Culture Lab at UCL East

The vision for Culture Lab is a place that draws together culture and making; including experimental and exploratory spaces focused on how we produce, represent, exhibit, preserve and narrate culture. The vision has been developed by over 50 academics working within the Joint Faculties and the IoE over the last few years and we are now moving into much more concrete planning around staffing, programmes and spaces.

UCL East Phase 1 will include over 2600m² of specialist teaching space and Culture Lab has secured several exciting spaces in both Pool Street and Marshgate that we hope will be resources for students and staff across the three faculties, as well as those based at UCL East:  

• The Culture Lab Space – a multi-functional exhibition and immersive learning space in a prominent position on the ground floor of Marshgate, enabling students and members of the public to work with artefacts to explore and communicate contemporary global challenges such as climate change or migration.
• The London Memory Workshop and Urban Room - a practice-based space dedicated to opening up UCL’s existing public and oral history collections focused on London, as well as the creation of new public histories through active engagement with relevant communities in East London.
• The Future Media Studio will offer state of the art audio-visual production, editing and imaging/digital research facilities as well as access to a purpose built cinema. Two Conservation Laboratories including customized learning labs for developing specialist conservation skills focused on the heritage of large monuments, modern materials and wider public Archaeology, and supporting two new masters programmes in the Conservation of Modern Art and Built Heritage.
• The Slade Studio: purpose built studio space for public exhibitions, masterclasses and evening classes, and a planned access degree programme for young people to engage with art and making in preparation for university study across a range of related subjects.

Programme leads continue to develop outline plans for their programmes and some have already begun the process of PMAP validation. The UCL East team have set up a Moodle site with resources to support programme development and appointed a Teaching Fellow to ensure that the programmes that are developed align with the UCL East vision and to encourage interdisciplinarity across programmes where possible.

In May we commissioned the research agency YouthSight to undertake student and teacher-focused market research to inform the development of the undergraduate programmes within Culture Lab – the Slade Foundation Course and the three proposed degrees in Media, Heritage and Creative and Applied Humanities.

YouthSight will manage an online questionnaire with around 1,000 respondents who are actively part of the current UCAS cycle and then administer some focus groups via web-based communities of 15 students to explore their perceptions of the programmes in more detail. We hope to have the results of this research in early autumn.

Various academics from across the faculties have been involved in meetings with the V&A, British Library and the Smithsonian to discuss opportunities for partnerships around research and teaching. Planning has also begun to think about the potential inclusion of placements or internships into some of the new programmes being developed alongside other opportunities for community-engaged learning.