I’ve recently been speaking to several colleagues across the University of Sussex to understand how creative work gets done. These conversations have clarified in my mind some of the challenges facing universities in general, particularly in the relationship between academia and professional services.

A flashback

In a former life, I worked at a daily newspaper. I began my career in advertising, before moving into planning and production, and then into editorial, ending up as a news reporter.

When I joined the newspaper in 2007, it was a newsroom of more than 300 people. It was a vast, intimidating setting with off-yellow lighting and a low artificial ceiling. It took some getting used to.

Straight down the middle of this open-plan office floor was the main walkway, indicated by a slightly darker shade of greige carpet from which narrower aisles of the same carpet branched off into various departmental clusters.

This central strip was not just a practical way to get office workers around the building. It was also a marker – a clear line between editorial and advertising, with sales teams and prepress on one side, and editorial features, sport, news and subbing on the other. In business terms, it was a cultural chasm.

My work in the prepress department was mostly building pages every day on a big screen, like a game of Tetris, dragging and dropping advertising into empty pages to either fill them up or leave a decent size and shape of page space for editorial production. I’d then cross the floor over to editorial to present them with the following morning’s flatplan on sheets of A3 paper. They’d pore over the space they’d been given, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up, tutting and sighing about “too much” or “not enough”, before I was sent back to my side of the office to fix it. The only thing missing was cigarette smoke hanging in the air, though if you closed your eyes you could still smell it. The glory days, eh?

I clearly couldn’t get enough of such feudal gaslighting because after a time I applied for a job as a trainee sub-editor. I vividly remember my first weeks in editorial. Coming into the office to sit on the other side for the whole day was the strangest feeling. One of the sales reps even said, “Don’t forget about us, Adrian”. (Don’t worry, Tina – I haven’t)

One day, a journalist I admired, the late, great Keith Winsper, said to me: “You’ve crossed the floor.”

When I asked what he meant, he said, “In nearly 50 years, you’re only the second ever person I’ve known to cross the floor from advertising to editorial. And the first person was me.”

Put simply, crossing the floor was not the done thing. For some, I was a curiousity. For others, it was plain outrageous, though most were decent enough to keep that view to themselves. I enjoyed most of my time on both sides of the floor, but truthfully I never really felt I belonged fully on either side.

Entering the third space

Universities are not so different, except the expansive floor of the news room is replaced by offices for professional services staff, sometimes secured by key card access, and rabbit warrens of corridors of painted doors, usually shut, sometimes with an academic behind them. (You knock to find out if there’s someone inside and a muffled voice normally shouts, “Yes” and then you enter.)

When I became head of digital content at Sussex, I was keen to meet people from all quarters.

One senior academic, who also headed up an administrative function, described themselves as “inhabiting a third space”, where they were neither part of professional services nor felt fully accepted as an academic.

These people in universities, in the “third space”, are often your pro-vice-chancellor-types, committee members or steering group colleagues. They’ve nodded as I discuss the third space concept. Those nods can mean different things to different people, because of our own experiences and viewpoints.

The question (finally, if you’re still reading) is: what does the third space mean for a website?

My space or yours?

Running a website is not as straight-forward as having a section for academia and a section for university administration, with the two dancing around each other in some kind of awkward courting arrangement where neither will look the other in the eye.

Research pages, for instance, cannot exist purely for the thought-experiments of an academic in their corner. There are journals and blogs for that. Neither can such pages be a portal into the kinds of policies and case studies that are geared towards attracting an audience of 1 REF assessor and their dog, or a handful of policymakers or the merest synapse-beat of a wealthy donor.

They need to exist in a different space – a third space that speaks to a wider audience.

This isn’t just a research content issue. It applies equally to course marketing content, education materials and business collaboration efforts.

This can only happen through content that is devoid, even ambivalent, of internal structures, run by a digital service that is comfortable living in a third space.

Broadening the intersection

The third space cannot become a walled city of its own. It needs to welcome in, and work closely with, academics and administrators.

Over time, the vision has to be for people on both “sides” to get accustomed to the third space and for the culture to subtly shift enough for people to feel comfortable crossing the floor into it as often as they inhabit their spiritual home.

That means hot-desking in it, brain-storming in it and talking through complex user journeys over another pot of coffee. Whatever it takes.

If we do this slowly and surely enough, the intersection of the ven diagram between one side and the other side will get bigger, until we’re all inhabiting one space together.