Campus cafes play vital role in forging research collaborations

A crowded cafeteria can help universities generate new research collaborations, but busy hallways appear much less effective, according to a study.

The analysis by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology adds to a body of literature on strategies for encouraging silo-busting encounters in academic settings by examining email records of hundreds of workers to identify lasting connections.

The method affirms expectations that colleagues working physically nearer to each other are more likely to find each other, and that the odds of connection are higher between locations with indoor pathways.

The investigation, published in the journal Social Networks, identified cafeterias as especially fruitful, apparently reflecting the added amount of time and extra opportunities that communal meals create for people to randomly find each other or be connected by another colleague, even in crowded settings.

Laying out campuses and designing buildings to intentionally create daily walking paths that bring researchers nearer to each other also appears to be effective, the MIT authors found. But hallways, unlike cafeterias, have a limiting point at which too much density appears to lead people to just walk on past without making new acquaintances, the authors concluded.

The study team collected email data from MIT covering more than 1,455 workers in February 2020, just ahead of the pandemic lockdowns. The researchers counted one-to-one exchanges between individuals and compared that data to their office locations and other place-based information, including their usual daily arrival points, walking routes and eating venues.

In cafeterias, people are naturally found clustered together and engaging in conversation, said one of the paper’s co-authors, Andres Sevtsuk, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at MIT. Packed hallways right outside an office or laboratory, said Dr Sevtsuk, head of MIT’s City Form Lab, “can dampen that effect”.

Universities do devote attention to such concerns, Professor Sevtsuk said, but often in fairly limited ways that do not tend to maximise the encouragement of scientific collaboration, and instead become overshadowed during building design processes by other practical and style needs.

MIT itself is taking advantage of insights from Dr Sevtsuk and his colleagues as the institute plans a new home for its School of Architecture, he said.

Yet MIT, too, falls short in many other places. “In my own case,” Dr Sevtsuk acknowledged, “my office happens to be fairly tucked away. So it’s sort of the opposite of a location that would generate a lot of social contacts. Which is somewhat unfortunate.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com