AN EVOLVING IDENTITY

Conceived by Harvard Biomedical Engineering Professor David A. Edwards, The Laboratory at Harvard opened last November alongside a series of successful initiatives.

The global company Le Whif may be their strongest showing, selling inhalable chocolate that Edwards invented several months before the establishment of The Lab.

Following such success, however, The Lab is looking towards an uncertain future.

It has partnerships with six organizations across the University, including GSD and SEAS, but has retained an independent existence, receiving funding from each of its partner organizations.

By its third year, reads The Labs’ website, the initiative expects that “the engineering school and the design school will make the lab at Harvard a part of the curriculum.”

“We are beginning to explore, with the encouragement of the deans of SEAS and the GSD, how The Lab might evolve into a longer-term design and innovation resource for courses more broadly on campus, and particularly in SEAS and GSD,” Edwards writes in an e-mail to The Crimson.

But according to Van Vuuren, The Lab’s uniquely independent position may work either for or against its final reevaluation at the end of the three-year experimentation period.

He also added that The Lab plans to use the coming two years to spread its influence across campus.

“Nearing the end of the first year, I think it can be said that we’re all very delighted with how the experiment has gone,” Edwards writes. “Over the next couple years we will broaden the programming and hopefully see one or two more lasting exhibitions with national and even international resonance.”

“It’s an exciting time at Harvard,” Lin says. “Everyone is trying to reach out to different fields.”

WILLY WONKA MEETS SCIENCE

The Lab originated from a SEAS class that students describe as a Willy Wonka-like factory, taught by Edwards, the Le Whif-inventing professor.

Engineering Sciences 147: “Idea Translation: Effecting Change through the Arts and Sciences” is a fall term class that focuses on how “idea creations evolve from a passionate will to effect change,” according to the course description.

Nworah B. Ayogu ’10 attended the class and has continued to be involved with The Lab. He describes Edwards as chic and eccentric. “I would love to see the inside of his mind,” he says.