Conclusions

This chapter has focused on the configuration of a range of lab spaces as a way to underscore the deeply situated nature of each, and to describe how that situatedness informs the philosophies of those working within them. As we continually point out throughout this book, all parts of the extended lab assemblage are deeply entangled and space is a vital part of this dynamic. We move next to the related topic of lab apparatus: the technological objects that are part of the bundle of practices that manifest in these same spatial sites of knowledge production. Lab apparatus produces agential relations between humans and non-humans; as such, this chapter returns once more to the Media Archaeological Fundus as a case study. Likewise, the fifth chapter on people will also return to the MIT Media Lab as a way to further explore the ways in which management techniques inform the spatial configuration of labs, along with these same agential relations. In short, labs are more like social dynamics of space than they are about stable architecture; the lab as a space is a product of relations between the people, objects, practices, institutions and discourses that it brings together.