Investigations and collaborative practices.
Generating spaces for exchanging information, interaction, dialogue, and reflection on contemporary sociocultural thinking, the non-profit O_Lab provides a forum and structure for sociocultural reflection and action. With a focus on the construction process of identities through collaborations and co-production, the OtiimaLAB engages partners across a diverse range of platforms, from neighborhood groups to larger collectives and companies, as well as other research centers.
O_Lab serves as a study center for research in the arts, sciences, and technology, in the disciplinary areas of Architecture, Arts, Design, Construction, and Urbanism, supporting the development of academic and community-based research.
O_Lab provides opportunities for collaboration within the scope of the courses and organizational research units of the University of Miami through its dynamic relationships with global partners and projects. Further, through its commitment to open access to the results of research activities, O_Lab develops venues for communication at multiple scales of engagement.
Through this commitment to collaborative, cross-disciplinary investigation and extensive communication of outcomes, the O_Lab seeks to promote, generate, encourage, organize, produce, disseminate and develop cultural projects through the production of content, and dissemination of sociocultural manifestations/actions.
O_Lab methods are centered on processes of reflection and dialogue that identify and engage all constituents to reformulate models and formats in the co-production of knowledge with a grounding in cultural practices. Its research platform is therefore interdisciplinary, transversal, and international to be able to explore projects on contemporary thought and action in locally appropriate and pluralistic modes in the conduct of its activities and communication of results. Fostering the development of protocols representing these values, O_Lab seeks to ensure that these processes of construction of ideas and social spaces are continuous, interrelated, and contextualized, advancing the development of local knowledge through reflection and direct action on the public dimension of contemporary urban practices through local, global, and virtual action.
O_Lab works through multiple platforms that include workshops, laboratories, seminars, summer courses, conferences, meetings, network projects, and publications as appropriate to the topic’s interaction of ideas, concepts, and local debate. Providing a physical and virtual space for engagement and the dissemination of outcomes, O_Lab is open to proposals from across the globe and encourages the formation of networks to develop a community of participants and projects.
Cultural Network.
O_Lab is collaborative; it arises from the combination of collaboration and laboratory. It is a "center without walls," a forum open to academics, researchers, students, and the general public interested in creating flexible and participatory networked learning spaces, enabling researchers to work together on the same project, even if they are very far from each other. O_Lab works where people live and promotes collective intelligence, connecting individuals together, sharing knowledge across networks, optimizing communication, experimentation, and the learning potential of the physical and virtual networks. Grounded in local action, each node can leverage the wisdom of the crowds generated in the global network.
Creativity & Innovation.
through:
Technology.
Knowledge production.
Applicability.
Collaborative interpretation.
Respect for intuitive and local knowledge.
Adaptability & flexibility.
Complexity analysis.
Reinvention and reuse.
Holistic sustainability.
O_Lab s a space for construction, production, research, reflection, and proposal. It also aims to publish and disseminate theoretical/practical materials related to contemporary urban culture and its relationship with the context.
O_Lab recognizes the operative multidimensional field of Architecture, values the processes of awareness, reflection and actualization, and nurtures circularities of experience-awareness, skills-knowledge, and communication.
Mission
- Transform individuals and places through research-based design and policy.
Outcomes
- Physical design and implementation
- Policy recommendations
- Practice-based research
Approach
- Building on a foundation of project-based learning as a primary form of knowledge advancement, the interdisciplinary team members of the Lab will participate in work that includes physical design, planning, policy, related research, and tangible evidence of knowledge advancement through independent workshops, publications, and course units in an academic, professional, and general audience context.
Structure
Advisory Group
Leaders in global allied industries who will participate in strategic planning, consultation, and support for the work of the Lab.
Partners
International professional partners who will participate in projects, providing local and specialized knowledge.
Faculty
Faculty members from the schools and colleges of the University of Miami and other institutions relevant to specific projects.
Location
- The Lab will establish an immediate virtual platform to convene the Advisory Board, Partners, and Faculty to ensure inclusive, expansive, and international composition and the potential for multi-institutional faculty. The Lab will work on locations relevant to individual projects and as needed for students, faculty, and visiting team members.
