New Year Greetings

Substack Projects & Stories for 2024 with Robyn Metcalfe

Jan 30, 2024

2024 Projects and Plans

I have just returned from two weeks in the Caribbean and have emptied the last grains of sand out of my pockets and shoes. Letting the beach go makes room for what lies ahead and I’m excited about filling my upcoming newsletters with reports from the field about experiments and explorations.

Building upon last year’s exploration into storytelling about science, beginning with Huxley and Faraday and ending with The Sphere in Las Vegas, I am now curious about how to take what I’ve learned to my university to test out how to best encourage and support students and faculty as we want to build better tools for engaging with our community.

And who is that community and why do they need scientists to become storytellers, not just communicators? Think of storytelling as the next superpower for a professor who wants to share their research about partial differential equations (any other equally befuddling concepts that are terrifyingly intimidating to non-scientists). Funders of science research are increasingly interested in projects that have a wider audience and broader impact.

How might students learn how to share their skills and passions as stories during their job searches? It seems that creating experiences for both faculty and students in academia that enable them to be master storytellers could be a way to make science and being scientists more relatable. And if more relatable, then conversations about science might become less polarizing and more collaborative. That’s what excites me this year.

I will share my enthusiasm with you through three projects that I’m working on at The University of Texas at Austin. The first project is in collaboration with a school at UT that is rediscovering its origin story and discovering how to create a story about its purpose outside the university that is both relatable and that will be relevant in our new world of AI and LLM. The second project is to explore how UT might create a program that could develop storytelling skills for scientists and their students. And the third project is a class that supports students who want to discover challenges in the real world and learn how to design solutions through collaboration and storytelling that could attract both customers and funders.

Along with these three projects, I am curious about formats for stories. Not all stories seem to be best told through the format of a book or written narrative. Some lend themselves to visual narratives, whether film or theater. Still, other stories come to life when sung or played as a game. How can we match the format to the story or the story to the format? And, which comes first? The story or the format?

In addition, I have a side project, still related to storytelling, that builds on the format of a museum as a platform for stories. How could a personal museum, one you build yourself, curate yourself, and share with a few visitors. This may feel like The History of the World in 1,000 Objects and similar approaches to using material culture as a prompt for long narrative stories. My project will have objects, but not 1,000 of them, since I’m retrofitting my very small hen house in my backyard to be my museum space. At most, three visitors will be able to enter the museum at one time.

I am already having fun with the questions the project provokes about what to put in a personal museum in the first place. And, might I encourage you to contribute objects to my museum?

As you can see, while my pockets contain no more beach sand, they have rapidly filled up with projects for this new year.

Please join me this year to follow these projects and to find new ways of storytelling.

Here’s a video of the early days of remodeling my chicken coop so that it can be my personal museum:

And, what should I do with the propane tank next to the museum? Transform it into a submarine?

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