, I never wished the lab would close, despite Mike’s assertions (although perhaps there’s a slight disparity between my public opinions and those I expressed privately during my time in the lab). My gripes were not as much with the lab itself but with the group in which I worked. In a different group, with a better focus, I could have adopted a different position and had a much better experience. Still, life is life.

MLE was always a strange place. The old Guinness store house was a really beautiful building (although, initially a very smelly building) that provided a contrasting backdrop to the new, expensive, hi-tech toys inside. But the burn rate was like something from the good-old, bad-old dot.com days: When I joined in 2001, everyone had flat panel monitor for no other reason except that they made the place look cool. Each room in the lab had 2-3 projectors for projecting art, demos or slides. Projectors are an expensive item but they were strewn around the lab like wastepaper bins — and typically left on with complete disregard for the cost of replacing the bulbs. I’d been in the lab for about 2 months when we were being pressured to produce a demo (despite the fact that the group had no focus, cohesion, or idea what we were supposed to be doing), so, without much discussion, 8 iPaqs with 8 dual PC card adapters and 8 wifi cards landed on my desk. MLE was a lab where resources were not a problem.

There were other problems that I saw in the lab. Initially, many most of the demos were imported from MIT Media Lab along with the majority of research staff. By the time I left, the lab had achieved a roughly even split between US, EU and Irish researchers, but there was still a very strong US attitude.

MLE was not an academic research lab (I know, I work in one now), nor was it a commercial research lab (I know, I worked in one prior to MLE). It produced interesting things. Research projects would often have more of an artistic or aesthetic bent than commercial opportunity or theoretical insight. This was no bad thing, I often found them exciting, beautiful, inspiring, weird and interesting… but unfortunately, selling interesting things to corporate sponsors is not really a workable business plan. MIT Media Lab survives largely because of the “MIT” part, not because of the “Media Lab”: They have the support infrastructure and reputation of MIT which is something MLE didn’t.

Long live research in Ireland! I can only hope that research labs in Ireland will have been inspired to take their own research on to a world stage. But, hopefully, to do so with a focus on content not marketing. Hopefully, this is the beginnings of decent technological research in Ireland, not the end of it. Oddly, I don’t mourn the loss of MLE, I pine for the return of Broadcom Eireann Research, in a post-MLE Ireland. Broadcom was a commercial research lab that built (mostly) practical systems that (mostly) worked and were (sometimes) actually deployed. Sure, on occasions, it could have done with looking a little further ahead and looking beyond the purely technological systems. But, it seems like there is an opening for the return of a Broadcom-like lab. Jonah points out that Bell Labs are to create a telecoms lab in partnership with Trinity College and 8 other research centers in Ireland. This initiative sounds promising as it will apparently focus on telecomsm, in a less artistic setting than MLE. I can only hope that the research is equally spread beyond Dublin — I’m trying to figure out what to do, and where, once I finish my PhD (2 years to go, sadly). Living in Ireland is top of my list but returning to Dublin is pretty close to the bottom.

Remember: All that glitters is not gold.