Blogs

In a busy life, there's those moments when you enjoy catching up with someone professionally. One such moment came when I spent some time with Eric Olson. Eric and I met as he researched who was providing improvisation-based science communication training. We found we have a common passion for building community and advancing science. 

Improvisation, including improvscience, has a rich history at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, better known as SC. Over the course of several years, the conference has featured improvisation in multiple ways. This trend will continue at this year's meeting in November.

I read Stephen Nachmanovitch's book Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art and enjoyed thinking about its relation to my experiences, work life, and play life!

Creating diverse, inclusive environments is a demanding practice. It asks people to be uncomfortable as we create new and unfamiliar ways of relating and working together. Through improvscience workshops, we develop the capacity of individuals and organizations to create inclusive, flexible and collaborative ways of working that build on the differences within and across groups. These day-to-day communication skills are crucial to the process of creating inclusive environments.

At improvscience, we help scientists learn to be playful. It is part of learning to be creative and collaborative. So given I often think about what "play" means, I was excited to discover the work of Penny Wilson. She has advocated for play in children's lives.

Dr. Raquell Holmes and Eric Olson, a research journalist, recently spoke about science communication.