Put Yourself In Their Shoes

Excellent evening on Wednesday night. As I expected, KC worked her magic and steered the conversation in many interesting directions, with Alan Alda turning out to be – not unexpectedly – quite the character. I suspect that it was recorded (on video) and so I will update this post or do a later post with a pointer to it later. Alda was swamped by people buying his book and getting is signed and so forth at the reception. It was great to see such a good attendance at this USC Visions and Voices event all about science and the arts – very much in the spirit of what this is all supposed to be about*.

Among the many things of note that were said, one thing I liked a lot was the telling by both of them of the tale of what happened the day before over in Engineering. KC took the guest over to work with Engineering students for some of the day, focusing on communicating about their work (why on earth we over in the sciences are not more actively working in this way on projects like this is a mystery to me)… At the beginning of the session, the students gave some very good presentations of their work, using the usual visual aids, and so forth. Somewhere along the way they spent time with the students doing various exercises (used, I understand, a lot in the acting world, etc) designed to encourage a great deal more empathy – communication with the people in the exercise, and especially listening, becoming less self-aware while more responsive to the other. Then they gave their presentations again and they were transformed! Good presentations were turned into ones that penetrated and resonated more, as the presenters, while in the act itself were much more attuned to how the message was being received… they were putting themselves in the shoes of the listener, and as a result the message was even better received.

Not a bad lesson for all of us, science communicators or not.

-cvj

*For the record (for anyone who was there), it was not me who was constantly setting off my camera flash during the event. As usual, I take a few snaps as stealthily as possible, and try not to disrupt. There seemed to be a remarkable amount of bright picture snapping throughout. A bit too much, I thought.

[Update: Turned out that Jennifer Ouellette and Sean Carroll where there too. Their takes can be found here and here, respectively.]

[Update: There was also a post here by Andy Carvin.]