The ThingTank Lab is an open, community based collaborative ideation lab.  This ideation lab is a place where the exploration, experimentation, and exchange of ideas are developed towards the building of “things”.  The things our lab is most interested in are those emerging through the continuing revolution of data driven goods and services, what is notionally discussed as being the “Internet of things”.  The next generation of digital content products and services have distributed and diverse modes of interaction where websites and mobile content will be only one aspect of the user’s experience: smart meters or wearable electronics, for example, connect the real world of objects to online digital networks of data. These digitally enabled networked objects are the Internet of Things.

The lab is fundamentally an interdisciplinary facilitating community.  It is the place where the next generation of ideas comes from. Its activities include academics and people from private enterprise as well as sponsoring organizations interested in alternative pre-competitive techniques of idea generation related to building things (and their networks) that address real world problems.