Humanities innovation labs
Source: https://www.mq.edu.au/faculty-of-arts/engage-with-us/humanities-innovation-labs Parent: https://www.mq.edu.au/study/admissions-and-entry/apply/international/international-academic-requirements
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Collaborating for impact
Our flagship collaboration model is the humanities innovation labs. The labs bring researchers, students and partners together to work on current and emerging challenges through practical, project-based collaboration.
Some questions can only be understood, let alone solved, by bringing different kinds of expertise together.
- How do we know if AI adoption is building capacity or eroding it?
- How do we prepare a workforce for jobs that don’t exist yet?
- What does it actually take to change behaviour?
These are human questions. They need humanities and social sciences thinking. Without it, you risk misdiagnosing the problem or designing interventions that don't survive contact with how people actually live and work (and which people resist, ignore or work around).
Our labs are where that thinking happens: bringing researchers, students and partners together around a shared challenge. Think of a lab as a focused team, combining humanities and social science expertise with partner knowledge.
Labs are for people who want rigorous thinking and practical outputs, whether that’s:
- joining a multi-year effort on a foundational question
- engaging with a specific slice of a problem we’re already working on.
How our labs run
We start with a live question that matters to your organisation. We bring in the expertise and perspectives the problem needs, assembling a team (staff, students, external specialists) that draws on our networks across sectors and institutions, locally and globally. We scale to fit the problem, and adapt as the work evolves.
The labs also works as a hub, connecting partners to researchers, institutions and communities working on related problems elsewhere.
With each partnership and project, our labs build a deeper understanding of how challenges play out across different contexts. A business struggling to understand why staff are resisting new AI tools might benefit from work we've done with an industry body in Southeast Asia navigating the same friction. An Australian agribusiness trying to understand rural workforce decline might connect with research and industry partnerships we've built in India working on parallel questions.
When you work with us, you get access to:
- researchers and practitioners at the cutting edge of their fields, working on the human side of change: culture, judgement, ethics, communication, behaviour. These are the things that make initiatives succeed or fall over.
- students who bring fresh, generational perspective, and do real work alongside our staff and yours. Students are closer to the future workforce – often they are the end users – with questions that people inside the sector have stopped asking, and fewer assumptions about how things are done. If you’re thinking about talent pipeline, or designing for younger demographics, having them in the room matters.
- unique cross-sector networks: we bring the right experts and teams from our global connections into the work.
- a practical way of moving from insight to action that doesn't treat research, learning and capability-building as separate activities.
Partners work with us when they need more than a one-off speaker or a standard consultancy project. The humanities innovation labs are designed for organisations that want:
- rigorous thinking
- practical outputs
- a relationship that can grow over time.
Explore the labs
Technological disruption is a human phenomenon. Disruptive technologies reshape work, judgement and institutions faster than society and organisations can adapt. AI is the current pressure point. New tools arrive, adoption gets mandated, metrics proliferate and the human dimensions (which determine whether tools get used well or resisted) go unmeasured.
This lab conceptualises and tests ideas about the human-technology interface: what happens to people, organisations and societies when these technologies arrive, and why. We apply our understanding in practice.
In business and institutions, for example, the question most organisations are asking is “how do we use AI?” The question they should be asking is “how will we know what good work looks like now?”
We are working on:
- embedded research in organisations
- workforce capability development
- evidence-based technology policy
- understanding when to use AI and when not to.
Organisations are deploying AI tools and counting clicks. Usage metrics don’t reveal whether judgment is developing or atrophying. They don't distinguish genuine capability from "workslop": output that masquerades as good work but lacks substance.
Understanding technology adoption requires methods from anthropology, philosophy of technology and education research, such as:
- observing practice
- building critical capability
- developing policy that accounts for how people actually use these tools.
Building critical judgment takes developmental time and cultural conditions that conventional training ignores. It means knowing when to use the tool, when not to, and how to tell the difference.
We partner with organisations through:
- embedded research
- workforce capability development
- evidence-based policy.
The goal is institutional change that outlasts the current technology cycle.