Is it time for science embrace coffee shop culture?

Cheap, sociable and a brilliant source of delicious beverages – Matthew Partridge ponders the possible joy of moving from the lab and into the coffee shop

Coffee shops are the place to do work. I can say, with the certainty of someone making up a fact, that every Costa and Starbucks right now has at least one author writing a novella about a troubled young teenager trying to understand their place in a society that hates hummus.

Authors and artists have really spearheaded this concept. As soon as big chain coffee shops started springing up they populated faster than you could say "how’s your novel coming?"

I think this is trend that scientists need to get right on top of. Science should always adapt to try and integrate with society at large and if working in coffee shops is de rigueur then that's where we need to doing science. I think it's worth understanding the drive and reason of the authors and artists that already follow this trend. Some quick internet reading suggests that the two main reasons are to do with money and human contact. Interestingly coffee and hot drinks didn't seem to feature at all.

Double shot Money as a driver is simple to understand, authors and artists are stereotypically often broke. For those of you that haven't looked into what it costs to rent and office ­– or enough of a desk to hold an A4 pad – I can assure you that it costs a lot more that a cup of coffee an hour, it would be at least a cup of fancy coffee possibly with a muffin an hour.

This fits very well with scientists. Research salaries are not catastrophically bad but they rarely afford scientists anything as fancy as a house big enough for a study... or in some cases even a table.

Human contact similarly parallels well between artists and scientists. Being an author or an artist typically isn't a team sport. It can be very isolating. Coffee shops may not provide much conversation (especially not in the UK where we have a strict ‘no eye contact with strangers’ policy) but they do, at the very least, allow you to spend some time in the company of other human beings. Science can be equally isolating – long hours in labs that are either so small that you are the only person that fits or so large that colleagues are some how always round the next corner, like some kind of very white well lit horror movie scene.

Conversely of course you can end up so harassed by students and health and safety inspectors it becomes impossible to get any work done.

Latte, no acid So I think scientists need to learn from authors and artists and see coffee shops as the solution to these issues. For the price of one coffee per hour you can have a space free from students, desks covered in towers of paper work and silent lonely labs. Obviously there are some technical challenges in working from a coffee shop depending on your specialty but with the correct PPE you'll be able to do your hydrofluoric acid etch experiments safely protected from accidental cappuccino spills.

[caption id="attachment_39565" align="alignnone" width="200"] Dr Matthew Partridge is a senior Research Fellow at the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton but describes himself as a biochemist who has accidentally ended up working with optical sensor systems.[/caption]