About
An independent research team that studies how technologies meet real people, and turns what it finds into evidence institutions and innovators can act on.
Established in 2026, on the back of years of sustained fieldwork on infrastructure transitions in emerging markets. We both publish our own research and work on the ground for others.
A technology only matters when it meets a person, in a place. That is the level the Lab studies from. Not the specification sheet, not the pilot slide deck, not the aggregate figure, but the daily arithmetic of the household, the shift, the field, the shop counter where the technology either lands or does not. Everything the Lab does starts there and reports back.
We publish our own research openly: articles on finance, electrification, and water access, and a signature typology of how new infrastructure engages the legacy regimes it enters.
We work under contract for organisations that need evidence they cannot generate themselves: field research, impact measurement, and the European projects that need an independent measurement partner.
The published work is the proof of the method. The contracted work is the same method, made available. Because we are independent of what we measure, we report what the evidence says. Including when it is inconvenient.
Two things that rarely sit in the same room. Social-science fieldcraft that finds out what is actually happening to people. And genuine technical understanding of the systems we study. Policy consultancies hold only the first; technical labs, only the second. The Lab refuses the split.
Based in Delft, The Netherlands. We do fieldwork in the contexts that defeat conventional research: low-connectivity, multilingual, informal, dispersed. We do not parachute in. We work through researchers and partners who already speak the language and know the place.
Informed, recorded, revocable consent. Anonymisation by default. We interview to understand, not to confirm, and we report the findings that contradict a client's hopes as carefully as the ones that support them. See Field Research for the full ethics practice.
For services, see What We Do. For our published thinking, Articles. To start a conversation, Contact.