Undercooled: A Materials Education Podcast

[MUSIC]

Hello everyone and welcome

to yet another episode of

Undercooled, a

materials education podcast.

I am your host for today,

Tim Chambers at the

University of Michigan.

But more important than me is an extra

special guest today.

We'll have someone who is not in our sort

of usual group of people

who are into these things.

I have brought with me Dave Choberka from

the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Dave, good to have you here.

Thank you. Good to be here.

I appreciate the invitation.

Yeah, I'm hoping that today we can get a

little bit into more of

the materiality of art

and sort of the intersection between art

and material science.

Also, what MSC as a field can learn from

how the art world and

how the museum world have

developed these ways of communicating

with and engaging with the public

that we can hopefully benefit from in our

professional practice as engineers.

Great. Sounds good.

So to get things started, if you could

just tell us a little bit about yourself.

How did you get into the museum field?

What are you doing at UMA currently?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think I'll start with what I do

currently and then sort of tell the

backstory of how I got

there because there's a little bit of a,

there's some sort of

stories coming to the fruition in

the position that I'm in right now. So I

am the curator for

University Learning and Programs at

UMA, the University of Michigan Museum of

Art, which is a job that

I've been doing really with

same job, but with various titles since

2012. And the main part of

that job is leading our program

of what we call curricular engagement,

which is working with

classes from all disciplines

across the university and working with

the instructors of those

classes to find ways to

use art at the museum to, like the main

thing I really try to

emphasize is advanced learning

goals within the discipline that the

students are coming from. I

also do, I mean, in this job,

I also do like a lot of our

collaborations with faculty around

exhibitions, collaboration with

researchers on projects that involve art,

which maybe I'll talk a

bit more about later on.

So all kinds of sort of intersections

between the art museum and

the university in general.

The way I got into museum work was

actually, there was kind of,

there's kind of a happy story

of serendipity that happened when I was a

grad student. I actually

came to the University of

Michigan to do my PhD in German studies.

And that sounds probably

like some odd leap from

German studies to museum work, but it's

actually not. The very first time I

worked, and so I was,

I was working, a cultural historian,

basically in a German studies program.

And I was hired by a

curator at the University of Michigan

Museum of Art to be a

researcher for a show on German

expressionism, because they wanted

somebody that could read German. That was

the first, I'd never

even thought about working in museums

before. But I really

liked that experience because,

I was like working in my area of

expertise, but writing and presenting an

exhibition for a general

audience. So I really appreciated sort of

using things I'd learned,

but not just communicating

them to other experts. I liked that. That

was a great experience. But

then also, I really enjoyed

the experience of working with the

material of a collection, like having

these objects and create,

and arranging them in a space in order to

create experiences that go

beyond the individual objects.

So that was a really cool experience. And

then right after I had that experience,

the university started their museum

studies graduate

certificate program. So there was just

kind of a happy, like I was like, that

was a cool experience. And then I like

learned that there was

this new museum studies program. So I

applied to that and got into

the first cohort. And then,

and that was what really got me into

thinking about museums as

a possible future career.

And that experience in grad school with

the museum studies

certificate program was really pivotal

in the sort of museum work I do, because

that that program is very

intentionally interdisciplinary,

they they bring in 12 grad students a

year. And they try to have

them be from all different

disciplines. So I was in the first

cohort. And my colleagues were like,

there was a there was an

aerospace engineer in there, there was a

zoologist, there was a computer science

person who was really

interested in sort of creating user apps

for museums. There were

only a couple of humanities

people. So it really being in that

program really helped me to think about

the interdisciplinarity

of museum work and the way that we can

make all museum work

relate to multiple disciplines.

And, and then so I got that certificate.

And then very soon after

I finished grad school,

UMA actually got a grant from the Mellon

Foundation to create

the position that I have

now, specifically with the goal of

increasing interaction between the Art

Museum and all sorts

of learning on campus. And so I got that

job and have been building

this program since then. And

we did some benchmarking studies a few

years ago for our current

strategic plan. And we found that

were the most successful university

learning program at an art at a

university art museum in

terms of the breadth of disciplines that

we work with, such as the collaboration

we did with material

science. Hmm. Well, maybe we'll hear more

about that shortly. The

thing that I love about hearing

your story though, is it's such a great

reminder that one single

unexpected experience that you

have, you know, in a course or in an

internship or something can completely

change your outlook on

your whole career. And you discover this

new thing that you never

quite knew existed before. And

suddenly you're experiencing it and like,

wow, I would like to do more

of this, the sorts of things

we want our students to, you know, have

when they're working with us. Yeah, you

know, it's actually,

it's an interesting point, because one of

the things I've done off

and on over the last few

years is since I have a PhD, but I don't

work in like a, you know, like a

traditional academic

position, I've been invited to do talks

with grad students about what you know,

what are often called

alternate career paths for PhD students.

And there's so many, so

many of the other people that

they invite to talk to talk there, like

they have this very deliberate story,

this very like, oh, I

wanted to do this. So I got this

credential in order to do this thing. And

my story is more like

exactly what you said, like being open to

experiences and being

open to like finding new

directions that just happen to kind of

come your way and really

embracing those. Yeah, it always

blows my mind when some of my students

actually know what they

want to do with their lives and

are intentionally working toward it,

because I certainly didn't when I was

that age. But that's

a story for another time. You mentioned

the interaction with the

materials department and

sort of how you got connected in there.

So yeah, could you give us

that part of the backstory of

Yeah, yeah, that's a so, um, you know,

back back or sort of early on

in the job, one of the things

I did a lot of was just outreach to

different academic programs

to be like, we're here, we're

gonna if you if you want to bring a class

to the museum, contact me,

we'll work together to put

together a very cool experience. And so

and I'm always like, I've

always been trying to work with

disciplines outside what people expect to

find in an art museum and

kind of going as far afield. So

I was I was like, I did some outreach

with engineering, I

can't remember exactly what

contact I had with material science

people. But then sometime back like a

year or two before the

pandemic. You're very active and cool

graduate student like outreach

engagement, like club.

Yep, actually contacted me because they

had kind of heard about the

outreach I was doing and the

work I was doing. And they contacted me

just to see if there's

anything that they could do with

the museum, that would be like, about

engaging the public with their

interesting knowledge about the

materiality of artworks. So we had some

very cool discussions, and it was going

to maybe go somewhere

and then things got derailed by the

pandemic. And then so because of that

connection, I actually

so when we were sort of getting back to

things at the museum, one

of the really exciting things

I've been able to work on since we've

been back at the museum is

this ongoing exhibition that we

call curriculum collection, which is a

show that I curate with faculty,

specifically for those

faculties classes to use as like sort of

learning material throughout the

semester. And I'm always

looking for, as I said, sort of wide

ranging disciplines to have

represented in that exhibition,

because it's a really cool experience for

the general visitor when

they come to an art museum,

and then they see, you know, this stuff's

on display for material science students,

it sort of changes how they think about

things. So I went back

to my contacts with the

grad students and said, you know, I'd

really like to put together something in

curriculum collection

with material science, and they directed

me to you. And then we

started talking and we ended up

collaborating on a curriculum collection

installation, which

actually had two really

cool components. One was we got some

really interesting art made with

different materials,

wood and metals and, you know, just like

my main criteria was like, I

think these students will see

things in this that are interesting that

I don't have access to, because I'm not

in material science,

but serving up some interesting materials

for them. But then we also

worked with that grad student

club to create what we call the materials

tour of the museum. So

they picked out, I think, six

objects that are on display in various

parts of the museum, and

wrote some really cool, like,

specialized but accessible texts about

the materials that went

into the creation of those

things. And I don't know if you knew

this, when that was on when

that was kind of active on the

website, that was the most popular thing

on our website for a few

months. Oh, that's fantastic.

That's very valid. Yeah. Yeah. So, so

that was, you know, that was sort of the

long story of how we

started working together. And it

culminated in this collaborative

exhibition. And then and then Tim,

who I'm talking with here right now, Tim

and I actually did a public

program that we do, we do a

public program in association with

curriculum collection

called subject matters, where we

basically try to like provide the kind of

university learning

experience that we do for the students

to the general public. And Tim and I had

that was one of the best

subject matters as well. Because

that was we had some really interesting

wide ranging discussions about culture

and materiality. And

I finally remember switching roles at one

point where you kind of

talked about the culture. And I

did my best to talk about the

materiality. That was a lot of fun. Yeah,

that was a really great

time. We should do that again. I'll say

that. Yeah, public. So

it's on the record. But you've

already brought me into I think the next

topic, which is that as

you're doing all this public

engagement, and, you know, you've been

interacting more with some of these

technical disciplines,

how has your experience and learning a

little bit about, you know, about

engineering and about

material science, has this influenced how

you think about the art

that you're working with and

how you communicate that art to the

public? Yeah, I mean, profoundly, and

really in kind of like,

two connected but disparate ways. So one

one being like the

technical side of things, and one

being how the working with material

science has also changed my

experience of like the aesthetic,

right? I'll talk a little bit about both

of those. So on the on the

technical side, like, I mean,

people, me and just people in general are

always interested to learn

about how objects are made,

and how the materials are manipulated in

order to produce the

effects that we're seeing.

And working with material science

actually gives me a little bit more

informed, like discussion,

sort of informed, informed material for

discussion about the creation

of metals, like talk a little

bit about the crystal structures in there

based on, you know, the

things that we learned about

with you. I know a lot more about

ceramics and glaze from

working with your program. So I'm

actually I have some facility to kind of

respond to that curiosity

that pretty much everybody has

when we're working with those sorts of

materials to talk a bit about how the

materials that they're

made with and the way those materials are

used produces the macro

effects that we find in the

pieces. I remember you saying at that

subject matters that micro structures

produce macro effects.

And I think about that often as well. Oh,

and that relates to the

other thing that's that's

really kind of in this is kind of a more

profound way in which it's influenced me.

And this is getting kind of into the

speculative territory here.

But like, so I think so our

experience of visual art is actually more

synesthetic than we

think it is, then we sort of

acknowledge it's like when we look at

something, it activates our

other senses as well. Right.

Okay. Yeah. And then it also, whenever we

look at something, it produces an

embodied experience as

well. Right, which could be, I mean, it

might be like an embodied

experience of like the form of

the art. And you kind of imagine like how

your body would move to produce that

form. Or it could be

something about like the texture of it.

And you kind of imagine how

it would feel and like maybe

how it would crumble if you touched it

and that sort of thing. So

thinking like, being more

attentive to the material qualities of

the that the objects are

produced with actually gives me

access to some interesting kind of like

synesthetic and embodied

experiences of them. I especially

experience this with like similarly with

like ceramics, like, you

know, I used to be attentive

to the ways that, you know, there's

different porosity in

ceramics that that I mean, I sort of

was like, it has to do with how the

molecules are clouded, try to get

together or something like I

had some idea that it must have something

to do with some of the

micromateriality in there. But

I feel like I have a little bit more of a

handle on that from working

with you. And so I actually

have a more powerful kind of embodied

experience and almost like a feeling

experience of objects

that is informed by that by that

experience with you.

That's, that's such an interesting

observation about the

different sensory channels that we're

engaging, even if we're just looking at

something with our eyes,

but really, it does become the

sort of whole body experience when you're

engaging your imagination

and consider how did a person

make this right? What must that have

process have been like? And that's the

sort of thinking that I

want my students to do, right, to

approach this as an engineer and say,

what was the manufacturing

like? What, what's the physicality of how

this material behaves as

someone's trying to shape it

into a product? And now you've got me

thinking on the side of how

could I use something a little

bit more artistic to get students to

engage with that more

complete sensory experience. So I'm

going to chew on that. But I do also want

to ask about another topic that is very

very topical in MSC and very much a

present day concern,

which is that we have this,

a much broader awareness, I think now in

our field, that there is a lot of

inequity and inequality in

society that is caused by engineering.

And in many of the problems

that we're dealing with as

engineers, that the the cultural context

in which we're doing our

engineering work is so critical

to doing it well and to doing it

ethically and to understanding how we're

going to affect people

in our engineering practice. But as

someone in the art world, I feel like my

naive belief from the

outside is that in the art world, it's

like you're always thinking about the

human element of these

problems. So what my question is then, as

engineers, what can we learn

from the art community and from

the museum community that's engaging the

public? What can we learn

about how to better get our

students to think about the cultural

context of their work? Gosh,

you know, I'm going to talk

about sort of how we engage in that kind

of work in the art museum.

And then let's see if we can

bridge that to how we can use that to

form the work of engineers.

I have maybe some speculative

ideas about that. But yeah, let me let me

so I was actually thinking about this

question ahead of time.

And I actually came up with like several

different metaphors for like

the value of art in these in

these sorts of discussions. So one is

like art as a mirror. So one of the

things that are, I mean,

it's not true of all art, but a lot of

art does address sort of

representation of people, which

we can connect to larger discussions

about identity. So

there's like the sort of in this

in art being visual means that we're, you

know, we're sort of

thrown on dealing with visual

identities, right, which is where a lot

of stereotypes reside

and a lot of bias reside,

right. So just the subject of art in

itself, which is about people and about

identity means that it's

kind of a mirror that we can hold up to

ourselves. And we can talk about

ourselves in relation to the

art and talk about our relations with

others in relation to the art. So art is

a mirror of identity

is one aspect. But then at the same time,

I would say art is a kind of

screen that it doesn't mirror

us, it actually allows us to talk to one

another without directly

addressing one another, we can

address the art. So or like a filter or

something like that. Oh,

that's one of the things I find

really valuable is like, when we're in

the museum, and we're

looking at a work of art that is

addressing like racism or some sort of

like, or a topic of social

justice. The main thing we try

to do is talk about kind of what the

artist is communicating,

and then kind of what our

response is to that. But so we're, we're

really talking about an

artist complex communication

about this topic. So rather than talking

about our own opinions, it

allows us to talk about issues

of identity and social justice, without

it being sort of

personalized. And it allows us to like

engage with like the artist is probably

saying something kind of

complex and interesting that's

not reductive. So it allows us to get at

these things without

it. I mean, if people feel

uncomfortable about addressing bias and

stuff like that, it's it's

a way of doing it without

them feeling called out quite as much.

Right? Yeah. Screen or a

filter. There's something there

that I want to connect to what some of us

do in our classes in

engineering, which is that there

will be this technical problem, usually

without a unique correct answer that we

want our students to

work on. But as we get the students to

frame the problem and to

describe and define what is the

problem you're trying to solve, this

often teases out many assumptions and

many, you know, sort of

unconscious biases that this yes have.

And just in that aspect of getting them

to describe what the

problem is, you're right, I think it

becomes a little bit less

personalized of here's how I feel

about my identity in the world. And it

makes it a little bit more,

as you said, just a little less

personal, where they can start to unpack

some of these ideas more

because there's this other

there's this third party that they're

getting to to use their

ideas. That's really interesting.

Yeah. And one of the things you said

there was actually the next

point that I was going to make.

And it was actually one of the places

where I could see

definitely see some intersection with

sort of the training of engineers, which

is like art is really good at ambiguity.

It's very good at like presenting things

to us that we can read

like compellingly read in

multiple and even opposing ways at the

same time. And so art has an

ambiguity in it that we can

like, we sometimes we have to like, get

past our initial simplistic

responses to it to get to the

ambiguity. But then if we have multiple

people looking at the

same work of art and having

different thoughts about it, that is also

another form of ambiguity of

meaning that has to do with

kind of social interaction around the

art. So all of these kind of

discussions, like help us to

sort of realize that there's multiple

ways to look at something.

And when you said you give them

technical problems without a unique

correct answer, I mean,

that's that's kind of the core

of things right there is like, there's

not a unique correct

answer to the to the meaning of

a work of art or to like questions about

sort of identity. It's like it's

something we have to kind

of talk about and work through. You know,

and just one other thing

on this sort of question of

bias, like one of the one of the great

values of art is actually

in dealing with biases that

so many biases reside in our visual

capacities, and they run on

autopilot, you know, like our

visual faculties are not designed to like

look at things, and we

don't actually accurately see

the world, we see a very filtered version

of the world. Like

before we even think about it,

our brain has decided, you know, this,

these are the things that are out there,

these are the things

that are worth paying attention to, and

then your eyes look at them and get

information out of them.

So like biases reside so automatically in

in visuality. And so

visual culture is a really

good way to kind of help people get go

through exercises to notice

how they jump to a conclusion

at first. And then when they looked more

and thought about it,

there was more going on.

Yeah, I think I think you just answered

my next question, which is

why should every engineer take

an art class, but I feel like we just

knocked it out of the park

on that one. Yeah, I think so.

Well, I, you know, there's two answers to

that. I mean, we could

talk about sort of the,

is the sort of socio cultural engagement

that we can get through

art. But then we could also

talk about, you know, engineers working

with like art materials. Yeah, there's,

you know, we've had,

we've been talking about bias, and we've

been talking about how our

our perception of the world

is filtered through our brain

unconsciously. And because there are so

many layers to this system of

how we perceive and engage with the world

around us, there's also

can be a lot of difficulty in

building just connections with people,

right to open dialogues

about difficult questions,

and to get to a place where you can have

these hard conversations

about problems that don't have

right answers. And I know that's a space

that you work in a lot,

because you have so many student

groups from different disciplines. And as

you mentioned earlier,

right, you have public groups

as well coming in. So what are your some

of your, what are some of

your techniques for, for starting

to build those connections and for

creating a space where people can talk

about these questions

in a productive way? That's a great

question. So I mean, like, first off,

like, I see one of the

most important roles that we play in

engaging with students in the public

around these sorts of

topics is like acting as facilitators and

trying to get people to,

like, talk and listen to one

another and respond to what one another

are saying. And the way we

do that is, like, you know,

there's a lot of talk of engaged learning

in sort of university

settings, we feel like we really

walk the walk the walk the talk of

engaged learning at the

museum and the way and there's

also these different definitions of

engaged learning, the one

that I think is like sort of

most salient, which actually I heard the

like my director say one time

was that engaged learning is

asking people to do something instead of

telling them something.

Right. And so one of the ways that

we so you would think like, how do you do

that? How do you ask people to do

something with a work

of art? We're standing in front of a

painting. What do you ask them to do?

Well, we ask them to

describe it. We ask them what they see,

and then we ask them what it

gets them to think about. And

we try to forefront all those sort of

active discussions, active

responses. We try to put that

upfront in the discussion before we bring

in any information about

the artist or the title or

anything like that. So we're really

trying to I mean, seriously,

we're trying to hear what people

think. Yeah, yeah. And that makes them

feel invited into the

discussion. Right. And then as

facilitators, a really important thing

that we do. And this

actually, you know, as I said,

my background was in German studies. So

when I was a grad

student, I did a lot of language

instruction, like German 101 and 102. And

there's some core things

that I learned in that pedagogy

that we apply all the time in museum

work. So one of the most important things

in language learning

is that people feel inhibited, right? And

they feel inhibited

because they're worried they're

going to make a mistake. Right. So the

language program that I was in was all

about not correcting

people. It was all about just like making

people feel confident that

even if they make mistakes,

they're going to be understood. So we

taught for comprehension rather than

accuracy. Right. And so

that creates an environment in which the

students aren't worried

about making an error. They're

trying to communicate for understanding

just like in cultural and social

discussions, we're trying

to communicate with one another for

understanding without worrying about

making mistakes. And then

being affirmative about what people say.

And then this is like a

key thing, what's called in

language instruction, what's called

recasting, which is where

you repeat what somebody said

correctly. Right. So one of the things I

often do in discussions

with people is people say

insightful things. Sometimes they don't

quite know how to

articulate it. I try to kind of take

what they say and repeat it in a way that

puts it in dialogue with the

things other people are saying,

or with some of the kind of like, you

know, sort of like

background knowledge that I have about

the piece or something like that. And so

this kind of invitation to

speak an affirmation of what

people are saying and then an active

effort to I mean, one of the

things I do in my work all the

time is I use ideas from other

disciplines and kind of metaphoric ways

that maybe are interesting,

but maybe kind of abuse them a little

bit. But in this case, I

would say the, you know,

within a discussion, the participants are

providing a kind of material,

right. And one of my goals is

the facilitator is to take that material

and work with it to make

something that the whole, to help

the group make something together. Yeah,

that's, that's fantastic.

And I think there's a good

overlap there with what we're doing in

engineering classes as well.

This idea of it's okay to be

partially correct, right? You need to

convey the ideas that you're having,

because so many of our

courses, especially our upper level

courses have so much of a teamwork

component, that it's not

expected for any one person to know

everything or to get it totally right.

But it's like, well,

if person A has a good idea, person B has

a different good idea,

person C has a different

good idea, you start to really put

together a very effective

approach to the problem that the

students are trying to solve. So then the

role for the teacher in that

context is to be I guess the

recaster, right, to take all these

aspects of correctness and to

be able to synthesize it and

say, it sounds like what you're proposing

is, and then to put it out in

a way that the students will

resonate with and say, yeah, that's

exactly what I wanted to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know,

I would add to that also, like as the

instructor in such a

setting, having as an explicit goal,

like helping the students to have an

experience of sort of social learning,

fun social learning,

it's actually fun to work on a team.

Right, collaborative, it's not

competitive. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. It's not competitive. And when

we listen to one another

and talk with one another and

facilitate making something together,

it's going to be like, it's

going to be a more enjoyable

experience. And we're probably going to

make something that's

cooler. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and that, you know, just one of

the things that I talk

about, and you know, when,

you know, in the, you know, museum world,

we're always kind of

talking about our work to,

you know, other museums and to other

people at the university.

And one of the things I always

emphasize is kind of like the primary

goal of everything we do

at the museum is to give

students or the public, and when we're

working with the public,

an experience of fun social

learning. And like if they learn stuff

too, that's great. But if they leave

being like, wow, that was

really engaging to, I was listening to

other people and I was

being heard and we talked about

important things together. And we changed

one another or we

changed together in some way.

That's all like super important, core

stuff of our experience.

What I wanted to ask you is in

your experience working, especially with

public groups, do you see,

do you see the museum visitors

getting excited about the science behind

the art? And like, what does

it mean? And how does it work?

And is that a vehicle that we can use to

to drive more, you know,

interest in the sciences with the

public? Yeah, I think there's a lot of

there's a lot of room there to meet

public interest. And in

most of the most of that, most of the

questions that the public

have in this area are around

the topics of your making, like how was

this made? What were the materials that

were used? How do you

manipulate them? And like, I feel like

it's like the more expert that

explanation can be, the more

it gives people access to some really

deep understandings of the,

you know, the materiality,

the objecthood of what we're looking at,

which going back to what

I was saying earlier about

synesthetic experiences, I really feel

like those sorts of that sort of

understanding and knowledge

can really kind of undergird a more, this

is a more powerful and multifaceted

experience of works of art.

Yeah, it's, it's so good to be reminded

of how layered these

topics are, right? That there's,

there's the cultural context, there's the

aesthetics of the art itself,

there's the physicality and the

materiality of what it's made out of that

all these things

intersect, right? It's not just,

they're not even separable. You can't

have one without the others.

No. Yeah, you know, a really good example

of that is going back to the

the QR code tour that we that

the grad students put together for

material science for that curriculum

collection installation

we did a ways back. One of the, one of

the objects that they wrote about was a

piece of celadon wear

and it was, it was in the, like the

technical side of it was like, why is it

green? Like what makes

it green? But then, like, why did they

want it to be green? That had to do with

the popularity of jade

and the rarity of jade. And so it was an

effort to make a ceramic

that had similar color qualities

to jade. So it's like a really cool

example of like the

intersection between cultural history

and understanding and the science and

bringing the two together in a way where

each sort of like had

something interesting. Yeah, and we're

trying to parallel those same

multifaceted conversations

in our engineering classes where it's,

okay, what is the

technical performance of this

system? Sure, great. What's the value of

it economically?

Sure, but also culturally,

is this something that people want? Is

this something that will

convey some sort of status

to the owner? Like these are all aspects

of, of this problem of

product design aesthetics,

like does it look good? If it's ugly,

people aren't going to

want it. And it's so easy for

students to get in this narrow vein of

what is the technical performance that

any, any venue or any

vehicle that we have to get them out of

that limited mindset and

say, what about the rest of

the world? I feel like it's very

important. Yeah, yep. It

actually reminds me of like,

one of the definitions of art that I

really dislike is this

definition. Like art is anything

that doesn't have to do with survival,

right? Because it's like,

we have survival needs and

we make tools to help us survive. And

then art's like this extra

thing. And I'm like, when we think

about design, that's exactly where those

two come together. Like

the way a tool is designed

is like integral to how usable it is,

right? And it's integral to

how it like supports life.

So like, so like, design is a like a

very, like, it's a place

where sort of like the technical

side and the cultural side come

intimately together. And

they're vital, right? They're not,

it's not like, oh, we make a tool and

then we give it design just

so it looks nice or something

that design needs to be integrated into

the functionality of

the thing. Yeah, it's, it

sometimes gets to be this problem that's

left aside until the end. And

then people will try to tack on

the other considerations after they've

declared the problem

solved. And well, that's not going

to give you an effective solution. It's

going to be obviously disjoint. And

absolutely. And it goes, I mean, that

goes back to like early 20th century

Bauhaus principles of

design, which is like the meat, like

things should be designed

for the meeting of form and

function. And it's in design isn't about

putting a facade on

something in order to make it look

better. Design is part of it. It

certainly is. I do have to keep an eye on

the clock. But before we

wrap it up for the day, for people in the

audience who might be interested in this

sort of collaboration

that you and I have had, right, where

worlds have collided, and we

created this new thing that

didn't exist before. How does that

happen? For you and me, it was just as

you said, it was serendipity,

someone happened to reach out to someone

else. But if someone wants to start a

community engagement

program, or if someone wants to work with

their local art

communities or local museum, to have

that collaboration between the technical

discipline, right? And that legendary

other side, the humanities,

how do we get that started? What's the

right way for someone like me

to approach someone like you

and say, hey, we should hang out

together? Yeah. Man, I mean, in a way,

that's like part of my job.

So I mean, if you're at the university,

and you want to do something

interesting with a class or

academic program or anything at all, I

mean, I'm the person

you'd get in touch with, but

sort of just speaking in general. So I

guess I got sort of two ways

to think about this. So one,

as far as like working with communities

and just doing something that's

interesting to communities,

like doing something that's like making

like a hands on sort of

thing is going to be way more

appealing. And if you can, like, if

you're interested in

bringing, like, you know, like

knowledge about the properties of paper

to a broader audience,

doing it through like an

origami workshop or something would be

like the way to do that, because people

are always interested

in hands on activities. And then if you

can tack on the sorts of

like, expertise on top of that,

then it's like, you know, it's an

enticing package. And then

also, it's like you're going

back to that engaged learning thing as

you have people make

something and then ask what their

experience of the materiality was and

then bring in what you know about the

things, you know, that

sort of thing. So like really doing

something participatory and

inviting their involvement,

as far as like working with an

institution and, you know, trying to

partner with them to do things,

I would say, like, in general, like

culture workers are like

very overworked. And it's like,

there's so many cool things we could be

working on. And it's hard to decide what

things to prioritize.

So having some kind of organization or

some kind of clear idea of

what you want to do can be really

helpful. And then like working with the

museum as kind of a

platform to present a program that

you put together can be really helpful.

Also, another, I guess,

another sort of key part of

working with like cultural institutions

is like, we tend to work really far in

the future. So like,

you know, talking early about something

you want to do in the future is also

extremely helpful. Like

we're working on things that are going to

happen in two, three years.

We're working on things that

are going to happen next week, six

months, a year, two years, three years.

So it's hard to keep a

handle on. Yeah, I guess the takeaway I'm

getting here is actually

plan ahead and actually have a

concept for what you want to do. And it's

amazing how if you do that,

you can get people to, to be

on board with it. Yeah, yeah. And hands

on things, hands on things are great.

That's something I'm

always like, I'm looking for new ways to

add, just like drawing

activities or just, you know,

with a lot of classes, just doing

something where the students are doing a

little little bit of

making, even if it's just asking them to

draw some lines in response

to prompts. That's a, it's a

really, it's participatory and fun. And

there's not right answers.

All right. Well, yeah, since

it's time to wrap up for today, I'll say

if you have a minute and you

want to talk about anything

that you're doing right now, anything you

want to brag about

anything you want to plug to the

audience, tell us what's going on at UMA.

Oh, man. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So

just in my, in my work area,

we just put up a new set of curriculum

collection displays. One of

which is in this, like a very

cool, cool combo. So in my exhibition

space on one side, we have a class on

interfaith understanding.

So it's a lot of art about different

religious faiths and also about sort of

interfaith identities

and experiences. And then sharing that

space is a new class in the

history of art called Arts and

Cultures of Star Wars, which is actually

a collaboration with

the Museum of Anthropology

as well. And that's a class that's

looking sort of like doing sort of a

cultural critical look at the

sort of representation of otherness and

difference in the context of

Star Wars and sort of paying

attention to the way that so much of that

representation is sort

of conditioned by settler

colonialism. So those are some, you know,

those are the current curriculum

collection installations

we have up. Another thing I'd like to

just like give a plug for,

which is just because I think

it's a really interesting project is I'm

working with a faculty in

the School of Nursing named

Clayton Schumann on a project that we're

calling Art-spective,

which is actually, so

Clayton works in, he works on bias in

medical care. And he was

specifically looking for a way

to, looking for a new way to do anti-bias

training, especially

with neonatal nurses.

And specifically, he has this project

where, you know, he's

trying to reduce bias of neonatal

nurses toward new mothers suffering from

opioid addiction and trying

to support the mothers and,

you know, in recovery and in being

mothers. And but so I did a like, I did

like a, what's a pretty

standard sort of empathy building

exercise in museum pedagogy,

like I did not invent it. It's

called a perspective flipping exercise

where you basically look at a photograph

and kind of describe

it for as a from a third person

perspective. And then somebody else

approaches it from the

perspective of one of the people in the

image. And then you kind

of compare how you read the

image differently, depending on if you're

taking an outside perspective

or a first person perspective.

The person who takes the first person

first person first person perspective,

sees much more agency in the image, they

like give a story and they give reasons

to like whatever the

person's doing. Whereas when you do the

third person perspective,

people tend to be kind of

like biased and judgmental. So that we

did that exercise with him.

And we did some studies with

some nursing students. And we actually,

you know, he did some

before and after surveys and

proved statistically that it increased

the empathy of the

people who participated in it.

And so now we're actually working on

trying to turn it into an

online education platform

that like, hopefully, like, you know,

medical organizations can

can buy this as an anti bias

training and people will go on and

they'll sort of do the exercise online,

the way that we facilitate

it in person. But going back to the thing

we were saying about bias

earlier, so the thing that's

cool about this exercise is different

than a lot of other bias

training, is it kind of puts people

through an experience where they notice

their own bias and become

aware of it. And it's not like

somebody else was saying like, you were

biased right there. It's

like they notice it themselves.

And then they there makes people less

defensive and hopefully just like, like,

you know, more aware

of it and trying to reduce it in

themselves. So I think that's one of the

effectiveness. One of the

reasons that that's effective is because

it once it's like what I was

saying about art is a screen

in a way, it's like it allows people to

think about bias and think

about their own biases without

being put on the spot. That sounds

fantastic. I'm very much now thinking

about how that might be

employed in a case study analysis and

engineering class, right?

Describe this case from the

perspective of someone who experienced it

rather than what we see

historically after the fact.

But that's an exercise for a future

episode. Yeah, I was gonna

go on. I'll stop. I've taken

enough of your time. I'm really glad that

you were able to make time to join us

today. Great to have

you here. And hopefully I'll talk to you

again soon for everyone out

in the audience. We'll see

you next time. Great. Thanks so much.