The other rule was that you couldn't remove any material from the room or document it in any way. The experiment took place in 1969 in at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. Sculpture students entered a bolted and padlocked room with only name badges and a cube of polystyrene wrapped in brown paper. They weren't allowed to leave from 10 am until 4:30 pm, and were supervised by at least one professor at all times. Technically, this was their art class, but it was also a pedagogical experiment.
Tutors Garth Evans, Gareth Jones Peter Kardia, and Peter Harvey worked on this experiment for two years, and the blueprint strangely resembles the coronavirus-era quarantining and remote learning procedures we're enduring now.
The idea was that they'd give students the materials to work, but nothing else. No instructions. During the second week of the experiment, the room had been emptied of everything the students had been working on. Some students began to consider the whole project more of a conceptual piece rather than a physical one. One could even call it a "social project," and it oddly mimics the same structure of how students are coping with remote learning today.