At this point, check time? No, not too bad.
The thought was that we would invite
you to have some transdisciplinary conversations.
Now, Faith, did we manage
to get the next bit of Slido work?
We're going to do it while they're
having their transdisciplinary conversations.
Perfect. Here is what we're inviting you to do.
These are our six big topics
and we have cunningly done two things.
First of all, we worked with Michelle to make sure
only terribly nice people were allowed to come here,
which means everyone is desperately keen to meet
you and you can be absolutely
certain that they are a terribly nice person.
The other thing that we wanted to do was to suggest
that if you were on a lightly populated table,
you may wish to waft in the direction of any of
the terribly nice people on
the one proviso that if when you look at them,
it's not just that you know them,
but you know the dates of birth of their children,
this would be an indication that you
probably know them too well.
The thought is to try and encourage you to organize
yourselves into little groups to be able to pick a topic,
and we leave it entirely up to you,
but to have the conversation around,
if we were to do a project around this topic,
what would be the most interesting questions
that we might explore?
I will let you know now that to start with,
you might go, "Yeah, we've got no overlap at all."
That's wonderful,
because it gives us the opportunity to say,
"How do you see this question?
What do you see as particularly important," and
to start making our connections.
I invite you, if you so wish to waft,
the more astute amongst you will
realize I'm also giving you
a free pass to move away from the person you didn't like,
but couldn't come up with a way of saying that.
[LAUGHTER] We will do this for
probably about 40 minutes and
then Faith will get it set up.
We have to finish by 3:30.
Is it 3:30? I thought it's 3:45.
You may have misheard me.
We will do this for
about 20 minutes [LAUGHTER]
by the look of it and then have a quick wrap up.
But Faith is going to set up
the Slido so that you can capture any questions.
Delightful people are waiting to talk with you.
Such interesting conversations that
you're really mad at me right now,
and to make it worse, I don't
have the cute British accent.
[LAUGHTER] I apologize for that.
What Andy is doing and on the other hand Emily is doing,
is going around with the microphones.
This is the question we have to debrief a little.
You're going to do more of this tomorrow.
We hope you will take some of
this conversing with you into your work tomorrow.
But for right now what we'd like you to
just if you feel so led,
one person at each table to just
identify something that was
surprising about that process,
and something that was hard.
You can choose either or neither.
If the thing you were going
to say gets said by somebody else,
you can just pass.
Something that was surprising about trying to have
a transdisciplinary conversation about
what would be the most interesting questions.
I'm going to start with Table 1,
and I'm going to begin by asking
Table 1 to identify itself.
[LAUGHTER]
See, there you go.
It was difficult to figure out what we were trying to do.
That's good feedback for us.
Not from, but like focusing on compressing a week
of work into 20 minutes
was trying to get through knowing people,
and identifying and building relationships,
and the people connecting you had to do it before you can
actually start to share ideas in a trusting way.
Really important observation.
Well-done for doing it in 20 minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
This is surprising.
Surprising or hard?
Okay, surprising or hard.
Yeah, I think just defining,
we chose Tech for Humanity,
which took a little bit of time to choose
that topic and just
being able to understand what that is,
like define what Tech for Humanity
is took up most
of the time so maybe that was a little surprising.
Speaking as a material scientist,
I was thinking more like,
do we want to work on a problem of, well,
water quality or some material thing,
and we ended up in a completely
different place than that.
Which is just fine, but limited time.
But that was surprising to me anyway.
We're not necessarily going in order.
This side of the room can pop up
with enthusiasm at any moment
[LAUGHTER] or perhaps not. Thank you.
What was surprising to me was that we have
10 or 12 questions and they're all great and exciting.
That was really fun. Thank you.
I'm coming over here.
I'm designating you as the next table.
Okay, go ahead there.
We decided to be a little bit
ambitious and we changed it up,
we did tech for human well-being.
It was rather difficult
to figure out how we were theorizing or
understanding the definition of well-being and how that
might shift depending on geographical location,
gender, race, class, generation,
and lots of other components that we
would identify as this is part of our well-being.
I really enjoyed. It was easy to talk to everyone.
I think the conversation just kept flowing really,
really great, interesting questions.
Excellent. Good.
I couldn't possibly know. [LAUGHTER]
The solution we were trying to or the question we were
trying to look at was Tech for Humanity,
and one thing that was
surprising to me was trying to listen to
everyone's perspective and viewpoint
trying to figure out where do
I fit in and how can I use
my area of expertise to add to the conversation,
and trying to get over how overwhelming that was.
[LAUGHTER] I can see why these think
tank idea spaces take a while to get
the groundwork laid to
really start to figure out where you fit in.
Emily, do you have?
No. Let me come over here,
would you like to? [BACKGROUND] [LAUGHTER]
They're just making me spin round and round.
[LAUGHTER] [BACKGROUND]
Sure. It took us a while to actually pick a topic.
But the moment we started deciding,
"What's the first thing you think about?"
To me it was interesting
very similarly to the other groups,
like how different we thought about it.
But the moment when you brought up your idea,
we just all immediately just went down that direction,
and I thought we succeeded in
that way as far as
making that decision quickly as we have.
I don't know what in English,
but we have momentum
in that direction, and so that was good.
Cool.
An important rule following Michelle.
We decided not to be shy.
Surprisingly enough, we chose tech for humanity.
[LAUGHTER] Actually what was really interesting
is that the conversation
quickly turned passionate in a very positive way,
even though I did keep a tally of the word,
but I think we used about
half dozen of them somewhere in there.
But that didn't prevent us from
actually having a really friendly conversation.
We were mostly observing
the whole topic on a 30,000-foot level.
Is technology solution or is it a problem?
Can we decouple technology from
its purpose and therefore
relinquish it off its implicit blame?
Can we observe technology and its purpose and
its impact if it's observed in a very short span of time?
To put this into perspective,
we've known fire for as long as we've known humanity,
and to this day we still have problems taming it.
Is it a problem or is it a solution?
How long does it take for us to
actually realize that it's one or the other?
In the light of that,
thinking about technology that's only been in
existence for a couple of decades.
Are we well equipped enough to
make that conclusion one way or the other?
Anyways, it was a very conceptual conversation,
we've identified some interesting questions,
but I think they're not on the level that we are ready to
engage any major funding agency [LAUGHTER]
unless you have some money to throw
a donation, of course.
There are some funders here and maybe
they're just going to come over and talk to you.
Any other tables here to chime in?
See, Andy is going to make you
chime in whether you want to or not.
I'm being much more invitational.
Yeah. I'm suggesting that chiming could happen,
but you are free to ignore my suggestion.
[BACKGROUND]
We win the gold medal because we picked human migration.
All right.
Well, simple, easy topic to solve.
[LAUGHTER] Surprisingly easy.
We came up with a bunch of questions,
but I think the other questions
were subsets of the major questions,
which I think was hard to find something unique and
it didn't fit into the big general ones,
I think that was the difficult part.
We have a table that wants to speak up.
We did human migration here as well.
One of the things that struck me is that we have at
the table, literature scholars, historians,
physicists, agriculture economists, public policy.
When you take a subject like human migration,
everybody had something valuable
to contribute to how to understand it,
which always makes me
think about the value of the humanities.
That we often think about these issues
as the specialists have to deal with it.
But actually,
the humanities has something very important to add,
and that's simply one part
of understanding the whole picture.
Hi, my name is Philip Danquah.
What was really intriguing as
to the discussion on migration was
the aspect of fear in terms of addressing migration.
It was really still how
the intersection of fear cuts across into
various areas of addressing issues like racism,
addressing issues like resources,
addressing their fear that
the migrants are running away from,
and the fear of what they're
going to meet in getting here.
I felt that it brought
a lot of discussions from the various fields,
and of which I believe.
Thank you.
Great and interesting. Because if you
just had a bunch of policy people sitting around,
I've nothing against policy people,
or people in a single discipline,
they might never get to fear,
which I think is at the bottom of
so much of our response to migration.
But when you get a bunch of people
sitting around from different disciplines,
what we have in common is the human experience,
and we all went through exams, we all know fear.
[LAUGHTER] A couple of
other quick observations just
to throw these out as you work through these,
not just tomorrow, but beyond.
I had a thought about the question process.
In the Quaker tradition,
I don't know if any of you are
familiar with the Quaker tradition,
but the Quaker religious tradition has
a process called clearness committees.
The idea of a clearness committee is when
you are stuck on the horns of a dilemma,
and I don't know what to do,
the Quaker perception and
commitment is you actually do know what to do,
there's just a lot between you and not knowing.
If you could wipe away the things that are between,
I'm choreographing for you now,
if you could cut through that,
you could find out what you must do,
and what you need are people to ask good questions.
But the rules of the question askers,
the members of your clearness committee is,
they must ask true questions,
not advice disguised as question,
or criticism disguised as question.
When I'm driving with my wife,
one of us is bound to say to the other,
"Didn't you want to turn right there, honey?"
[LAUGHTER] Not really a question.
It's advice disguised, and sometimes it's criticism.
Ask questions to which
you cannot possibly know the answer.
Those are the kinds of questions that
will generate the new knowledge,
the new ways of looking at things.
It's tough for us because we are trained in
everything we do as academics to be the experts,
and so setting aside your expertise and trying not
to ask the advising question is really hard.
But it's one of the strategies that we used at IU
when the clearness committee note, the Ideas Labs.
So that's one observation.
Another thing is folks said somebody got to
start down a path and we
went there and that is wonderful.
Somebody always needs to have
responsibility for getting you off that path.
In other words, the first path
can often be the best path,
but it should never be the only.
At different points, you want somebody,
and this doesn't have to be an assigned position,
but somebody who may not
be comfortable with any other leadership role may say,
I'm going to say, "Well, is there
another way we want to look at this?"
That will be my clearness question.
It's advice hidden as a question, but let's go with it.
The third thing is in our Ideas Lab at IU,
and I imagine Andy would confirm this,
very few of the most important conversations
happened in the assigned conversation times.
It's those conversations that
begin when you're in line at the buffet,
or that you follow-up a week later in your office.
Sustainable transdisciplinary research and
sustainable novelty will not
come as a result of a single five-day workshop,
or even a single conversation.
They will come when you follow-up and you say,
"You know it's really been
niggling in the back of my mind,
and I'm still thinking about,
can we talk about that for a minute?"
So exchange emails,
exchange a novel thing called phone numbers.
Pick up the phone, invite somebody that you had
an interesting conversation with to coffee
and continue the questioning there,
and that will help you move forward towards
novel ideas. Anything I missed?
No, but I feel the overwhelming urge
to make odd gestures there. [LAUGHTER]
Okay. I'm calling our dancers forward.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.