Immersion to Action

What it is. A 2023 cross-disciplinary program at Swissnex San Francisco studying how immersive and experiential science programming shapes audience behavior after the program ends. Funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung (Scientainment, CHF 220K). I was Program Manager and Lead.

The problem behind it. Most evaluation of public-engagement science programming asks whether the audience enjoyed it. That question is well-instrumented and not very useful. The harder question is whether anything in their actual life changes after they go home. Bootcamp-style intensive programs are a natural test environment for that question because the cohort is small enough to follow up on and the dose is concentrated enough to expect a real effect.

What I did. I led the design and operations of the bootcamp from concept through cohort selection, programming, and the evaluation back-end. The program ran on a CHF 220K Gebert Rüf Scientainment grant out of Swissnex SF and used the existing science-communication community in the Bay Area as recruitment and review pool. The work extended the evaluation infrastructure built earlier on the Artist-Scientist Festival Residency.