Our Research Approach

At EdgeLab, research is not simply about producing solutions — it is about rethinking how problems themselves are constituted. We work upstream, where questions are still open and categories unsettled, creating space for rigorous imagination and institutional learning.

Thinking with Autopoietic Ecology

Our research is grounded in autopoietic ecological theory — the idea that systems persist not because of fixed essences, but because they continually regenerate the operations that allow them to endure. A classroom, a legal system, or even a democratic practice exists only because it keeps re-enacting the conditions that make it meaningful. This perspective shifts the focus from what things are to how they sustain themselves.

This ecological stance reshapes how we study institutions, technologies, and democratic life:

Systems are living ecologies, not machines to be engineered.
Meaning and knowledge are enacted, not simply discovered.
Change is recursive, arising through re-entry into systems’ own ways of making sense, not imposed from the outside.

In practice, this means our research does not attempt to “fix” systems. Instead, we observe how they generate coherence, adapt under perturbation, and open (or close) possibilities for transformation.

From Use to Integration

A central distinction in our work is between use and integration of technologies such as generative AI. While use treats AI as a tool to improve existing workflows, integration attends to how AI reshapes the deeper logics of authorship, legitimacy, and institutional identity. This shift allows us to study not only how tools are adopted, but how they alter the very conditions under which knowledge and action are produced.

Research Focus

We focus on four interrelated domains:

Democratic Communication and Civic Resilience – exploring how trust, legitimacy, and participation are recursively generated in democratic systems under conditions of misinformation and fragmentation.
Education and Institutional Learning – investigating how schools, universities, and cultural organisations sustain or reconfigure themselves when faced with technological and political disruption.
AI and Systems Transformation – studying how generative technologies couple with existing knowledge ecologies, creating both risks and opportunities for institutional change.
Ecologies of Practice – developing methods of co-inquiry, situated prototyping, and reflexive workshops that help partners re-examine not just what they do, but how their doing shapes what they can see and become.

How We Work

EdgeLab functions as a scientific studio and knowledge ecology. Rather than closing down questions, we cultivate conditions for:

Conceptual R&D – treating theory as infrastructure that informs how we act, design, and innovate
Co-inquiry over consultancy – working with institutions as co-observers, not as clients.
Situated experimentation – prototyping practices in low-stakes, generative environments.

I-CIVIC: Innovating Civic Engagement

EdgeLab is proud to be the Cambridge host for I-CIVIC – Innovating Civic Engagement: Pedagogies for a Resilient Generation, a four-year (commencing November 2025) international research project funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges (MSCA-SE) programme under Horizon Europe.

I-CIVIC brings together universities, NGOs, cultural institutions, and civic organisations from across Europe to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time: how to strengthen democratic resilience and civic participation among young people.

Why I-CIVIC?

Across Europe, young people face a growing democratic deficit—marked by declining civic engagement, the spread of misinformation, and widening gaps between schools and civic life. I-CIVIC responds to this challenge by rethinking democratic education and creating innovative, inclusive, and community-based models for engaging youth in civic life.

The project is organised around six work packages, spanning from mapping democratic deficits and inclusivity barriers to designing new civic education models, building digital literacy, and training the next generation of researchers and educators.

Cambridge’s Role

At Cambridge, EdgeLab leads the project’s Training Work Package, under the direction of Dr. Steven Watson (Faculty of Education). Our role is to:

Provide interdisciplinary training programmes for researchers and educators, drawing on expertise in digital literacy, generative AI, and innovative civic pedagogy.
Develop tools and approaches that bridge the gap between formal schooling and community-based democratic learning.
Mentor a new generation of scholars and practitioners to work across academic, civic, and cultural sectors.

Consortium

The project is coordinated by the University of the Basque Country (Spain), with partners in Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the UK. Together, we aim to build a resilient civic culture that empowers young people to participate meaningfully in democratic life.

Cambridge EdgeLab