Stanford OpenLab
Wrong Discipline. Right Insight.
OpenLab is Stanford's experiment in productive collision. We bring researchers with different, sometimes even outwardly incompatible, backgrounds into the same space to maximize cross-pollination.
We're built for the moonshots, the misfits, and the questions that don't fit anywhere else.
The best insights often come from surprising places.
Structurally, universities are largely homogeneous: departments are organized by similarity. Geneticists cluster with geneticists, engineers with engineers—the people a researcher sees most are trained to think exactly like them. OpenLab is different. By organizing around dissimilarity, our researchers are constantly brainstorming with and having their ideas vetted by thinkers from completely different fields, gathering fresh perspectives and applying them to the hardest problems.
Our research
We practice thoughtful disobedience.
Our ethos encourages skepticism of not just established conclusions, but the questions that produced them. We dismantle arbitrary hierarchies and build from first principles rather than inherited assumptions, defending the freedom to investigate ideas we hate as fiercely as ideas we love. We measure success in prototypes, not publications. In a world trending toward surveillance, inequity, and control, we build tools for privacy, dissent, and human agency. We take the brilliant misfits, the forbidden questions, and the impossible problems. Where others see risk, we see necessity.
FAQs
We're frequently asked...
Absolutely not. There's a reason universities gravitate towards clustering. Collecting like-minded experts in one place has significant advantages. For a researcher stuck on a difficult problem, it's usually the case that another expert with a similar background will be best equipped to help. Departments should unequivocally exist, and they ought to be the dominant structure in academia.
However, every standard should have an alternative. Notwithstanding the strengths of a purely departmental environment, there is tremendous value in a researcher having a single place they can go to talk through their problems with several different kinds of experts all at once. OpenLab represents this alternative structure, and we are designed to work alongside traditional academia rather than being a replacement.
"Interdisciplinary" usually refers to doing research in between two (or more) fields. This is broader than doing research within a single field, but is not what OpenLab focuses on. Instead, we do disciplinary research in an environment that ignores discipline.
An example may help. Take any two fields: say, biology and economics. In traditional departments, biologists will do deep biological research surrounded by other biologists, and an economist will do deep economic research surrounded by other economists. Interdisciplinary work might happen in one or the other department, and this work will carve out a little silo somewhere in between biology and economics. In contrast to both of these, OpenLab might take a biologist (and/or an economist), and ask them to do biological research—but instead of being surrounded by like-minded peers, they will be surrounded by... artists. Philosophers. Religious scholars. Mechanics. Our goal is not to work in between disciplines, but to provide thinkers with a completely unique environment in which to pursue their work.
Absolutely. We do not favor any fields over any others, and there's no requirement that a field be established, traditional, or institutionally-endorsed. We believe there is enormous value in work that has historically existed outside of formal academia, and welcome any research that can be approached rigorously.
Indeed, there may even be outsized benefit to more niche expertise. If our goal is truly to construct a unique environment, insight from a lesser-known field provides special value.
Contact
Stanford University School of Engineering
Department of Management Science and Engineering
475 Via Ortega
Huang Engineering Center
Stanford, CA 94305
email: contact@stanfordopenlab.org
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