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The history of the **Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)** is best understood as the convergence of three histories: the University of Edinburgh’s long tradition of interdisciplinary inquiry; the emergence of data-driven innovation as a strategic priority for Edinburgh and Scotland; and the transformation of the former Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place into a new kind of university and civic space. EFI itself is a relatively young institution, formally established in 2018, while the building in which it is now based has a history stretching back almost three centuries.
Origins: from the Royal Infirmary to a futures institute
The physical story begins in 1729, when Edinburgh’s first voluntary hospital opened in a small building known as the “Little House” at Robertson’s Close. It was established following an appeal by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The institution became the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1736 and subsequently moved to increasingly substantial premises as the city and its medical needs expanded.
By the nineteenth century, the earlier infirmary buildings were becoming inadequate. A new Royal Infirmary was commissioned from the architect David Bryce. The foundation stone at Lauriston Place was laid in 1870, and the completed hospital opened on 29 October 1879. Bryce's design was strongly influenced by the pavilion model associated with Florence Nightingale. Its large windows, spacious wards and separation of patients were intended to improve ventilation and reduce the spread of infection. The new hospital was regarded as exceptionally advanced for its time and was described in contemporary reporting as one of Britain’s best-planned hospitals.
The building therefore had an unusually strong connection with evidence-based practice long before anyone spoke about “data science” in its modern sense. Florence Nightingale advised on aspects of the building and its layout, while her broader work involved collecting, analysing and communicating statistical evidence about health and mortality. EFI has subsequently made this connection between historical data practice and contemporary data-driven decision-making an important part of its institutional story.
The Royal Infirmary became deeply intertwined with the University of Edinburgh's medical education. Generations of medical students trained there, and the hospital was an important site for advances in medicine, surgery and nursing. The institution remained Edinburgh's principal hospital for well over a century. Its medical role continued even as medicine became increasingly specialised and hospital technology changed radically during the twentieth century.
The hospital leaves Lauriston Place
The decisive break came at the end of the twentieth century. Plans for a new Royal Infirmary at Little France developed during the 1990s, and the modern hospital eventually opened there in 2003. The Lauriston Place building consequently ceased to function as the city's main hospital.
The former hospital site then entered a prolonged period of uncertainty. Parts of the wider site were redeveloped as Quartermile, while the principal surgical-hospital buildings that now constitute EFI remained vacant after the transfer of hospital services. The University subsequently acquired the remaining Royal Infirmary site, creating the possibility of giving the historic complex a new institutional purpose.
That transition was particularly significant because the building was not simply an empty historic property. It was a Category A-listed landmark, closely associated with Edinburgh's medical history and with the University's own development. The challenge was therefore to find a use that could preserve its historical character while making substantial contemporary use of its exceptionally large floor area.
The emergence of Edinburgh Futures Institute
EFI emerged from the University of Edinburgh's response to a changing intellectual and economic environment. During the 2010s, Edinburgh was developing a particularly strong concentration of activity around data science, artificial intelligence, digital technologies and innovation. The University was simultaneously seeking ways to connect these technical capabilities with the humanities, social sciences, medicine, engineering and the creative arts.
The University announced ambitious plans in 2017 connected with making Edinburgh a major centre for data-driven innovation. The following year, the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal provided a substantial public investment framework for developing a regional Data-Driven Innovation ecosystem. EFI became one of the University's principal institutional responses to this environment. The University describes EFI as a major strategic initiative, while Professor Lesley McAra's University profile identifies her as its inaugural director from 2018 to 2022.
The conception of EFI was distinctive because it was not intended simply to be another academic department devoted to a particular subject. Its founding ambition was explicitly cross-University. The Institute sought to bring together the arts, humanities and social sciences with data science, engineering, natural sciences and medicine, while also working directly with communities, governments and industry. McAra described the model in terms of interdisciplinarity, co-design, co-production and data-driven innovation.
The choice of the old Royal Infirmary was consequently more than a matter of available space. The building offered a physical metaphor for EFI's intended role. A nineteenth-century institution designed to gather medical knowledge, educate professionals and serve the public could be reimagined as a twenty-first-century institution designed to bring together different forms of knowledge and different communities.
The inscription **“Patet Omnibus”**, meaning “open to all”, above the former hospital entrance became particularly resonant. EFI has repeatedly connected that historical principle with its aspiration to make the building a place where academics, students, businesses, public bodies, community organisations and members of the public can encounter one another.
2018–2020: building the Institute
Professor Lesley McAra became EFI's inaugural director in 2018. The early Institute concentrated on establishing its intellectual identity, developing partnerships and creating programmes capable of crossing conventional disciplinary boundaries. Its purpose was framed around complex societal challenges rather than individual academic disciplines.
The initial research agenda included areas such as the ethics of data and artificial intelligence, critical infrastructure, CreativeTech, financial technology and financial services, data civics and the future of public services. Student research funding was introduced across the University, with projects expected to demonstrate multidisciplinary approaches and potential public benefit.
Education developed alongside research. EFI's first undergraduate course, **Currents: Understanding and Addressing Global Challenges**, was introduced in 2020. It was deliberately open to undergraduate students from different disciplines and initially focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. The course used the crisis as a way of examining datasets, social consequences and the complex interactions between different kinds of knowledge.
The Institute also began developing postgraduate education around themes such as data, inequality, society, education futures, governance, narrative futures, creative industries and service design. Its educational philosophy increasingly centred on “fusion” or hybrid learning, allowing online and campus-based students to participate together.
One particularly important development was the establishment of the **Centre for Technomoral Futures** in 2020. Led by Shannon Vallor, the Centre was designed to examine the ethical, social and political implications of technological change. Its first cohort of PhD students began in September 2020, with research spanning applications of data and AI in areas including agriculture, medicine, social robotics, education and finance.
EFI and the COVID-19 pandemic
The Institute's formative years coincided almost immediately with the COVID-19 pandemic. This profoundly affected its development.
Its first undergraduate course moved online, while EFI created new forms of digital teaching and research. A fully online Text and Data Mining Boot Camp was piloted in June 2020, reflecting the Institute's interest in hybrid education and in developing methods that could function beyond conventional campus settings.
COVID-19 also gave EFI an unusually direct opportunity to apply its “futures” perspective to a crisis occurring in the present. The Institute launched its **Future Present** series in 2020, bringing together perspectives on the pandemic from areas including economics, sustainability, creativity, history, health, justice, education, democracy and society.
The pandemic reinforced one of EFI's central intellectual propositions: major societal problems rarely fit neatly within one discipline. Epidemiology, statistics, economics, politics, culture, technology, psychology, ethics and public administration all became relevant to understanding the crisis and its consequences.
The restoration of the Old Royal Infirmary
While EFI was developing as an intellectual institution, an enormous physical transformation was taking place at Lauriston Place.
The University embarked on a roughly seven-year, multimillion-pound restoration of the former Royal Infirmary. The project was intended to preserve the historic character of the Category A-listed building while converting it into a contemporary environment for teaching, research, innovation and public engagement. The redevelopment ultimately created approximately 20,000 square metres of space.
The architectural approach retained important elements of the former hospital. The historic wards and central circulation spaces were incorporated into the new scheme rather than being erased. At the same time, contemporary teaching facilities, collaboration areas, innovation laboratories, business incubation space, exhibition and event facilities and publicly accessible areas were introduced.
The project also sought to reconnect the building with the surrounding city. New points of access were created from Lauriston Place, Middle Meadow Walk and Quartermile, while a new public piazza and garden spaces helped turn what had previously been a closed hospital complex into a more permeable civic environment.
The restoration became an intellectual project in its own right. EFI commissioned oral-history work with people who had worked at the Royal Infirmary, while researchers explored the building's archives and memories. The purpose was to ensure that the hospital's history was not simply preserved architecturally but incorporated into the identity of the new institution.
The resulting philosophy was expressed particularly clearly through EFI's **Recycling a Hospital** project. The initiative explored how memories, materials, architecture and stories from the hospital could be carried into its new life.
Chris Speed and a widening conception of innovation
In 2022, Professor Chris Speed succeeded Lesley McAra as director. Speed had already been deeply involved in EFI and had served as its Director of Innovation. His background in Design Informatics and his involvement in the £7.4 million Creative Informatics partnership helped strengthen the Institute's emphasis on innovation, creativity and collaboration with external organisations.
During this period EFI's ecosystem continued to expand. One example was the establishment of the **Centre for Investing Innovation**, announced in 2022 through a five-year, £7.5 million partnership between the University and investment company abrdn. The centre brought academic and industry expertise together around innovation in investment and financial services.
The Institute's role consequently evolved beyond conventional research. It became increasingly concerned with the movement of knowledge between universities, companies, public institutions and communities, with innovation understood as a process of applying research to real-world problems rather than merely producing academic publications.
The physical opening in 2024
The most visible milestone in EFI's history came in 2024, when the restored Royal Infirmary finally became its permanent home.
The Institute opened the building to the public on 3 June 2024 following the seven-year restoration. The University described the completed 20,000-square-metre redevelopment as one of Europe's largest institutes for interdisciplinary learning, research and innovation.
The opening transformed EFI from an institution whose identity had largely existed through programmes, partnerships and dispersed University activity into a major physical presence in central Edinburgh.
The building was subsequently used for teaching, research, business and civic collaboration, exhibitions, performances and public events. Its relationship with the city became a central part of the Institute's operation rather than simply an aspiration.
The scale of that public role became particularly visible in August 2024, when the Edinburgh International Book Festival used the newly renovated building for the first time, attracting more than 70,000 visitors. EFI also ran its first major in-building event season later that year, selling more than 7,000 tickets.
The Institute's official opening ceremony took place on 11 April 2025, when it was formally opened by **The Princess Royal**, the University of Edinburgh's Chancellor. This followed the earlier public opening in June 2024.
The transition to Marion Thain
The leadership changed again at the beginning of 2025. Professor Kevin Dhaliwal served as interim director from November 2023 while the University prepared for the next permanent appointment. In January 2025, Professor Marion Thain became director.
Thain joined from King's College London, where she had been Professor of Culture and Technology and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. At King's she had founded and led the Digital Futures Institute. Her intellectual interests in culture, technology and interdisciplinarity provided a continuation of EFI's interest in combining technological and humanistic perspectives while also giving the Institute a somewhat broader cultural conception of technological change.
Under Thain, EFI has increasingly articulated its identity around what it calls “radical interdisciplinarity”: bringing different disciplinary approaches together without treating one as subordinate to another. The Institute argues that major challenges such as artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality and technological transformation have scientific and technical dimensions, but also cultural, social and political dimensions.
That approach is reflected in EFI's current structure. Rather than employing a conventional faculty organised around individual disciplines, the Institute describes itself as a disciplinary-neutral environment that brings researchers and teachers together from elsewhere in the University and connects them with external partners. Its current work spans education, research, innovation and convening.
EFI's role within the Data-Driven Innovation programme
An important part of the Institute's institutional history is its relationship with the **Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal** and the resulting Data-Driven Innovation ecosystem.
EFI is one of six Data-Driven Innovation hubs associated with the regional programme. Its particular areas of engagement include creative industries, finance and fintech, public-sector innovation, and travel, tourism and festivals. The objective is not simply to commercialise University research, but to create relationships through which academic expertise, data and external-sector needs can interact.
This has given EFI a position somewhere between an academic institute, an innovation hub, a convening organisation and a civic institution. That hybrid character is deliberate. Its work involves teaching students, supporting researchers, working with companies and public bodies, hosting events, developing innovation projects and creating spaces in which people who would not normally work together can meet.
The Institute's reported impact illustrates the scale of this ecosystem. Its 2024/25 annual report recorded 188 new companies having been started with support from EFI and related projects since 2020, with those companies subsequently securing more than £41 million in follow-on funding. The report also recorded 75 adoption projects through which University research informed new products, services or public-sector activity.
Those figures should be understood as ecosystem-level measures rather than evidence that EFI itself directly founded all of those companies. The Institute's role encompasses partnerships and related programmes across the wider Data-Driven Innovation environment.
Education and the mature Institute
EFI's educational role has expanded considerably since the single undergraduate elective introduced in 2020.
By 2025, the Institute reported eleven interdisciplinary postgraduate programmes alongside undergraduate provision. These programmes have addressed areas including data and inequality, education futures, governance, narrative futures, creative industries and service management and design. The Institute has also developed executive education and other forms of professional learning.
A distinctive feature is its use of “fusion” learning, in which students participating online and those studying on campus can share teaching environments. The approach grew partly out of the pandemic experience but became an intentional feature of EFI's educational model.
The resulting student community is unusually heterogeneous for a conventional postgraduate institute. In the 2024/25 academic year, EFI reported students from 62 countries, with ages ranging from 17 to 73.
Research, centres and partnerships
EFI's research history has similarly developed from a small collection of thematic programmes into a broader ecosystem of centres, partnerships and projects.
The **Centre for Technomoral Futures** remains an important expression of the Institute's interest in technology and values. Other activity has encompassed data civics, financial innovation, creative technology, digital culture, public services, infrastructure, climate-related innovation and the relationship between technology and society.
EFI also hosts or works with research and innovation initiatives that extend well beyond the University's traditional disciplinary boundaries. The current Institute describes its “golden thread” as attention to the intersection between technology and individual and social needs and values.
One particularly significant example is the **Scottish Prevention Hub**, a collaboration involving EFI, Police Scotland and Public Health Scotland that seeks to use data to improve understanding of health and social inequalities in Scotland. Another is the **Compassion in Financial Services Hub**, launched in 2025 to bring together financial services, policymakers, academics, communities and civil society around questions concerning the future of the financial system.
The Institute as a civic space
The transformation of EFI is therefore not only intellectual or organisational. Its founders and subsequent directors have deliberately treated the building itself as part of the Institute's mission.
The old Royal Infirmary was historically a specialised institution with controlled access, despite the inscription “Patet Omnibus”. The restored EFI building reverses much of that spatial logic. Publicly accessible areas, event spaces, exhibitions, a café, gardens and open collaborative areas coexist with secure research, teaching and partnership spaces.
This makes EFI unusual within a university. It is simultaneously a place for students and researchers, a meeting place for external organisations, a venue for public discussion and a piece of Edinburgh's architectural heritage.
The building's history also remains visible in the Institute's cultural programme. Projects have addressed the memories of former hospital workers, the history of medicine, the Edinburgh Seven and the relationship between Edinburgh's past and its possible futures. EFI has thereby treated heritage not as something separate from innovation, but as material for thinking about how institutions and cities change.
2025–2026: from new building to established ecosystem
By 2025–26, EFI had moved beyond the question of whether the former hospital could successfully be converted into a futures institute. The focus had become how the resulting institution could operate at scale.
Its 2025/26 annual report, published in September 2026, describes activity across four principal areas: **Innovation, Research, Education and Convening**. Innovation activity focuses on bringing together expertise, entrepreneurs, partners and public bodies; research activity includes new research teams and externally funded work; education encompasses interdisciplinary programmes and initiatives such as Students as Change Agents and live projects with industry partners; convening includes public events, exhibitions, community activity and the Institute's Future University programme.
The **Future University** programme is particularly revealing of EFI's present direction. During 2026, the Institute has been using its convening role to examine how universities themselves might need to change in response to technological, economic and social pressures. Its September 2026 programme addressed questions concerning collective inquiry and public consequence, the university of 2050, work and the future knowledge economy, AI, truth, free speech and the future of research.
The Institute has therefore developed an interesting reflexive quality: an organisation created to study and help shape societal futures is now explicitly examining the future of the university itself.
What the history means
The history of Edinburgh Futures Institute is consequently much longer than its institutional age might suggest.
Its **institutional history** begins around 2018, when the University established a new cross-disciplinary initiative under Lesley McAra's leadership. Its **intellectual history** grows out of Edinburgh's longstanding strengths in medicine, humanities, social science, science, engineering and data-driven research. Its **regional history** is connected to Edinburgh's emergence as a centre for data-driven innovation and to the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. Its **architectural history** reaches back to the Royal Infirmary's founding in 1729 and especially to David Bryce's 1879 hospital.
The most distinctive feature of EFI is the way these histories have been deliberately joined together. The former hospital's concern with evidence, observation and public service provides a historical precedent for an institution concerned with data and societal challenges. Nightingale's use of statistics provides a particularly direct historical connection between the building and EFI's interest in data-informed change. The inscription “Patet Omnibus” supplies a second connection, expressing an aspiration toward openness that EFI has attempted to translate into contemporary university and civic practice.
The result is not simply a restored nineteenth-century building containing a modern university department. EFI represents an institutional experiment in which **place, interdisciplinarity, data, public engagement, education, innovation and futures thinking are deliberately combined**.
As of September 2026, its history is still relatively short as an institute but already substantial in terms of institutional development. The current leadership under Professor Marion Thain is positioning EFI around interdisciplinary knowledge infrastructures, external partnership and the intersection of technology with culture and society. Its latest annual reporting presents the Institute as still being at an early stage of its development, despite the major transformation already completed.
In that sense, the most appropriate historical description of Edinburgh Futures Institute is not a story that begins when the University moved into the Old Royal Infirmary. It is a story of **repurposing accumulated institutional knowledge**: a hospital founded to improve health, a university with centuries of interdisciplinary scholarship, a city adapting to the data economy, and a vacant historic building have all been brought together to create an institution explicitly concerned with how societies can understand and shape their possible futures.
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