Are you fascinated by the big questions? What is time? Does the future exist? Do we exist? And most importantly, can we build something funky to explore it all?
We are a quirky, passionate group of psychologists, researchers, nutritionists, artists, and makers based in Lyon. We tackle deep subjects with both rigorous curiosity and a healthy dose of creative irony. We love going on tangents, collaging ideas, and building weird and wonderful things.
Our work is a vibrant collision of disciplines. We collaborate with artists, musicians, researchers in psychology, behaviour sciences, sustainability professionals, festivals, and universities to create installations, immersive experiences, and thought-provoking projects.
What we’re working on now (and where you come in):
This spring and summer, we have a thrilling and eclectic mix of projects on the horizon. Our work ranges from the wonderfully specific to the wildly ambitious:
- “Dears, we have one week to develop a 15-minute immersive experience for professionals in cultural sector, grounded in our latest research.”
- “Great news – we’re invited to present our installation at a festival! Now, we just need to fill a hole in the budget over the next few months…”
- “Hmm, these pre- and post-experience comparisons are off. Looks like we need to check for baseline climate anxiety and build some non-linear models…”
Sound like a “go somewhere you don’t know, and bring back something you don’t know what”? We promise it’s not quite like that! It’s more like… organized chaos with a purpose.
This is where you come in. We are looking for a self-motivated and curious intern who:
- Is excited to dive into the unknown and share their own ideas.
- Wants to learn in an environment that will challenge and support their growth.
- Isn’t afraid of a little ambiguity and enjoys figuring things out as a team.
Yes, our work can be unexpected, and we take things day by day. But we are the good kind of crazy. We build on each other’s strengths, and we offer guidance and structure to help you navigate our peculiar world. We are as logical and rigorous as we are playful. You won’t be alone in the deep end; we’ll be there swimming with you.
The Practical Stuff:
- Start Date: Yesterday? Seriously, we mean ASAP.
- Location: Lyon, France (French-speaking is essential and English is needed for our day-to-day collaboration).
- The Vibe: Passionate, unconventional, slightly odd (in the best way), and always, always curious.
If this sounds like a fun and fascinating opportunity, drop us a line!
Tell us what makes you curious.
hello [at] creativetimelab [dot] org
More details:
The Short Version
Help us wrangle the cosmos. Support Creative Time Lab through project coordination, finding cool people to partner with, and helping us figure out what we’re offering to the world.
What You’ll Actually Be Doing
We’re in a phase of growing from brilliant, chaotic experiments into something a little more… structured. (Don’t worry, we’ll keep the good chaos). You’ll be our partner in crime, helping us build the ship while we sail it.
Your main missions, should you choose to accept them:
- Project Wrangling: Help coordinate workshops, pilot projects, and research events. Keep the trains running on time (even if they’re magical, philosophical trains).
- Figuring Out What We Sell: Help us articulate our service offerings. What is a participatory workshop on the nature of time worth? Let’s figure it out together. This includes our immersive installations and training formats.
- Spy Work (aka Market Research): Scope out the landscape. Where does Creative Time Lab fit in the world of culture, research, and innovation? Who’s doing cool stuff, and where are the gaps we can fill?
- Finding Our People (Partners): Help us identify and map potential soulmates—universities, cultural institutions, municipalities, foundations, and other wonderfully weird organisations who should know about us.
- Treasure Hunting (Funding): Dive into the world of foundations and public funding programs to find opportunities that align with our mission.
- Telling Our Story: Help prepare project proposals and outreach materials. Translate what we do into a language that institutions (and their grant committees) can understand and love.
- Getting Our Ducks in a Row: Help structure our internal resources — documentation, project tracking, shared digital spaces. Basically, help us be less messy.
- Proving We Exist (Impact Reports): Assist in preparing impact reports and project documentation. Organizing research data, contributing to data analyses (quantitative and qualitative), writing summaries, co-designing impact measurement strategies … you know, the stuff that shows we’re not just making it all up.
- Event Support: Help before, during, and after the conferences, workshops, and events we (inevitably) end up organising.
Some of the Skills You’ll Proudly Use and Grow:
- The Professional: Project coordination, ecosystem analysis, partnership mapping, grant research, proposal writing, impact documentation, and the dark art of organisational development.
- The Analytical: Figuring out where a weird organization fits in a not-so-weird world. Structuring chaos into coherent plans. Turning deep research into things people can actually do.
- The Human: Radical autonomy and initiative. Communicating with artists, academics, and bureaucrats (sometimes on the same day). Collaborating in a tiny, intense team. Adapting when a project suddenly pivots (because it will).
Why Bother? (The Big Picture)
This isn’t just about fetching coffee and filing papers. This is a hands-on, deep-dive into what it takes to build a mission-driven organisation from the ground up. You’ll get your hands dirty in everything from strategy to logistics, helping us transition from a series of brilliant pilot projects into something more… sustainable and scalable. You’ll leave with a real sense of how to make a cultural and research-oriented project actually work.
What You’ll Take With You (Learning Outcomes)
- Experience building an emerging org at the intersection of research, culture, and innovation.
- Real-world skills in market analysis, partnership development, and funding strategy.
- A hand in designing actual service offerings based on real research.
- The know-how to document impact and tell a compelling project story.
- A toolbox full of project coordination and strategic analysis skills, tested in the wild.
The Nitty Gritty
- Where: Lyon, France. We’ll be on-site for meetings and events, but flexible for remote work when it makes sense.
- When: ASAP.
- Hours: Part-time or full-time for 4-5 months. Heads-up: when we’re at festivals or running workshops, that might occasionally include a Sunday or public holiday. It’s the price of doing fun stuff.
- Cha-ching: Compensation as per French legal internship regulations.
- Perks: If we ship you off to a festival, we’ve got your transport, accommodation, and meals covered.
