-: So really before I get into
what we're gonna be doing here today,
I want to take you back a few years
to when I was, thank you, (laughs)
giving a key note talk
at the Jason Foundation Educators' Conference,
and I was up on stage and telling people
about deep sea exploration and my career
and looking for shipwrecks and finding new species
and all sorts of amazing things,
and also the need to diversify the field
of ocean exploration
and how we do that with curriculums and internships
and all sorts of wonderful things.
And after I finished, one of the teachers came up to me
and said, "Well, you know,
"most African Americans can't swim."
I'm gonna click through a couple slides here,
and she asked me how many oceanographers can swim.
I said, "Well, pretty much everybody I know can swim."
And she said, "Well, maybe rather than
"or in addition to all of these internships
"and curriculums,
"maybe you should find out a little bit more
"about this and how can we ignite passion
"for the ocean at a much earlier age."
So I went home and did a little bit of research,
and according to the USA Swimming Foundation,
these are the stats on swimming in the United States.
40% to 64% of people have little to no swimming ability,
and so it really has got me thinking
about all of the people with whom I work,
and everybody swims and surfs and scuba dives
and kite surfs and does all sorts of crazy things,
and this is not scientific,
but I've no doubt that we all got into this field
because of those early passions that were kindled
because we loved being at the beach.
I know that's true for me,
and I know that's true for many of you in this room.
And so it got me thinking
about how can we be more intentional
about those what are now serendipitous decisions
that are made,
and broadening from play,
what are some of the other ways
that we can really ignite those passions
at an early age?
So when I found out that NOAA was looking for a host
for the 2018 forum,
I just was beside myself with excitement.
I was like, we need to do this,
and they wanted it to be on broadening participation
and engagement in exploration.
It was like, well, we need to do it here,
and so I really am stoked (laughs)
to have you all here today,
and really so that we can dig into this question
of how we can spark this passion,
spark people to be all hands on deck,
and how do we get everybody on earth on board
with knowing why the ocean's important?
So broadening out from play,
we had decided on six themes
that we'd be addressing over the next couple of days,
and the others include imagining a bright,
optimistic future for the ocean
through story telling, wonders of awe,
and wonder rather than doom and gloom,
which is often the case.
How do we immerse people physically in the ocean more,
but also bring experiences to people
who can't experience it first hand themselves?
How do we touch hearts and souls
through creative arts of all kinds?
I made those
(laughing)
with one of our speakers' patterns.
How do we create tools for people
to explore for themselves,
and through all of these things,
how do we connect people to the ocean
and to each other?
So we have an amazing line up of speakers for you
to talk about all of these different themes
over the next two days in the mornings.
In the afternoons, we have several different workshops
that again talk about these themes,
and we have the opportunity to interact
with some demos of current research in these fields,
and we intentionally made this event
as participatory as possible.
Probably everyone sitting in this room
could be on one of these panels,
could be one of the workshop leaders.
We're really excited for you all to be here
and really want to draw from your expertise
and experiences,
and please, please speak up
when we're doing all of these things.
So on a related note,
when we were planning the forum,
we really wanted a broad cross section of people to be here.
Previous forums have generally been invitation only
and result in a pretty small cohort of people
that end up going to the same events,
and so we knew that this wouldn't happen accidentally.
We had to be intentional about it,
and so we put a lot of thought into how we would select
participants and speakers and workshop leaders,
and so we made a few changes to this forum's process
in that regard.
So the first one was that
we made an open application process,
which many or most of you went through,
and as a result, we have 350 people registered
from more than 26 countries around the world,
which I'm very pleased about,
and we have a very broad cross section of expertise,
ranging from scientists and oceanographers,
all the way up to
comedian paleoanthropologist television presenters,
and everything in between. (laughing)
The next thing that we did was recognizing
that the cost to come to events like this,
which generally are pay your own way,
are often a barrier to entry,
a significant barrier of entry.
You need to be able to afford it
to be able to come,
so we committed funds to making travel assistance
available to those who otherwise
would not be able to participate,
and those are Ocean Discovery Fellows.
So we had somewhere around 100 applications,
and I'm very excited that we have 42 Ocean Discovery Fellows
with us here today,
21 of whom are from 11 states and Puerto Rico in the U.S.,
and 21 are from 17 countries around the world.
I need to get a photo of Ayana,
and so please join me in congratulating
all of these people for being here
(applauding)
and coming from all over the place.
I hope you have the opportunity to meet them,
wonderful group,
and I'm very, very pleased that you're all here with us.
The third change that we made
was that we invited people with small children
to bring caregivers with them
so that they could participate in all activities.
I don't know why I'm crying. (laughing)
I'm just gonna move on.
(applauding)
And the fourth was to make as many of the activities
as possible open to the public as well,
not just the people in this room,
so we're live streaming all of the speakers
that will be in this room.
Hello to our online audience.
Thank you for tuning in.
We have one workshop available this afternoon at 1:30,
Transmedia Storytelling,
which will be available online concurrently
with the group that's doing it here,
and we also have a number of events
at the New England Aquarium IMAX Theater
that are free and open to the public.
I don't expect you to read this,
but you all should have a handout
with the schedule,
and it's really gonna be a lot of fun.
Thanks to all of you who are volunteering
to help out with that.
The red light is flashing at me,
and we're already behind time,
so in conclusion, I think I've said it a million times,
but I am very, very excited about the next two days.
I hope that all of these changes that we've made
not only make a difference here today
but also some of the lessons learned
will be brought forward to future forums
so that we can bring a broader choir of voices together.
Of course, none of this would be possible
without all of our sponsors,
so thank you very much to all of you
who are helping to support
and make it possible for us to be here,
particularly the NOAA Office
of Ocean Exploration and Research, or OER,
which is co-convening this event with us.
We've been planning in detail
with many of their staff,
and I'd like to invite Dr. Alan Leonardi,
the Director of OER, up to the stage
to tell you more
about the National Ocean Exploration Forums.
He's a meteorologist and oceanographer
and advises NOAA in the Department of Commerce
on exploration research and technology.
-: Great, thank you, Katy--
-: Welcome, Alan.
-: So much.
Thank you.
(applauding)
Katy, big round of applause for Katy
for putting on this great event.
I can't thank Katy enough for agreeing
a little over a year and a half ago
to have this conversation about doing this together
and inviting this very diverse
and very exciting group of people
to come together to talk about this aspect
of ocean exploration engagement.
And I can't honestly imagine a better place
for this to take place than at the Media Lab.
Just wander these halls a little bit,
if they'll let you,
and take a look into some of the rooms and the windows,
and you'll see some really, really cool things going on,
so I'm looking forward to a very exciting couple of days,
but I thought I might just give you
a little bit of a context for why we do this.
Most people know that
NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research
supports exploration activities,
either through our own conduct of that at sea
for on average 180 to 200 days a year,
through a grants process,
and through strategic partnerships.
What most people don't realize
is that we have a legislative driver
that tells us that we should be convening meetings like this
with the community as a whole annually preferably,
but it's not a requirement.
We've been doing this now since 2013.
The first forum was called Ocean Exploration 2020,
and that forum really took upon itself
to look at what the national program on ocean exploration
might look like in the year 2020.
In that forum,
the participants came up with a number of things.
A key item was that they really saw
that the priorities for national ocean exploration
should be driven by the community,
not just the ocean practitioners,
but the community as a whole.
They also believed that ships and the assets
would be more plentiful,
been able to do this type of work,
that the data that would be collected
would be free and publicly available for anybody to use
who wanted to use it,
that citizens would be exploring themselves
and become more engaged,
and the public ideally would know a lot more
about the ocean as a whole.
Since that first forum in 2013,
we've been exploring these topics in depth annually
through the forum process.
This is the sixth such forum.
Last year's forum took place at the Qualcomm Institute
at the University of San Diego
and focused on data and visualization,
so bringing ocean explorers, ocean scientists,
ocean practitioners, together with data practitioners,
to figure out how we might unearth this volume of data
in new and novel ways
so that we can better understand the ocean
and we can better connect people to the ocean through data.
That was a great success.
This year we're gonna be building upon that success
and looking at how we engage the public
through things like storytelling,
novel media approaches,
and things like that.
This doesn't come together easily though.
None of this process comes together easily,
and it requires a lot of people behind the scenes.
Katy, of course, has put in countless hours
to pull this off.
Jenny Chow has supported her.
The whole local community has supported her.
Carlie Wiener from the Schmidt Ocean Institute,
Carlie, I don't know where you are,
but she's put in a ton of hours as well,
as a well as a couple of members of my staff,
David McKinney and Adrian Copeland,
so without their help,
none of this would happen
so I'm excited to be here.
I'm not in the mode of wanting to talk at you.
I want us to talk with each other while we're here.
The MIT Media Lab students are involved.
The fellows are involved.
If you haven't met them yet, meet them.
If you know them,
introduce them to people that they don't know.
This is really all about building
and growing this community,
so before I get off the stage,
I have the honor of introducing today's keynote speaker,
Neil Jacobs.
Dr. Jacobs is the Assistant Secretary
for Environmental Observations and Prediction
at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
He's effectively the number two in charge
behind Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet,
and while collectively at NOAA,
we like to refer to Tim being in charge
of the dry side of NOAA,
I think that what you'll find through his presentation
is that he's much more comfortable
on and often in the ocean
than perhaps outside of it,
and he'll be relaying to us how the dry
and the wet connect together in ways
that are meaningful and powerful
for the American public.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jacobs to the stage.
(applauding)
-: Thanks.
Thank you for that introduction, Alan,
and thank you, Katy, for putting this on.
Originally, Admiral Gallaudet,
the Assistant Secretary for Oceans and Atmospheres
and the acting NOAA administrator,
was invited to give this talk,
but unfortunately he had other commitments,
and sends his regrets and regards,
asking me to come talk to you,
and I said, well, I'm the dry side.
You're the wet side.
What am I gonna talk about?
He goes, "Talk about your connection to the ocean."
So that's what I'm gonna do today.
Ocean exploration is just cool.
(laughing)
I can't say it any other way.
I can't tell you how many times I've been at NOAA
watching the livestream of the Okeanos Explore.
Just every second there's some new life form,
and they're like, "Oh, I don't think one's been
"identified yet,"
and it's amazing to me to just sit there and watch this,
and the camera's so impressive.
I'm sure everyone here has probably watched
these videos for hours.
How it can actually see something so far away,
and I was like, oh, look at this,
a tiny, little fish over there,
and you don't realize how far away this device is
until it zooms in,
like a major telephoto lens in full HD.
It's unbelievable.
So a lot of times you will hear Admiral Gallaudet speak
about the blue economy,
and there's essentially four pillars
to the blue economy.
The first one is seafood competitiveness.
The next one is ocean exploration,
and then we have maritime and shipping, and recreation,
and I started thinking about my love of the ocean
and my involvement in the ocean
and realized I have stories in all four of these.
So the ocean covers roughly 70% of the planet,
and it's amazing to me that over 80% of it
is still unexplored.
That just boggles my mind
that a lot of times we're focused on trying to get
to other planets or back to the moon,
and we've got so much of the ocean
that we haven't explored.
So in my portfolio, the dry side,
it is space.
It's NESDIS, the program that manages the satellites,
OAR, which is the research division of NOAA,
the National Weather Service,
which is the weather and climate forecasting group,
and then the admiral and I kind of trade off
working together with the National Ocean Service,
and within that portfolio,
my second day on the job,
I got to fly down to Cape Canaveral
to see a rocket launch.
I couldn't believe how cool that was,
and still, watching the Okeanos Explorer videos
just blow my mind,
but what I wanted to do today
is take this to maybe a little bit more personal level
because what we're trying to do is relate to people
who have a connection with the sea, with the ocean.
Almost everybody does,
and if they haven't,
it would be awesome if they had that experience.
I've got a three year old and a five year old,
and I'm giving them swim lessons now
because I go to the beach,
and they see me out surfing,
and they want to go out there,
and I'm like, no, you gotta learn how to swim
before you're gonna go in the ocean,
and bringing them up in that environment
is just really important to me.
So I'm sure everyone here today is here
because you have a connection with the ocean,
so this all hands on deck,
encourage more people to explore their connections,
so here are a couple of my personal connections.
My academic background is actually in math and physics.
I started out in condensed matter physics.
I was working in a lab developing semiconductor material.
It was in the basement of this building.
I had no idea whether the sun was up or down
or what time it was,
and I was always an outdoors person,
and I thought of going to grad school
and just doing more of this in the basement lab work.
It was alright, but I really wanted to do something
that I enjoyed,
and I was always an armchair forecaster
'cause if you ever wanna know when the waves
are gonna be good,
you gotta be able to predict the weather.
So I would sit there and watch the weather channel
and try to figure out when the waves were gonna be good,
and then I thought, you know, I could actually go
to school for this.
Predicting the weather is just applied math,
so I started looking at grad schools,
and I ended up choosing a path on air, sea interactions.
So my Master's degree is in air sea interaction,
and my PhD research,
which I'll talk about in a little bit later,
was on extratropical cyclone genesis
and how western boundary currents influence it,
particularly with the Gulf Stream,
but rewinding back to when I was a little kid,
so I was five years old when I stood up
on a boogie board,
and I thought, when you weight 40 pounds,
you can probably get away with that.
(laughing)
I got my first surfboard when I was seven,
and I've been surfing ever since.
I'm proud to say my boards I ride
are still shorter than I am tall,
although at some point I may get a nine foot
just because it's fun for everyone else to ride.
So I grew up in the Treasure Coast of Florida,
aptly named because people would find
all sorts of cool treasures on the beach,
and I was back and forth between Vero Beach and Miami,
and then my parents wanted to retire in Charleston.
My dad was stationed at Homestead Air Force Base,
and of course when you're down there,
the water's relatively warm,
so when I moved to Charleston,
Folly Beach became my next adopted home break,
and that was the first time I'd ever have to surf
with booties and gloves.
And so then from there I went
to grad school in North Carolina,
and my adopted home break at this point
is still the Outer Banks,
which is fantastic in the summer,
pretty brutal in the winter.
Truth be told, I actually interviewed at two schools,
North Carolina State and Woods Hole,
and I loved the program at Woods Hole,
but I opted for North Carolina State
because I didn't think I could handle surfing
year round here, (laughing)
and the idea of putting on a seven mill dry suit
in February and wading through snow
to go surf just.
So when I left grad school,
I had a lot of odd jobs,
and I ended up landing at Panasonic,
which is gonna sound kind of strange,
but I was doing the weather and forecasting
for Panasonic, believe it or not.
They actually are in that business.
The cool thing about this was they had offices
all over the planet,
and I realized I could stash surfboards everywhere,
(laughing)
and set up meetings all over the place,
so I have boards in San Clemente.
I have boards in Pupukea.
I have boards in Singapore and France.
I've surfed in every continent except Antarctica,
and I'm not sure you can actually surf there.
(laughing)
But when I was traveling around,
it was an unbelievable experience
to surf all these exotic breaks,
meet a lot of new people,
but I also experienced a lot of other things
that probably weren't quite as pleasant,
incredibly bad sinus infections
from paddling through contaminated water
with run off and sewage,
paddling through heaps of trash in Bali,
walking down the beach and just seeing waste on the beach.
This kind of stuff was frustrating to me.
So surfing's not my only passion.
I do do some diving,
not as much as I used to.
Actually most of the diving I did when I was traveling
was just inspecting how bad the reef was
before I surfed over it.
I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing,
but I've probably left a lot of skin on various reefs
around the planet,
but experiencing as a child being able
to do the glass bottom boat rides at John Pennekamp
down in Florida,
and then later on diving out there.
That's where I actually did my first diving.
Recreational fishing has always been a passion of mine,
so that was sort of the father, son bonding experience,
and we would always do it on his boat in the ocean,
but growing up, when he couldn't go out in the boat
'cause he was flying planes somewhere,
I would go down in the mangrove swamps in south Florida
and do a lot of fly fishing for tarpon and snook
and all sorts of fish down in the mangroves,
and whenever he would come back,
we would go out on his boat,
and we would go fishing,
and he always used to take me fishing
because I was the only one in the family
who could throw the cast net.
And we would always fish with menhaden,
and they're not exactly easy to catch,
and throwing a cast net off a moving boat
when it's going up and down in waves
is not exactly easy,
but some of the best experiences
and conversations I've ever had with my dad
have been out there,
and some of the scariest too.
We were out on the boat fishing one time,
and we couldn't get the motor to crank,
and a storm rolled in,
and I was just like, well, what do we do now?
I could see land,
but I think we're stuck here,
and his advice was, "Well, let's just go to the front
"of the boat 'cause if lightning strikes,
"it's probably gonna strike the engine
"because the propeller's grounded,
"and the rest of it's fiberglass."
I was like, our boat's like 20 feet long.
(laughing)
The front's not that far from the back.
So when I went to grad school,
I had a lot of different assistantships.
Every single one of them was tied to the ocean,
but one of them was very interesting.
When I came on board at NOAA,
they were like talking about wet side, dry side.
"What's your experience?
"We're really interested
"in the commercial fishing industry,"
and I said, actually, being a satellite person,
I do have some experience
in the commercial fishing industry.
I used to process AVHRR SST data
for the commercial tuna fishery,
and what would happen is the Gulf Stream
would go up the coast,
and these warm core eddies would spin off,
and it would consolidate the fish
'cause they didn't wanna swim outside of the comfort zone
of whatever thermal gradient they liked,
and of course these eddies are moving at two
or three meters per second,
and so this was back in the '90s.
Unless you're out there just transecting the ocean
with some type of thermometer,
you're never gonna find these eddies,
so you had to use remotely sensed information,
and I would have to go in twice a day
and adjust correct for the satellite drift
because it wouldn't quite line up,
and this was kind of a manual process.
We'd have to align the image back the shape
of the Outer Banks on the coast,
and then I would send it up to them,
and I mean, this was on Thanksgiving,
on Christmas, every day of the year,
and if I didn't get that image out,
I would get these really angry satellites phone calls
from people in the middle of the ocean.
"Where is this stuff?
"We're out here.
"We can't find any fish."
And then I realized how important
all of these aspects are when you tie them together.
Another thing in the four pillars of the blue economy
was aqua culture.
There's a massive seafood trade deficit in the U.S.,
and that's one of the things
that we're gonna be addressing,
and I didn't actually really think,
aquaculture.
That's so far out of my world.
Turns out, it's not.
I have a very large reef tank,
and it's always been a passion of mine,
and I realized propagating stony corals,
particularly the acropora,
was something that I've always done,
and I always loved,
and I thought, this is really cool
because they were explaining to the dry side guy
ocean acidification,
and I thought, I understand ocean acidification
'cause I've built a calcium reactor
for my reef tank,
which if you're not familiar with as a device,
you basically just pump compressed CO2,
which I got from a welding supply store,
into a container with calcium carbonate,
and it was actually regulated by a solenoid
on the CO2 that was connected to a pH meter in the tank.
So automating this whole thing was really convenient
'cause then I could actually go overseas on a trip,
and the whole thing wouldn't implode when I was gone,
but the life, the life in the tank was the coolest part.
If you're familiar with reef tanks,
typically what you would wanna do
is populate the reef tank with various
what they call live rock,
and it has all sorts of microbes and stuff on it
that eventually will populate the whole tank,
and process the waste and do other stuff,
but you get a lot of odd hitchhikers,
which come in on the live rock.
And at the time that this happened,
my reef tank was in my bedroom,
and every single night when the lights would go out,
I would just hear these really loud pops and clicks,
and I'd turn the lights on,
and it would stop,
and I'd turn the lights off,
and 10 or 15 minutes later,
it would start again,
and this went on for probably a month.
And so finally, I got my Petzl headlamp
with some red film,
and I put that over it,
and I was shining it into the tank,
and there was this shrimp in there,
probably four inches long,
and it was just popping his claw,
making the loudest noise I've ever heard,
and this was quite a large animal,
and I was like, I didn't put that in there.
(laughing)
It just came in on some of the rock,
and for all I know,
it's still in there.
I read online where you don't wanna reach in
and grab these things
'cause they can really do some damage
on your fingers,
but probably my favorite species of fish actually
was a bicolored blenny.
This thing just had the attitude.
If you're familiar with this species of fish,
they're pretty entertaining.
They back into a little hole,
and they just stick their head out,
and if anything comes by the hole,
they attack it,
and so I would have these snails crawling around,
and the blenny would just stick its head out of the hole
and just keep hitting the snail
until the snail would fall off,
and then it'd go back in its hole,
pleased with itself.
So going back to my love of weather and forecasting
and how I got involved in this,
as I said earlier,
weather essentially generates waves.
You gotta know when the weather is a certain way,
particularly with the wind direction,
with the swell direction,
and we're talking over the entire ocean,
so some of these swells will propagate
several thousand miles,
and so I got involved in running numerical models,
doing this type of forecasting work,
and it's incredible important
for a lot of different reasons
to have the ocean and the atmosphere coupled
in the model,
and this is, as sophisticated as these models are,
a lot of the models aren't coupled two way
ocean and atmosphere.
So this is something that I'm actually gonna be working on
when I'm at NOAA for a lot of different reasons,
but primarily, if we wanna achieve forecast skill
into week three and four,
we have to have a two way coupled model with the ocean,
and we have to have a really good ocean model,
and to have a really good ocean model,
we have to have good observations.
I'm just kind of biased
'cause I wanna know when the swell's gonna be good.
So going back to my PhD,
I had wrapped up a Master's degree.
Interestingly enough, the funding for my Master's program
came from the Ocean Margins Program,
and as I said earlier,
I had a lot of odd jobs and assistantships,
and one of them was driving marine equipment,
buoys, moorings, all sorts of stuff,
from NC State down to the marine lab at Wilmington,
and the university paid for me
to get a commercial driver's license to do this.
So I always in the back of my head thought,
if my entire career fails,
I can drive 18 wheelers,
and I still have a CDL today,
but I actually did time on NOAA's Ron Brown
during this process,
and I also spent some time on India's vessel
the Sagar Kanya during the INDOEX experiment.
So going back to my PhD,
I was sitting around one day.
I'd finished my Master's.
I had started the PhD coursework,
and I really couldn't come up with an idea
of what I wanted to do for my dissertation,
and this was in January of 2000.
I don't know if you're from the Carolinas,
but in January of 2000,
we had the most intense snow storm that's ever hit
central North Carolina.
The models were predicting three to four inches of snow.
We literally got 24 inches,
and it was one of those things where each time
they would update the forecast,
it's four to six, six to eight, eight to 10.
Then you'd go outside,
and there's already like 14 on the ground,
and I thought the models really blew it.
What went wrong in the models?
This is a good PhD problem to solve.
Well, it turns out at the time that the models,
whether it was the regional models
or the global models,
were using a static sea surface temperature file
that was a 30 day mean,
and they do the 30 day mean of the sea surface temperature
because when you collect the data from the satellites,
there's always cloud contamination,
and so you build a composite over several days
to try to wipe out the cloud contamination,
but in the process of doing that,
you actually smooth out a lot of the thermal gradients
from the various currents,
the Gulf Stream being the critical one
for this particular storm.
So then I started looking at some buoy and ship obvs,
and it turns out that during that particular storm,
the water temperature off the Outer Banks,
and I mean measured off the end of the pier,
was around 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is January.
It's normally 38 or 40,
and so what had happened was
the current, basically this warm filament
had backed up against the coast,
and there was a massive thermal gradient.
It went from very cold air right at the beach
to extremely warm,
and when you have cold air move out
over very warm surface,
you have really intense fluxes,
and that's what drives the storm development.
And so then I started actually trying to figure out,
well, what if we just took the actual SST
from a couple days before that storm
and swapped it out in the models?
What would happen?
Two feet of snow.
The models nailed it,
but it's really not quite that simple of a problem
because how do you get rid of cloud contamination,
so I wrote a bunch of algorithms
to basically filter out clouds
in non-composite satellite sea surface temperature data,
and at this point,
essentially the model, it was not coupled.
The wind stress from the air wasn't feeding back
and altering the ocean,
but it was a step in the right direction,
but I actually wanted to know
why these western boundary currents
get so variable,
and it turns out that off the coast of Charleston,
there's this feature known as the Charleston bump,
and the Gulf Stream basically runs up Florida,
interacts with this bump feature,
and that's what sets the weird oscillation in motion,
and without really accurate bathymetry information,
we wouldn't have even known that was there.
So those are sort of my,
I guess how I would relate to the four pillars
of seafood competitiveness and aquaculture,
ocean exploration, the maritime and shipping industry,
and then recreation,
but some of the recommendations that came
out of the ocean exploration in a sea of data last year
was that there needs to be active coordination
and collaboration between academia,
government, industry, non-profits,
and that's one of the things that I'm gonna be doing
working with NOAA.
So I'm developing a version of the global model
that we're gonna call the community global model,
and it's actually, it's a unified forecasting system,
but it goes beyond unify because we're using these weather
and climate models to initialize all sorts
of other models.
When you talk about harmful algal blooms
and other things,
it all comes back to having a really good
weather and climate model,
so we're gonna be using the same dynamic core
for all of the models,
and of course we're gonna be coupling them
to ocean models,
and if we're gonna be doing that,
we really have to focus on having a really good ocean model,
and in order to do that,
we need really good bathymetry data,
which we're actually lacking,
and we need really good observations.
So all of these models are essentially
rely on observations for their initial conditions,
so forecasting is just an initial value problem.
The algorithms are right,
but unless you start with good information,
you're not gonna get a good prediction into the future.
Well, as everyone here knows,
observing the ocean is not quite as easy
as observing the atmosphere.
It's a little bit trickier,
and so having ocean observations,
exploring new ways to observe the ocean,
is incredibly important,
so whether it's with underwater gliders,
or argo floats,
or we're even exploring new dropsondes
that we can deploy out of aircraft
that take an atmospheric profile
all the way to the surface of the ocean,
and then where they go sub-surface,
they go up and down in the water column
and take measurements.
These are interesting new observing systems
that we're gonna need to deploy
to power the models,
and we're gonna do that
through a lot of different mechanisms,
primarily with public, private,
and academic partnerships.
An interesting partnership on the industry side
on that front is with a company called Saildrone,
and they actually have these drones
that glide on the surface of the water,
and as an atmospheric scientist,
I always thought it was interesting
because I could get pressure obvs.
Open ocean press obvs are extremely critical,
and wind and temperature,
and so then, I went to one of the NOAA labs, PMEL,
and found out that they're actually hooking cameras
and other devices to these things
and monitoring fish populations with it
and sending that data back to NOAA,
which is hugely critical
because it's so expensive for us
to try to put manned boats out there to do this,
and now we've got these devices going out there
and collecting data, sending it back to us,
and industry's interested in this.
Industry benefits from this,
and so what I would like to do
as part of my agenda at NOAA
is get industry,
who's going to benefit from this greatly,
to start funding some of the applied research.
I like to divide research into basic research
and applied research,
and if there is a profit motive for industry,
they will fund applied research.
There's all sorts of fields,
whether you're talking about crop science
or medicine or even in numerical weather prediction now.
Industries funding a lot of the applied research
at the university level,
not necessarily NSF or NIH.
The interesting thing about this is
industry is probably not as interested
funding basic research
'cause it's hard to see a return on investment
with basic research like applied research,
but if a lot of the applied research
is being funded by industry,
then that means it should take pressure
off federal funding sources
to focus on funding basic research,
which is something that could very well likely
save humanity down the road.
Even at the time it was funded,
no one really saw a use for it.
So as part of this all hands on deck,
I think it would be fascinating,
and I actually looked at sort of the distribution
of people's backgrounds here,
to hear how the conversations go,
to hear what everyone's personal experience is
with the ocean 'cause I know everyone here has one,
and I didn't even realize
how connected I was to the ocean
until they told me I was coming to do this talk,
and it was about your connection to the ocean,
which is really cool for me to come talk about
'cause normally I'm talking about models
and equations and high performance computing,
and I'd much rather just be in the ocean,
to be honest with you.
So anyway, that I think is the goal,
and it's gonna be great to hear the coordination
and collaboration and discussion
between everyone here
because that is what is gonna happen
in the broader community,
particularly with younger kids.
The last story I'm gonna tell you
is when I was a kid,
I was down in Miami,
and I was at summer camp,
and I would go to the Museum of Science in Miami.
I don't even know if it's still there,
would have summer camps,
and every year I would take the marine biology one
because we would get to go on these cool field trips,
and we would get to dissect stuff,
and I started thinking about
what different experiences I had there
and trying to trace back
my love of the ocean to as far back as I can remember,
and it goes really far back,
I mean, almost further than I can remember.
I only know it goes back that far
'cause I saw pictures of myself
as an infant in the water.
So those are my personal connections to the ocean.
Thank you for having me here,
and thank you for forcing me to really think about it
because it was one of the few talks
that I was really, really smiling a lot
when I was putting my thoughts together for it.
So I would love to hear the read out,
what happens after this,
what the next steps are,
and if there's any way NOAA can work closer with you
and the community and how we can be better engaged
with what we do,
please let us know.
Let me know.
Every one in NOAA leadership has strong connections
to the ocean in many different ways.
I will be here for probably another hour,
but my email as a federal employee
is my first name, dot, last name,
so it's not hard to guess. (laughing)
So if you want to talk about ocean exploration
or you want to talk about surfing,
(laughing)
get in touch.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: You sit right here.
(whispering)
Sorry, we're gonna get ourselves situated.
Okay, you sit here.
You come on over.
Yeah, at the very end, thank you.
Alright, we're good.
Thank you very much, Neil,
for connecting the dots to your life story of the ocean.
We're really glad that you were able to share
those childhood memories,
and they've brought you up through your current career,
and we're very excited about the future research
that NOAA will be working on.
Good morning.
I am Jenni Szlosek Chow,
and I will be moderating our first panel, Play.
So just saying the word
leaves your face in a smile. (laughing)
Together with these fine folks on stage,
we will kick off this ocean party
with all those positive vibes that the word play connotes.
These individuals on stage each have a wealth of knowledge
to share in the work, art, culture,
practice, development of impactful playful moments,
from its various modalities,
like sports, swimming, and surfing,
to tinkering, making and creating exciting
novel installations,
classrooms, or within your own home.
I work with Katy here at MIT Media Lab's
Open Ocean Initiative,
and serve as the project coordinator.
An exhibit of one of our projects
is right outside these doors.
You might have seen it on your way in.
It's kind of hard to miss.
I'm the event coordinator for this forum
and also for Boston Ocean Day,
and I am an oceanographer,
so that might not seem so surprising in this audience,
but when you go to a dinner party,
and you tell people, "I'm an oceanographer,"
the usual response is, "Oh, I've never met one of those."
(laughing)
So why are we so rare,
and more importantly, why do so many of us
look more like me instead of this beautiful diversity
that we have here in this room?
We want that change.
It's something that we need to change now,
so the ocean is for everyone.
How do we increase the diversity of oceanographers?
How do we have more folks in the world like you?
We have a sea here of varied, unique,
and exquisite talents and expertise,
and you have chosen to have these careers
and these passions that are ocean adjacent.
We think about these questions a lot
in the Open Ocean Initiative,
and in the development of these
national ocean exploration forums
that happen every year,
and play is a natural lead in
to looking into this issue.
If you know how to swim,
you might actually consider working with the ocean.
If you've ever been wowed by the beauty
of a barrel wave
and the crazy talent and strength of some person
who's able to somehow be so connected
to ocean's dynamicism,
and then they're able to stay on that wave
with just a board separating them from that power.
You might then think about
how do we help the ocean,
how do we work to take care of it?
If you are given a set of blocks
that can be combined in innumerable ways,
and moments are filled with what if, yes,
and let's try this,
then problems become fun projects,
and innovation is around the corner.
If science, technology, and engineering
are presented in a carnival enthusiasm
with joy and energy and art and entertainment
where they all bleed together,
we might start seeing holistic ways to do things,
so Andre Fountain knows how to bring people together,
communities, local leaders,
sports personalities, and organizations.
He's a project coordinator
of the Aspen Institute Sports and Play,
Sports and Society Program.
He is responsible for the execution
of Project Play Baltimore,
an initiative to improve the youth sports opportunities
in Baltimore.
Andre coauthored The State of Play Baltimore report,
and this is the first hyper-local comprehensive analysis
of the current state of youth sports in east Baltimore.
Reece Bacheco, he is a surfer that tweets out
nature articles on climate change
and ocean engineering, ocean research.
He is the executive director of Pure.
This is the World Surf League's non-profit focus
on ocean conservation.
Previously, Reece was co-founder and CEO
of two video technology start ups,
and he dedicates much of his time
to the 5Gyres Institute,
Surfrider Foundation,
and the Waves for Development.
Samantha Chiappetti's work brings the Lego world
to children of all ages,
from toddlers on up to high school children.
She is the partnership manager
on the front end innovation team
for Lego Education
and is responsible for identifying
and nurturing strategic partner product relationships
with other organizations
and focuses on bringing playful learning experiences
to students across the globe.
Maria Redin's studying career path
has glowingly depicted how science and art
can work hand in hand,
and also brings empowerment to youth.
She is now the chief of staff at Two Bit Circus,
where they are building a chain
of micro-amusement parks.
She with Two Bit Circus Foundation
to inspire young inventors
through their STEAM carnival events,
and before we get on with this panel,
I have a little bit of an explanation
of how we run things here.
This is actually a microphone,
and it's very soft.
When it comes time for questions,
which will be after our wonderful panel speaks,
I will be throwing this out to members
of the audience,
so you have an opportunity to ask your questions
and get involved,
and then you're to throw it back to me,
and I hopefully will catch it.
(laughing) Alright, so let's get on.
Andre, yes.
-: Well, thank you for the introduction,
and to start, Project Play Baltimore is,
or to start, the Project Play is the flagship initiative
of the Aspen Institute Sports and Society Program.
Through Project Play,
Aspen aims to develop, share, and apply knowledge
to help build health in communities through sport.
The Project Play Baltimore Initiative
is built on the framework of Project Play,
the eight plays for the eight sectors
that touch the lives of children.
The eight plays are considered strategies
to get kids involved in playing sports,
and the eight sectors are groups of organizations
and individuals that have resources
to help create access for kids to participate in sports.
So the eight plays in the eight sectors
are the foundation of the State of Play Baltimore Report,
which was released in September of 2017.
The report is a resource guide for the communities
of Baltimore to take positive steps forward
in engaging kids through sports.
Here is a snapshot of the study area
for the initiative.
We focused on a two square mile area.
This map highlights the key community assets
and where most youth live.
As it relates to this conversation today,
are the number of pools in the community.
There are five pools.
Two of them are indoor.
Three are outdoor.
Play three, encourage sport sampling.
This is one of the eight play strategies,
and this play has two meanings.
Keep kids engaged in a variety of sports
so that they can overcome the pressure
of specializing in one sport at a young age,
and two, grow the variety of sport options
that are available to kids
so that they can find the right sport
that's best for them.
Through our youth survey that we conducted,
we surveyed about 2,000 students in this area,
and we learnt, and where we asked them,
what sport would they like to try?
And swimming was the top sport at 23%.
You break that number down by gender,
18% of boys said they want to participate in a sport,
and 27% of girls said they want to participate in a sport.
You break that number down by race,
swimming was the second sport behind basketball
among African Americans at 21%,
and it was the top sport among Latino or Hispanics at 29%.
So I like to give credit where credit is due.
I like to give credit to Michael Phelps
for the reason why kids in Baltimore want to swim.
(laughing)
I mean, he's a hometown guy,
and he's arguably one of the greatest swimmers of all time.
So due to that interest in swimming,
I was able to help foster a collaboration effort
between U.S. Swimming Foundation
and Baltimore City Recreation and Parks
to help teach youth essential swim skills.
In June of this year,
U.S. Swimming Foundation came to Baltimore
to host their Make a Splash tour,
which focuses on water safety
and teaching kids how to swim,
but most importantly,
the Recreation and Parks Department in Baltimore
is now a local partner
of the U.S. Swimming Foundation,
which means they're able to apply
for grants worth up to about $15,000 on a annual basis
to support their swimming efforts city wide.
So we are hopeful that this is the start
to engage more kids in learning how to swim
and connecting them to other opportunities,
and this is a good segue into the purpose
of why we're here for this session today on play.
How do you spark curiosity
in the ocean through play?
Well, for example, once a kid can swim,
an array of water based sports can open up,
from triathlon to rowing to diving to surfing.
Also job opportunities can come about as well.
You can become a lifeguard, pool attendant,
or so much more.
However, to answer that question,
I believe that collective impact
should be the approach to connect kids to the ocean,
and also doing that through swimming
or other water based sports.
The collective impact methodology is what we used
for the Project Play Baltimore initiative
to get more kids active through sports.
Collective impact is about solving a complex social problem
with the support of a variety of different stakeholders
coming together to achieve a common goal.
So for that very reason,
I believe that collaboration should be fostered
between colleges, grade schools,
rec centers, and so many other people that are out there
to help teach kids the essential skill of swimming
and connecting them to the ocean.
Together we can help kids see the value
of the ocean,
but we need to give them the tools
and the opportunity to experience it.
We must expose kids to the ocean
and play settings and bridge the gap
to a potential career path as well,
and the last comment I'll make is I just want
to highlight a new program
at the Aspen Institute
called the Aspen High Seas initiative,
which is gonna be focusing on connecting
the ocean community and others
to protecting the high seas on a global level.
So at the Aspen Institute,
we're excited to be a part
of more oceanography conversations moving forward,
and I'm excited to be able to speak on behalf
of Play and connecting the dots for kids
to be more engaged in this particular subject area.
So thank you.
(applauding)
-: Awesome.
My name's Reece.
I'm here repping the World Surf League.
Really quickly, I want to just be very clear
that I am not a professional surfer.
The amazing surfing that Jenni described,
I don't do.
I'm decidedly average,
if anything, probably below average.
I work in and around professional surfers,
but I am not a pro.
That being said, I am stoked to be here.
I'm stoked on surfing.
I'm stoked on ocean conservation.
I'm stoked in my role,
and before I use that word one more time,
I want to define what it means.
Stoked is that euphoria.
It's that thrill. (laughing)
It's that excitement.
The literal definition, right here,
this is Mikey February.
He is in the zone.
He is making this amazing top turn.
He is totally stoked.
This is Steph Gilmore,
six time world champ,
just got a great wave.
She's in the water by herself, stoked.
On a wave with Mikey February,
surfing together, you're stoked off of your friends.
It's that vibe.
You're like, yeah, woo.
You're just totally into it, right?
This is a beginner.
They're pros.
Of course they're stoked.
They're always surfing really well.
This is a beginner surfer.
You may start to recognize if you zoom in.
This is like her second day ever surfing,
and she was going left, going right.
This is a championship level performance wave,
and that's Dr. Ayana Johnson,
who is your moderator for the next panel.
(laughing and applauding)
She's stoked.
Now as I said, I work for the World Surf League.
We put the world's best surfers on the world's best waves
in competitions around the globe,
countries all over the world.
We have professional athletes,
top notch athletes that compete for hardware like this,
for the big sponsorships,
and they compete in front of huge crowds.
This is one of our crowds in Brazil
where we have rabid fans.
They just love surfing,
and we broadcast these across our TV broadcast deals,
online, streaming, social media, et cetera.
It's pretty serious business, actually,
as much as we like to play around and have fun,
but that line between fun and play and stoke
is really blurry in surfing.
We're gonna take a look at this photo.
This is John John Florence,
two time world champ surfing backdoor
and pipeline in Hawaii, right?
He's in the zone.
He's there.
This is that pro.
He's the one getting barrel,
and he's really in there,
but if you look at the same photo,
same wave, same guy,
same mouth agape, in the zone feeling,
he's just not wearing a jersey.
In the first photo, he's competing.
In the second photo, he's not,
so that line of play and competition is really blurry,
but he's just in the zone no matter what,
gets that stoked feeling off the ocean.
This is Caroline Marks.
She's a 16 year old grom,
and this is in competition,
throwing up the dab,
having fun with it, right?
I mean, she is competing on the world tour.
This is what her life dream is,
and she's out there goofing around,
just as much as anybody else,
and I just think it's really beautiful
about how much we love and play
and get that thrill off the ocean as surfers,
and more than any other professional athletes,
I shouldn't say we, 'cause I'm not one.
(laughing)
Our professional surfers are immersed in their environment.
We're literally in it.
It is our office.
It's our playground.
It's our church,
and so it's on us to protect it,
which is where WSL Pure comes in,
and I'll just play a quick video.
(upbeat instrumental music)
-: The earth is an ocean world.
(waves crashing)
As surfers, it's our home,
and it needs us to speak up,
so Pure will shine a light
on people doing good and making a difference.
We can turn the tide by turning up the volume
because we love this place,
and you do too.
-: So that's WSL Pure.
Our mission is to inspire, educate,
and empower the global surf community
to protect our ocean.
This is a slide with bullet points
because every presentation has to have one,
but it checks a couple boxes.
We're a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
We focus in three core areas,
climate change, coastal conservation,
and plastic pollution,
and we work with a lot of the great groups
that are out there to try and tell their story
across our broadcast,
across our social media tip,
activate with them onsite at our events,
so groups like 5Gyres Institute,
grassroots groups like Surfrider Foundation,
up to NRDC or Center for Climate and Life
at Columbia University.
We work with them as well,
so we try and tell their story across our platform
and figure out ways that we can move
the surf industry forward,
and that's really our great mission,
so we're happy to be here
and open our doors and say,
hey, we want to collaborate with you too
and find cool ways that we can work together
to help move the surf industry forward,
to be better for our oceans.
One more thing, we're at MIT,
so I have to show off cool technology.
I don't know if anyone knows what this is here,
but this is the Surf Ranch,
aka Kelly Slater Wave Co.,
aka the Stoke Machine. (laughing)
So this is a manmade wave.
That's what Ayana was surfing earlier,
so there's a foil on a track
pushing a sled underwater,
and then the water moves over a contoured reef,
quote, unquote, so the bathymetry of which
will then essentially create different sections
of a wave, like a barrel or a wall
or an air section,
and this is a manmade wave
that the WSL owns,
and I highlight this to really say
that we think that there's an opportunity here
to engage more people in ocean conservation.
How do we make sure we bring people into this,
and get them hooked on the real thing?
'Cause they come out of here stoked, smiling,
just really, really, that was amazing.
That was the best, most high performance wave
I've ever been on,
and we want to make sure that we're using that
as an opportunity to engage people
in ocean conservation,
get them hooked on the real thing,
and that was my crappy surfing.
Thank you very much.
(laughing and applauding)
-: Thank you so much for having me here today.
My name is Samantha Chiappetti.
I work for Lego Education,
and working for Lego Education
for the past six years has enabled me
to see playful learning experiences
go around the world or across the world,
but before I start talking about learning through play,
since I do work for Lego,
we have to do a little bit of building here.
So I have some really nice volunteers helping
to pass out these little bags,
so once you get this bag of bricks,
I'll wait just a couple minutes here.
I'm gonna ask you to have your hands do the thinking.
We're getting close here.
Alright, very nice.
So with your hands doing the thinking here,
when I give the word go,
I want everyone to build a duck,
and you have one minute to do it,
and I will time you,
so three, two, one, go.
(laughing)
(murmuring)
A duck, yup.
(laughing)
Alright, we're halfway there.
30 more seconds.
(laughing)
-: Smartest people in the world.
(laughing)
-: 15.
Five, four, three,
two, one.
Alright, everyone stop building
and hold your duck up in the air.
Show it off.
Let our neighbors see.
(laughing)
Beautiful, I love what I see here.
So many different types of ducks out there.
(laughing)
Great.
So with this exercise that I had you guys do,
it was pretty fun, right?
We had a little bit of fun,
but what was actually happening
while this was going on?
So if we take a look at this here,
you were actually practicing and learning
all of these different skills
while you were building.
If we look at self-regulation,
you had to control yourself with the excitement
when I gave you the task to build,
or you had to maybe hold yourself back
from yelling at me when I was time pressuring you
a little bit.
Also, you used symbolic representation.
That basically means that you had to remember
what a duck looked like.
Then you had to build from your memory.
Is your duck asleep?
Is your duck flying?
Is your duck swimming?
There's no right answer here,
but everyone's duck is different
because we all have a different memory
of what a duck actually looks like,
and then there's spatial reasoning,
thinking about what a 3D object looks like
and then building that,
and then iterating off of that as well.
This is a great skill that enhances math
and also something that Lego does innately,
but as we're talking about this here,
this was actually learning through play.
(laughing)
You guys learned through play today,
which is great,
and why was this an actual learning through play task here?
And that's because it involved
these five different skills
that promote deeper learning,
so when we look at these different skills,
relating it directly back to this duck build that we did,
this was joyful for you.
You had fun.
I could tell by the laughter in the room.
You also probably felt a little bit of joy
when you completed a task.
That's a natural thing as well.
It was socially interactive.
When I had you hold it up,
everyone was looking around the room
and seeing each other's duck,
comparing and contrasting.
Also, you might talk about this later with your peers
in the room,
and you'll now have this shared experience together.
This was actively engaging.
It actually was a little bit quiet
when you guys first started to build
because you were looking very intently at your bricks
to decide what type of duck you would be building.
It was in iterative process.
You probably did a little bit of tinkering
with your duck.
You could have built it one way,
and then changed it before the minute was over,
and then this was a meaningful experience as well
because you had to bring meaning
to what a duck is to you.
Like I said before,
we all have a different memory
of what a duck is,
but none of those answers are wrong or incorrect.
So now that we had all of that fun,
I want you to think of a high school science course,
or high school science courses in general.
In those courses, you have to learn pH,
learn about temperature,
learn about buoyancy,
learn about engineering,
learn about all of these different things,
and this might be the wrong room,
but for a high school student,
sometimes that's scary
or maybe not as fun as they think it could be,
but if we bring these types of play
to this experience in a high school,
it makes it a lot more fun.
So now I want you to think of a way
that you can learn all of these different skills
that I was talking about here
through an underwater ROV that you have built,
designed, programed, tested,
and collected data with in the water
that is near your school.
Sounds a lot more fun, right?
So this will give the kids a chance
to actually bring these five different joyful,
socially interactive, actively engaging,
iterative, and meaningful experiences
to a high school science class
where it might not be the first thing
you think of as something playful.
So as we look at playful learning experiences
that enable every student to succeed,
this is our mission at Lego Education.
This is when we are looking at developing products
that go out around the world.
We want to make sure that the experience
is not only playful,
they learn,
but it's also enabling for every student to succeed.
So I hope this little experience that I did with you today
and the skills that I shared with you for deeper,
playful learning is something
that you can bring back to your work
as you are looking towards engaging not only kids,
but adults in learning deeper about the ocean
or different water around them.
Thank you.
(applauding)
Thank you.
-: My name is Maria Redin,
and I'm the chief of staff for Two Bit Circus,
(laughing)
and Two Bit Circus is a band of mad scientists,
engineers, artists, and creatives that have been creating.
We've been building games, experiences,
spaces, events for the past seven years,
and if the slides would come up,
so for us, play is super important,
and our last creation is actually micro-amusement,
okay, so this is the who we are,
and for the past two years,
we've been building a micro-amusement park
in downtown Los Angeles.
You should come if you get a chance.
It's the future of entertainment, as we believe it.
It has VR, escape rooms, a robotic bartender,
and, gosh, an interactive theater,
but so that's awesome.
It's super fun, but the reason we exist
is actually to promote play.
In fact, our company mission is to bring people together
to play elbow to elbow,
and we believe play is a social,
gosh, brings people together
in a way that doesn't happen easily
if you do it even across, gosh.
I apologize.
The slide's throwing me off.
Any case, basically we believe in social play,
but sort of play is not only important
for bringing people together,
but it's also really important
from an aspirational perspective,
and sort of to what Lego does as well.
This is OK Go, the band.
I imagine a lot of people have seen them.
In fact, I believe somebody from there
is speaking tomorrow as well.
Some of our original team members
at Two Bit Circus did giant Rube Goldberg machine
for this video,
and sort of after that video was released,
OK Go kept on getting a lot of requests
from science teachers and math teachers
because they were using that material, gosh,
to bring to life math and science lessons,
so kinetic energy paths, trajectories.
All those things were sort of being brought to life
in a really interesting way,
and so for us, from the Two Bit Circus side,
the insight that came out is, oh my gosh.
What is the rockstar equivalent for STEM, right?
So if kids in general will teach themselves music
if they wanna be a rockstar,
what's the equivalent, but for math and science?
So what we ended up doing
is doing something called the STEAM Carnival.
So the STEAM Carnival back in 2014
was the idea of basically showcasing how science,
technology, engineer, math, and sort of art for us as well,
could lead to something really exciting
so that kids would be inspired
to become inventors themselves,
and that's exactly what we did.
Back in 2014, we created,
basically had a pop up of 100,000 square feet
full of games, games that we had designed
and designed with our partners,
designed with interns,
and effectively for a week,
we basically brought kids in.
For about an hour, we taught them the basics of games,
and then let them loose with all the games
that we had created.
We basically said, this is how you start.
This is how you can end.
If you too sort of could learn science
and get excited about the things
that we get excited,
these are the things that you could do,
and we did it again in San Francisco in 2015.
We did it again with the Dallas school district in 2016,
and we moved that work on to our foundation,
which basically continues this.
Gosh, over the past three years,
we've thrown 30 more STEAM Carnivals
with different school districts,
and, gosh, I'm just gonna show you a little bit
about impact, the impact that we've done
from that respect of,
there's a lot of data there,
but the most interesting piece
is the stuff on the white background.
So we asked kids if they thought that,
if science has anything to do with real life?
And before STEAM Carnivals
and some of our other programs,
basically like 60% of kids didn't think
that science had to do with anything in real life,
which is really, especially for an audience like this,
for is, it's a terrifying statistic.
After sort of going through sort of the connection
of the STEAM Carnival,
15% agreed with that statement,
so this is really a big drop.
The other one that was really concerning to us
is sort of the idea,
is am I gonna fail science this year?
We asked them if they agreed with that statement or not,
so mind you, we work with a lot of kids
in underserved schools,
and, gosh, this one really breaks my heart,
so the idea that almost half of the kids
thought that they would fail science that year,
so after sort of going through an experience,
like an exciting and inspiring experience,
we were able to drop that space,
sort of that number to 10%.
Now, how you learn and how you get inspired
sort of has a number of reasons,
or rather, sort of why you succeed at a class
has many number of factors,
but certainly, as a lot of us know,
the idea of confidence and connection to your life
are two big pieces to that,
and so that is what we have to do
with the STEAM Carnival.
The Two Bit Circus Foundation continues
that work to this day,
and sort of it just kind of goes to show
at least for us how play is a really important lever
in bringing populations that normally
are not exposed or don't believe
that this is something that's possible for them
into the space, so there we go.
(applauding)
-: Thank you very much, panel.
Now this panel spells fun,
and we are going to continue the fun
with more workshops later in the afternoon
where you can dive deep into some of these topics,
so I know many of you signed up
for Lego Wave Finder workshop.
We also have one on aqua games.
Now it is your turn to participate,
so I'd like to know if anyone has a question,
and I will toss them the microphone cube.
-: And can you catch.
No pressure, really.
You don't have to catch
'cause I also have to throw
so I don't want to put pressure on anyone. (laughing)
There any takers?
Anyone interested?
Ready?
Nice. (laughing)
-: That's a little heavy, so.
My question has to do with
there was some talk about if you get kids swimming
in swimming pools like in cities,
then there's a leap made from, oh,
if kids like to swim,
that will connect them to the ocean,
and my experience growing up in Oklahoma
is that I spent a lot of time in swimming pools,
and I had no interest or awareness of the ocean,
so what do you do in that space between,
oh, I like to go to my local pool,
and, oh, I actually care about the ocean?
How do you make that connection?
-: Thanks.
Do you want to start?
Anyone would like to start?
-: I'd default to you first,
but I have a comment,
but I'll go to you.
-: Yeah, so I'll take that,
and I think that's a good, valid question.
I think in urban areas,
some pools are accessible,
but then when you think about trying
to connect the dots to the ocean,
it kind of is sort of hard,
and it goes back to my comment I made earlier
about working with a variety
of different stakeholders
to use their resources and assets that they have
to think creatively of how do you connect the dots?
Okay, kids are learning how to swim,
but how do we spark their curiosity
that they want to learn more
and that they can swim in larger
of a body of water,
but also can be educated
on some other aspects of the water?
So I think it's crucial
that one person or organization can't do this alone.
It takes a team effort
and working collectively.
-: Yeah, I'd echo the partnership aspect,
so I used to live in Rockaway Beach, New York City,
kind of underserved community,
and there was a group there
my wife was heavily involved with
called Swim Strong,
which was getting local kids in the water,
in a pool, and then connecting them to surfing,
and then getting them out in the ocean as well,
so we would bring boards to the pool,
get them used to paddling around on a board, right,
and then trying to take them out
in the ocean on a calm day
and have them understand the currents
and the undertow, et cetera,
and there are a number of groups
that work in that space.
There's also Surfrider L.A.,
has a project called One Watershed,
just trying to connect us and say,
"Hey, we're all part of this one watershed."
It's not just the surfers, right?
In South Africa, there's a group called
Surfers Not Street Children,
which tries to take kids off the street
and connect them to surfing,
so that's why it was important for me
that we have Mikey February as a South African.
He represents what those kids can become
as a pro surfer,
so it's important for us, as a league,
to help support those images
and support those programs,
but I do think partnership between the groups,
you gotta get them in the water
and understand the basics of stroke and breathing,
and then the next step is get them
in the ocean so they kind of understand
'cause it's really scary,
and kids, if they feel too confident,
just coming out of pool
and go straight out into the ocean
on a heavy day, it's scary.
-: And to add to that,
there could be collaboration
within the school district as well.
How do you work together with the science department
and also physical education?
I don't even think that they work hand in hand,
but to that point,
that could be something creative
of how you really marry those two ideas together.
-: And as an oceanographer,
I'm gonna chime in really quickly
on that question too 'cause this is something
we think about a lot.
I know there are many.
There's robotics programs out there,
like SeaPerch, that try to have kids
building robots and using pools.
We're actually working with Lego,
and this is a workshop that you'll see here today
on developing underwater Lego robot.
So that's one way to make a connection
to the field of oceanography,
but in a landlocked area,
and I think there's also a lot of focus
on aquariums and their jobs,
and there is a workshop on the future
of aquariums here,
and I think another area we're really looking into
is telepresence.
How do you get that ocean vessel experience,
the real work of doing ocean research,
in real time to people on land?
And that would be another way to connect that dot.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
Yes.
-: Hi, my name is (mumbling).
I'm a designer,
and this is for Samantha.
In the '80s, I worked with Lego
to design some of the first space elements
for turning into kind of space education and so on.
It's a fantastic product.
Are you guys now,
and as we know, plastic is an issue with the oceans.
Are you guys starting to look at ways
to make Legos with biodegradable materials
other than plastic?
-: Yeah, the organization is starting
to work towards creating non-plastic materials
with their bricks.
I believe it will be early next year
or later this year.
There will be a set of plans,
and it's the plans from plants set,
so it was made I believe out of sugar cane,
and I think the company has a goal,
I believe it's by 2032,
to have all of the bricks
be made out of non-plastic materials.
-: Fantastic.
(applauding)
-: Oh yes.
Nice catch. (laughing)
-: Hi, Annie Dees, National Geographic.
Another question along the same lines with Lego
for Samantha.
If you added up how many Lego pieces
exist already in the world,
I think it far, far outnumbers
the number of people on the planet.
-: Yes.
-: And with this idea of do we need more Legos?
What about all those Legos
that everyone has in their house
in a huge pile that can't be sorted?
Is there any smart, innovative person here
at MIT or at Lego who can come up
with a Lego sorting machine
(laughing)
so that we can repurpose these
and we can have 10 million ducks
already in packages?
We don't have to make new Legos.
The ones that we have already
are all unsorted and discombobulated.
-: Yes.
-: So is there anyone at Lego
who's actually working on that?
-: There potentially is in our headquarters,
Billund, Denmark.
I'm just not aware,
but I would also look to our colleagues here,
especially at MIT Media Lab, Lifelong Kindergarten.
They always are coming up with really creative ways
to do different things with Lego
that you already have in your classroom
or in your home already,
so ways that you could utilize it in your home,
there's many multiple fans of Lego out there
that have done different things with some
of our robotics kids to build sorting machines,
not only for Lego,
but for other different items
that they have around their homes or schools,
and also there's activities and lessons
and building instructions online,
not only from Lego,
but also from other fans out there
that just utilize the bricks
that you already have,
so you don't have to create or go out and buy
a brand new set.
You can create with what you have.
We want to start that playful learning
with stuff that you already have at home
or have access to maybe at your library
or something like that.
-: Like Coinstar for Legos.
-: Yeah. (laughing)
-: Do you mind tossing it back, Annie?
Thank you.
Nice.
-: Nice.
(laughing)
-: Hi, my name is Marah Hardt,
and I work at a non-profit called, excuse me,
Future of Fish,
and we work mostly with small scale artisanal fishers
trying to work on sustainable seafood,
and we try to often introduce the element of play,
but I'm wondering if you guys have any tricks
for when actually dealing with adults,
who the first impression when you pull out Play-Doh,
Legos, or pipe cleaners and say,
"We're gonna build a new seafood supply chain,"
they look at you like you're nuts,
and it can take half of the time to just try
to get them involved and get them going,
so I would just love to hear
what your thoughts are on trying to engage grown ups
who may be a little jaded
that play doesn't lead to learning
and doesn't know the science behind it.
(mumbling)
-: I think a lot of it has to do with the set up.
We have had those types of workshops,
and what has helped us the most
is basically giving people a little bit of time
beforehand to know what they're about to get into
because what happens with adults that's very different
than children is that kids don't care if they look silly.
In fact, they tend to enjoy it.
Like adults, we've kind of built all these personas
in front of us,
and so if you find yourself in a situation
where you sort of end up not looking your best,
then walls go up.
So what we usually end up doing
is letting them know that something like this
is coming up, that everybody's gonna look silly,
so just kind of prepared for that,
and then oftentimes,
this is not from Two Bit Circus,
but I used to work at IDEO,
where sort of we often used those types
of similar materials to do that type of work.
You almost want to go through a system of decompression.
Like right at the beginning,
you're just like, alright,
we're just gonna sort of pick.
We're just gonna draw our representation
of what you would look like
if you're a superhero.
Nobody doesn't want to be a superhero, if you will,
but then sort of that beings down that path
of like kind of deconstructing your armor, if you will,
and then you can go into things
that are a little bit sillier,
a little bit sillier, a little bit sillier,
and then ultimately get to a place
where it's a little bit more open for workshops like that.
-: And I would just build on that.
I agree with everything you said.
Just having a lot of materials available,
so having the Play-Doh, the Lego, the pipe cleaners,
the whatever you think might work for that.
Having multiple modes of expressing themselves,
I think, could be also helpful,
and then also posing the problem upfront first
without showing the tools that they will use to solve it,
I think could be something.
So they're thinking through the problem
that they want to solve,
and then you give them the tools
after they know the problem.
That might be helpful,
and maybe also posing it,
what we do in our lab here
is we talk about prototyping for inspirations,
so it's okay if it doesn't work correctly.
It's okay if it doesn't look perfect,
but you have this prototype that you've learned from
and you can work from,
and you can iterate on it
and build from there.
-: Thank you.
-: Thank you very much.
I'm sorry.
That's all the time we have for our panel,
but thank you all for participating in it.
We will move on.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: We want to talk to you about the importance of imagining,
so if you can find a seat, please do.
You're all so well behaved and quiet.
This is amazing. (laughing)
There's a few people coming in,
so we'll give them a second to find a chair.
So welcome to the Imagine panel.
My name is Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
I'll be moderating.
I'm a marine biologist by training,
but haven't actually collected any data
for about a decade now.
I founded and run a consulting firm
called Ocean Collective
that designs conservation solutions
grounded in social justice,
and so a lot of the work that we do
is imagining what a future relationship
with the ocean could be,
and before I introduce the panelists,
I just wanted to share a little bit of context
for what we're gonna be discussing today.
So in the prompt from Katy,
she mentioned the need to imagine a bright,
optimistic future for the ocean.
I think that's a message that for those of us
who are more on the science side
who understand the details of all the different ways
things are going wrong,
we often aren't imaging the ways that they could go right,
and so there's an opportunity to go from bad news
to good news
and from no vision for the future
to this optimistic one.
I will say, however,
that there is a misconception
that all the news that's being discussed
and presented in media is bad news about the ocean,
but that is quantitatively untrue.
There was a paper led by Jennifer Jequette
analyzing ocean stories in the news,
and they're actually not all bad.
They're not even mostly bad,
and there's this really big appetite
on the part of the press to tell positive ocean stories,
so hoping that this discussion will inspire
a lot of that.
So when we started thinking about ocean,
imagining a better ocean,
the first step at that was this workshop
called Beyond the Obituaries
that Nancy Knowlton arranged at the Smithsonian,
and then that morphed into this collective thinking
about ocean optimism,
and now what I think about a lot
is ocean futurism.
What does futurism look like
in an ocean context?
So it's with that in mind
that I want to introduce our panelists
who will each give their remarks,
starting with Steven Wendland,
who is the head of creative development
at Technicolor and currently executive producing
season three of The Deep,
which will be screened at the aquarium here tomorrow,
so I'll turn it over to you, Steven.
-: Thank you.
Can you hear me okay?
Actually just a slight correction.
We're screening a few episodes of season one,
so if you got kids,
please bring them.
I think they'll love it.
I don't know if anybody's seen the show,
but I'll give you a quick whirlwind trip of it.
First off, I want to say thank you for inviting me here.
It's so great to be here
with such an esteemed group of people
to discuss our little TV show, The Deep.
I guess I have to put the first slide on here.
There we go.
As was mentioned, I'm an executive producer
on the series.
I also helped to develop it for TV about five years ago,
just a little over five years ago,
and since this is primarily a kids' show,
I don't want to assume that anybody's seen it.
I should start by playing you our opening title sequence.
I think it's a good summary of what the show's about,
who the characters are,
what they want,
the kinds of adventures they go on.
(dramatic instrumental music)
-: My family are explorers.
We have been for generations.
Some argue that everything on earth that can be discovered
has already been found,
while others look up to the stars,
we know that there are an infinite number of things
that shine in the darkness below.
There are things lurking in the seas
that long ago vanished into myth.
We believe these myths are returning.
Secrets are rising out of the abyss.
My family are explorers,
and we explore the deep.
(growling)
(water splashing)
(applauding and cheering)
-: It's fun, right?
So when we first discovered The Deep,
it was a graphic novel called Here Be Dragons.
You can see it there.
It was written by Tom Taylor
and illustrated by James Brouwer,
published by Gestalt, all in Australia.
A second novel came out later
called The Vanishing Island.
My colleague in the UK, Allison Warner,
called me up one day and said,
"You gotta read this novel.
"It's amazing.
"I think you'll love it."
I read it.
I realized she was right.
I thought it was bold and fresh.
It had strong, diverse characters
and an epic story.
It was totally different from anything on TV at the time,
so we gave it a huge consideration.
I always love a story that helps you see something
that you thought you knew with completely fresh eyes,
and that's what's struck me about The Deep.
Tom Taylor once told me the inspiration
for The Deep came to him
either from an article he read
or a scientist he heard.
I'm sure you've heard this too,
how we know more about outer space
than we do about our own oceans,
and something just clicked with him in that moment,
and he realized he had his big idea for The Deep,
and it's a big reason why we decided to option it
and develop it for TV.
I think it's simple,
and it's a powerful premise for telling
loads of great story ideas,
and I think one of the reasons why this series works so well
is that it somehow feels strangely authentic.
We're not forcing healthy edu-tainment for kids here.
It doesn't play down to its audience.
It doesn't try to be cute,
and it's certainly not preachy.
The Deep is aspirational.
It's fun.
Many of our stories are based on a premise
that happens to be real,
either a real creature, a real occasion,
or a real event in history,
and we take that premise,
and then we build a fun mystery around it.
When we first pitched the series,
the only thing broadcasters said they wanted
without exception was comedy, comedy, comedy.
Unfortunately, we pitched them adventure,
but we managed to stand out from the pack
with a really fresh, quality show,
and thankfully, The Deep now airs all around the world.
Here in the U.S., it's available on Netflix
and Universal Kids.
The show does incredibly well in Europe,
especially in the UK and Germany.
We've used these territories as key
to building the brand.
We're doing our best,
trying expand the brand into areas
beyond the TV screen.
We've created a short 4D film,
which is now available in a few theme parks
and aquariums across the U.S.,
as well as a special Deep-branded activity
at Sea Life aquariums in Germany and the UK.
We're actually doing a special screening,
as you've mentioned,
so please bring your kids.
I'm happy to say that we now have toys
(laughing)
coming out this quarter in Europe
and hopefully soon available on Amazon
in the U.S.
The toys are doing a soft launch before Christmas,
then expanding to a bigger push in spring.
We also have a line of great quality books
from Bloomsbury that have just released
in the UK and Australia,
and I'm proud to say that we've recently
announced a partnership
with Nekton Oxford Deep Ocean Research Institute.
These guys go on real deep sea missions.
They've discovered hundreds of new species
in their last mission,
and they expect to find thousands more
in their next mission,
which begins next year.
Our partnership helps them connect
to a younger demographic
and helps us connect our fans
to the real ocean.
But I think one of the most satisfying things
about working on The Deep is hearing directly
from our audience.
For example, we get to hear some parents like to watch it
when their kids aren't home,
or that they like to dress up for Halloween
as the Nekton family,
but we also get to hear how much
it genuinely inspires people.
Believe it or not,
we've had multiple comments from parents
that tell us their kids have decided
to become marine conservationists
because of this show.
I can't tell you how amazing it feels.
It's almost like we're no longer just making a TV series.
If you'd like to know more about The Deep,
feel free to chat with me after this,
or please check out our website
at thedeepanimated.com.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: I'm excited to introduce our next speaker,
Ella Al-Shamahi, who's a National Geographic explorer,
a presenter on BBC and PBS,
and a comic,
and also does, no big deal, paleoanthropologist,
specializing in fossil hunting
in hostile territories.
So she's not an ocean person,
so please give her a warm welcome to our ocean space.
Ella.
(applauding)
-: Thank so much for having me, guys.
So that's the big confession,
that I'm not an oceans person.
The bigger confession is I can barely swim.
Like I can get from A to B,
but nobody understands how I got there
based on my technique, that kind of thing.
(laughing)
Actually I'm a mountain person.
I'm a cave person.
That's what I do,
and it so happens that I was really interested
in looking at some caves in the island of Socotra,
which is between Yemen and Somalia,
and then I kind of got stuck with the ocean to get there,
basically got lumbered with the ocean.
I don't think this is the kind of room
that you're supposed to say you got lumbered with the ocean,
but that's basically how it was,
and the issue so to speak
was that I had to look at the ocean
if I was really interested in trying
to raise the profile of this incredible place.
It's known as the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.
It's an incredibly, incredibly beautiful, diverse place,
and then I had to rely on what I know
to raise the profile,
and that's usually how I work,
so my other jobs, as mentioned,
are that I am a stand up comic,
and I am a BBC presenter,
sometimes PBS as well,
and sometimes I'm a producer as well,
and the reason why I do those things
is actually pretty simple.
There's a few reasons,
but the main reason, for this room certainly,
is that we have a communication problem in science.
We just do.
We have a massive, massive communication problem,
and when I say that we have a massive communication problem,
I mean some people just don't even believe us.
(laughs)
Some people don't even believe the data that we show them.
Some people find us really boring, okay?
We've gotta accept that.
Some people find science, the ocean,
actually quite boring,
which is weird to some of us, I know,
but it's the truth,
and some people of course just don't really respond
very well to the preachiness maybe,
the doom and gloom narratives.
Some of us who are activists and missionaries,
we love that stuff,
but actually to the masses,
sometimes that doesn't work.
So I strongly, strongly believe in harnessing three things.
One is being comedy and humor.
The second is adventure.
Adventure is exciting,
and the third thing is the power
of the moving image,
and by that I usually mean film and television,
though also apparently it means YouTube as well,
so I'm quite open and broad,
and so the issue is how do we do this?
And I think the issue before that
is to just point out that there's hope
in these narratives actually,
and there's hope in these methods.
If you think about 30 years ago,
now we all know that people of color
and their community certainly have issues today still,
but if you look at the progress
that's been made over the past 30 years,
if you're not willing to acknowledge
that a part of that difference
in the mainstream and the attitudes of the mainstream
is a result, a direct result,
of comedy and television and film,
then it just is.
If you think about something like Will and Grace,
it partly changed the zeitgeist.
It was partly the right moment, certainly,
but it also changed the zeitgeist
because it humanized.
It was emotional,
and that's part of it, right?
Part of it is that in this room
there's probably a lot of academics.
There's probably a lot of scientists.
There's probably a number of activists,
and that's all well and good,
but the truth is that kind of means
that we tend to really like facts.
We tend to really like jargon.
We tend to really like nomenclature,
and let's be honest.
We don't want to be seen as stupid,
particularly academics.
We're really, really scared to be seen as dumbing down,
and we have got to get over ourselves
because if we want to reach the mainstream,
they're not interested in nomenclature.
They're interested in some wow facts,
some of the wow theories certainly,
but mostly what they're interested in is feeling.
It's that emotion,
and so what I really kind of very, very quickly
just want to hit on,
just some points to be thinking about,
and they'll appeal to some people in the room.
Some of you might it not be your thing,
so one is comedy.
I was once told that I should stop pulling faces
'cause it makes me look ugly.
Took a picture next to these dead guys,
and I feel perfect.
(laughing)
So the thing is, comedy is an interesting one.
Now there will be people in this room
that really have an incredible sense of humor.
It's okay if you don't,
but some of you really, really will, okay?
Some of you will know that you have a few jokes
in some of your lectures that delivered,
some of your presentations that deliver.
Guys, if you're into humor, go for it.
Really delve into it.
Think about taking an improv class,
thinking about going to an open mic night.
Think about taking a comedy class
'cause it's not about becoming a comic.
It's about learning how to harness the humor.
Part of that is also thinking
about really funny narratives,
and guys, delve in deep.
If you think of something that's funny,
see if you can collaborate with some comics.
See if you can get something out there.
Really, really simple example was
that I was talking to the (mumbling)
about rhino horn
and how one of the many uses
is as a hangover in the Far East
and as an aphrodisiac,
and the thing is, that's really tragic,
and it's also really funny
if you take a step back.
Now just bear with me, right,
'cause I might get a bit dark,
but think about this for a second, okay?
(laughing)
You are essentially wanting to murder
an incredible, majestic animal
that is in danger just so that you can get a hard on.
Like think about that.
Now think about if somebody really ran with that
in the Far East.
Let's say you picked up a few comics in the Far East,
YouTube channel, something,
and they ran with that as a comedy bit.
Imagine if somebody did that.
It's not preachy.
It's taking the piss,
and it's kind of funny,
and I mean, this has been done time and time again
with so many things,
and we need to be thinking about this with the oceans.
What's funny about plastic, guys?
We keep thinking about what's depressing.
How do we solve it?
What's funny about overfishing?
How can we embarrass through the use of comedy?
How can we stimulate?
How can we raise some kind of emotion using comedy?
The second thing is adventure.
It goes without saying adventure is, you know what?
I watched something on Netflix the other day.
I watched The Goonies.
The Goonies, guys.
I was like in heaven.
Adventure is so powerful,
from the young to the old.
Adventure is something.
If you switch off a documentary about plastics,
you might still switch on an adventure doc
that also has plastics as some kind
of a background theme,
and that's what we need to really,
really be looking at more.
How do we use adventure?
It's this incredible thing,
and again, so many of us are academics.
We're a bit careful.
Don't be awkward.
We don't wanna be seen as just really gung ho.
There's a way of doing it sensibly of course,
but we need to be thinking about adventure as well,
and the final thing is film and television,
and I will say, guys,
I got into that by taking a module.
I took a Master's level module
in film and television.
I would not be here if I didn't do that.
Look at your university.
Look at your open courses.
Look at how you can get the skills that you need
and then collaborate from there,
and I've run out of time.
Thank you so much.
(applauding)
(mumbling)
-: Our third speaker is Steven Gould.
He is a science fiction author of 11 novels.
He is currently working with James Cameron
on sequels to Avatar,
and he is not an ocean person by profession per se,
but he has a lifetime love affair
with the ocean through diving and sailing.
-: Yeah, I think I've got, yeah,
so one way I could start this
is by saying (speaking in a foreign language),
which for people who have seen the movie,
that means I see you,
but it's a very significant thing to the movie Avatar.
I found myself in a room with James Cameron,
in his living room, at one point.
It was a job interview,
the first time I ever met him,
and it was to do work on this series of movies,
but around 20 minutes in
after professing a very serious love of his movies,
particularly the director's cut of The Abyss,
I said, you know, I really like your movies,
but 12 people have walked on the moon,
and only three have been to the bottom
of the Challenger Deep,
and I really want to talk to you about that,
and we had this two hour appointment
to talk about why they were talking to me,
but we went two hours and 45 minutes
because we spent like an hour and 25 minutes,
the next hour and 25 minutes,
talking about that adventure,
about that trip where we're not talking,
and oddly enough, it brought back to a book I wrote
in 2000 called Blind Waves,
which is an incredibly unrealistic book
where ice shelves have slid in the Antarctic,
and the oceans have risen 90 feet,
and there's a huge paranoia about immigrants,
and just totally unrealistic.
(laughing)
Completely unlikely to have happened,
but in that thing,
I had designed a submarine
because my main character
was doing ocean exploration.
In this case, she's doing coastal ocean exploration
of drowned communities,
communities that are now completely underwater,
and I designed that sub,
and had James Cameron say to me,
"You know that sub you did in that?
"That would work,"
and to have someone who co-designed the submarine
that went down to the bottom of the Challenger Deep
to say that was just incredibly,
that was a high point,
peaked early kind of moment.
(laughing)
But if I would say anything,
there's some common things
about what has been said here earlier,
and that is the arts, video, TV,
books, comics, and so on
are the ultimate Q-ship,
and a Q-ship, for people who don't know,
was especially during World War II and World War I,
were merchant vessels that were armed with deck guns,
which were then concealed
because torpedoes were incredibly expensive
for the Germans,
so they would actually surface their U-boats,
undo their deck guns,
and sink the merchant shipping,
and the merchant ships were sitting there
waiting for that to happen,
and they would undo their guns,
and they would sink it.
So it's a disguised weapon,
and so in science fiction, in fantasy,
in drama of any kind,
that's a Q-ship that lets you examine issues
that are far more serious
and far more significant,
and also to a certain extent unattractive
to your reader, your viewer, and so on,
so your ability to deal with issues,
like in my fiction,
I've dealt with issues of childhood sexual abuse.
I've dealt with issues of various social issues,
but this is in the middle of our drama, our story,
so we get people who are gonna turn away
from a news story about that,
who are going to put down a newspaper article
on that issue,
and instead, they're going to subconsciously absorb that.
I am not advocating that people write political tracts.
In fact, whenever we write something
that is designed specifically to propagandize concept,
we end up turning off our viewers,
our readers, as much as anything,
but the things that we are passionate about
cannot help but emerge in our works of art,
our works of fiction,
and I find that it is just as important
for me that the science in my fiction,
the science in my stories,
and oddly enough, James Cameron feels the same way,
that if you don't get that right,
you're not going to be able to sell
the fantastic element of your stories,
and that would be the message.
Get everything.
I tell lies for a living
to tell an ultimate truth,
but if I want them to buy a big lie,
a big non-scientific fact in my story,
I surround that with as much scientific,
psychological, and physical realism as I possibly can,
and that's the way you do it
to sell whatever else you're selling.
Thanks, that's all.
-: Thank you.
(applauding)
This actually makes me feel really hopeful
because we have all the elements, right,
like we have the potential.
As much as I hate to even make this analogy,
it's a lot easier to make people excited
about the ocean than about climate change,
and so when we're thinking about the wow factor
and engaging people's feelings
on the positive side, on the humor side,
on the adventure side,
we have it all there,
and so it's a matter of how are we weaving that together
in all these different ways?
And so I'd love to hear from each of you
sort of what do you think are the remaining challenges
or roadblocks to scaling the solutions
to the communication problem that Ella described?
What's gonna get us to the next level on this?
For any of you.
-: I mean, I don't think I'm in a position to necessarily,
I'm not an expert on this.
I just think that story,
I mean, I'm a huge believer in story,
and I think that when you can immerse yourself
in an experience,
when you can identify and relate
and aspire with the characters that you're watching
or reading about,
that is a powerful means to communication,
and that's not just kids.
That's everybody.
I think if you can show somebody really living
and loving and experiencing this world,
and you can give them that vicarious experience,
I mean, that's the key for me, I think.
-: I also saw in one of your slides
that one of your products that you're rolling out
is quiz books.
I don't know if I'm the only person
that was like, quiz books, this is a great addition
to the series. (laughing)
Because I loved the workbooks
that went with like all my favorite shows and characters,
so my question for you is like how much science
are we gonna sneak into the fun quiz books
that go with that?
-: Yeah, it's a really good question.
I hinted at it,
and sorry I didn't talk much about the books
that we're releasing.
They're really beautiful.
There's the official handbook of The Deep that's out.
There's six new original stories and chapter books,
and then there's that activity book that you mentioned.
All of them are sort of peppered with realism, as you say.
We base a lot of the stories,
I mean, I did an official track of this at one point
where almost every story has a basis in fact,
and then we sort of just grow it and blow it
and build on that into something
that sort of tips into fantasy,
but it's that appealing, is it real?
Could it be real?
It might be real,
is really tantalizing,
and I think it's a really critical part
of the show's success.
I don't think it would be near the success
if we didn't have that sort of realistic rounding.
I think it would just be this fantasy show
that people might enjoy,
but it wouldn't have that sort of really compelling,
I want to go there, kind of feel.
-: So Ella, you said one thing that really struck me,
which is the value of humor,
but in particular you mentioned ocean plastic pollution
and overfishing,
and we need to find the humor in that,
so I'm gonna put you on the spot,
and say I'm guessing a lot of people were like,
hmm, good idea, but how the hell would we do that?
'Cause it's really hard and depressing.
Do you have any initial thoughts
on how overfishing could be funny?
(laughing)
-: So I think that's the point, right?
So there will be people in this room
who study overfishing
or who are really engaged with overfishing,
and the question is really to them,
where's the funny in it?
There's gotta be something funny about it
or a way of making it funny.
Now maybe it's not the thing itself.
Maybe you can create a character
who is just so useless that he or she
kind of enters into a kind of funny territory,
but I would say that the step before that,
in answer to your first question,
is two things.
One is to be thinking about our institutions
and our organizations
and how we help those within
those organizations and institutions
be better communicators.
Really, really simple things,
like if you were to once a term,
once a semester, organize an evening of communicators
where you invite the general public,
and you get them to try and be funny.
So let's say you had 10 people that worked in overfishing,
and you ask them all to get onstage,
and to just talk about the most ridiculous parts
of their work.
Now imagine if that was the culture
across the country and my own country,
and what have you.
Eventually people would start to see
some really interesting, but amusing things.
Now then if you went on to the next step,
which I was gonna suggest,
which is in addition to helping people
become better communicators and teaming them up
with people that are really good speakers
and having these evenings and these events,
if you were to then think about networking,
so getting them to meet comics,
getting them to meet stand ups,
getting them to meet improv troops,
eventually something would come out,
and eventually one of those things would go viral,
and I suppose that's what I'm saying.
The better we are at communicating the better, you know,
Neanderthals is what I study.
Now they're kind of funny
just 'cause they're Neanderthals, right,
but some of the stuff that I find funny is war,
and war is not funny by nature,
but I have a solid five minutes
that will make you laugh,
and it's just because I've studied it for so long,
and I've gone in it so deep
that I found the funny in it,
so the question I suppose is a terrible thing,
but I'm sorry.
It's up to you guys,
those of you that study overfishing.
Where's the funny in it?
Try and find the funny,
and think about, is there something in here
that could go viral that's funny?
-: So other Steven,
(laughing)
along those lines, finding the humor in things,
the wow, the opportunity to tell a story
from a new perspective,
you, in this science fiction world,
are like imagining whole new ways of seeing
and interacting with the planet,
and so I guess I would say what,
and you've told so many different types of stories.
What are the stories that really remain untold?
Are there any major opportunities
or narratives that you think
that really need to be brought into this space?
-: I actually think that is less
of an issue than, well,
there's a huge variety of stories being told.
The question is whether
or not they find their audience or not,
so you can look at almost any of these issues.
The interesting thing is the technique.
One thing about how to examine the unfunny thing,
if we set this overfishing thing
on a completely different planet,
we no longer have to cringe
as humans, consumers of fish,
that were overfished or are taking
at a point in their lifecycle
without realizing that they have
a 25 year birth cycle that are moving this.
Sure there's lots of fish,
but we're not actually going to see more
for an incredibly long time,
so that stuff can be moved into a thing
that will not make,
and even though it's a dark subject
when examined here,
you can definitely go ludicrous on the topic,
but it's interesting.
So science fiction has a fake reputation
as a futurist phenomenon,
when in fact, science fiction predicts the future
the same way a shotgun kills a duck, right?
You fire off a shotgun.
The pellets spread out,
and one pellet occasionally hits the duck
and takes it down so that's--
-: Maybe we don't want like analogies
where we're killing our future though.
(laughing)
-: Hits the target.
-: Take it down.
-: Just hits the target.
One thing hits the target,
but so many things don't.
On the other hand,
science fiction is almost always more about the time
it is written than its ostensible setting,
past, future, fantasy, et cetera.
The Lord of the Rings is about, among other things,
the trench warfare of World War I,
which Tolkien experienced,
so there's things that happen,
but I really believe strongly that narrative art
in particular, but other kinds of art,
can wrestle with these issues
in ways that are far more acceptable to a mass audience
than putting out a tract, a political tract.
-: It's interesting because what I'm hearing
from all three of you is that
there's this opportunity to use art and story
and moving images to help people imagine other ways,
but it doesn't have to be the way it is now
with this absurdity of like, I know.
Let's kill all the fish right when they're
about to make babies.
That'll be a good way to make it sustainable,
so thinking about like how do we envision another way,
help people see that there are other options, other ways.
-: I think there's also different audiences.
So in the UK, for example,
we have different channels on the BBC,
so BBC4 is for the people that are really serious,
and then BBC2 is a bit less serious,
and BBC1 is like, "Hey, plastic's bad, guys,"
but the thing is, and we've gotta remember--
♪ Take your canvas bag ♪
♪ Canvas bag ♪
-: We're starting a performance art here,
but no, but I think the truth is
that we need to remember that there are different things,
so the tracts for example are really useful
for the academics and for the activists
because they're the one's who need all the information,
but actually if we want to read the masses,
that's where you need to start thinking about this stuff--
-: So Steven you mentioned that the show
was really popular in the UK and Germany in particular.
Why do you think that is,
speaking of these different audiences?
-: That's a good, well, there's a couple of factors.
Part of it is the strategy of building the show.
We sold it to CBBC at one point,
and we partnered with Super RTL in Germany,
who became a big brand partner on it,
so there's a lot of factors that go
into the success or failure of a kids' TV show.
Sometimes it's a lot of luck,
but those particular territories happen to be good
for a good viewing base,
as well as extended licensing opportunities so that's--
-: I was hoping for some like weird cultural hook.
-: I was wondering myself--
-: If there's like a business, a practical reason--
-: The amount and level of public education,
which has been a problem in our country,
as we cut back on various aspects of that,
is different, is sufficiently high,
that there's an engagement there.
-: You know, I don't know the specifics,
I can't speak to that necessarily.
All I can say is I kind of come back
to the fact that if you can, well,
let me back up and say,
part of the fact of the marketplace right now,
especially in kids' business industry,
is that you have to make a universal brand.
You have to make something that can appeal
because you can't easily sell to one broadcaster
and fund your show.
So by definition, you have to put the pennies together
from all sorts of different territories and markets,
so that changes the kind of content
that you're creating in a way,
so you're trying to create something
that can be universally,
and that's a good thing,
captured by an audience around the world,
and this happens to be one that seems to be connecting
all around the world.
-: Great.
Questions, we're all gonna see
if I'm better at surfing or throwing things.
(laughing)
Michael.
-: Okay, great, thanks, Ayana.
I actually don't have a question.
I just wanted to hold the cool mic.
-: Give it back then.
-: No, no, no, so I'm the director
of the Aspen Institute High Seas Initiative,
and so one of the things that we work on
is trying to figure out how to connect people
to the high seas,
which is inherently difficult,
because it's at least 200 miles away,
and the ocean's really deep there,
and I think story's a great way to do that.
I'm also a recovering television writer myself,
and a book editor,
and so as I think about stories
and particularly about the stories
that you're talking about in the science fiction realm
or in the children's television realm,
one of the aspects that we kind of bump up against
is that there are programs like Wild Kratts
where you have actual science being done with children
and engagement with animals that actually exist,
and then The Deep and some of the science fiction components
where there's this element of Here Be Dragons
and showing things that in your fantasy mind could exist,
but we sort of know enough about the oceans
to know that those large discovery creatures
don't actually exist yet,
whereas in space, of course,
everything is open to be a possibility.
So how do you bridge the gap between
wanting to do both of those things,
of including science and including creativity,
but knowing enough to know
that maybe the greatest creative things
aren't actually there?
How do you bridge that gap?
-: Could I take a stab at this?
-: Yes, please.
-: One of my great dislikes,
my thing I would rant out a little bit,
is movies and stories in general
that depict technology and science as the villain.
So in the case of the ocean,
this has been a tremendous thing.
I mean, we have The Meg going right now
where, yes, there's a giant creature,
that it wants to eat you.
It wants to be destructive.
I wish we could find species like that
that were so massive,
so I think it's really important
to try and find drama that does not demonize technology
that does not demonize literally the scientific method.
Right now we get enough of that in the news,
where, oh, yeah, global climate change, yeah.
We have people who are denying stuff
that 98.7% of scientists working
in climate field say it's a real thing,
but then you get representations of
here's the one scientist
who doesn't buy that,
and then take one scientist from the other group, versus.
So I think that's part of what's going,
what we need to avoid.
Michael Crichton, science is out there to eat you,
kill you, and do something, school thing.
I really prefer the, we got rid of smallpox in my lifetime,
school of science, and so on,
and I think that's a very important direction to go,
but again, engaging story, engaging characters,
we're never going to get anywhere.
Cameron spent five years or so
working on a movie project
that was gonna be about the colonization of Mars,
and he spent incredible amounts of time.
He had a room full of file cabinets
with all the research material,
and he said, "I could do this movie,
"or I could do a sequel to the Avatar projects,"
which have already made a significant change
in attitudes about colonization,
the treatment of Native peoples,
the over-exploitation of resources
to the detriment of an environment,
and so literally he's tabled that
and went towards the sequels in hopes
that there would be actual change resulting from these, so.
-: We'll take one more question.
I got super chatty.
I might just like walk.
Is this this cheating when you walk over
before you throw?
Yes.
-: Hey, I got it.
Okay, so I have like two questions.
-: Sorry, we really only have time for one--
-: Only one, okay, just one--
-: They'll be around.
-: Okay, so I'm here with my 12 year old son,
and a big part of being 12 years old
is video games these days,
so how do you think the medium of video games,
which is like kind of the cross
between imagination and play,
is going to make an impact on the younger generation
in terms of awareness of all of these issues
and awareness of the ocean?
-: I have no idea.
(laughing)
-: I mean, my initial response,
and I mean, it's such a big question.
There's 1,000 answers to it, I'm sure,
but I mean, one thing that I'm particularly excited about
is that video games are getting
to such a sophistication
that they can really tell stories,
and it's stories in a different way.
They're immersive stories in a way
that you couldn't tell on the TV screen or the film,
and I think that's powerful storytelling
when you can be in that
and you can experience these things.
I'm not gonna judge which games are good,
which games are bad,
but the ability to do that now is really powerful,
and that excites me.
There's some fantastic games out there
that really have incredibly sophisticated tricks
to immerse you in that experience,
and I think people have just scratched the surface
on what you can do with that.
-: My daughters play a game that is set
in an alien ocean that is really impressive
in both its graphics and immersion,
and the number of lifeforms and so on
that you have to interact
because it's a survival game as well.
So I'll have to actually get the name of the thing.
I don't have it in my head,
but ask me later, yeah.
-: Is it called what?
-: Spore.
-: No, it's not Spore, but that's an interesting--
-: Shipnautica?
-: Subnautica. -: Subnautica.
-: That's it.
That's it, Subnautica, Subnautica.
-: I'm only attending conferences in the future
where there are children 'cause they have all the answers,
(laughing) and on that note,
unfortunately we have to wrap up this panel,
but thank you so much.
That was really great.
(applauding)
(murmuring)
(laughing)
-: Alright, hi, everybody.
My name is Emily Salvador.
I'm a second year Master's student here
at the MIT Media Lab,
and I'm just so excited that this forum's being hosted here.
It's such an exciting opportunity
to meet such inspiring people,
especially the people on my panel.
They're such stewards of imagination
and engagement and innovation in so many ways,
and I'm so excited that they're here
to speak to you all today,
but before we get started,
I wanted to tell you all two stories of mine
that relate to the theme of this panel which is immersion.
So similar to Neil Jacobs,
who gave the keynote this morning,
I also grew up on the Treasure Coast in Vero Beach,
and conveniently, Vero Beach is an hour and a half away
from the theme parks in Orlando,
so Disney and Universal and Sea World,
and when I was a kid,
I loved going to Epcot.
It was one of the most inspiring science museums,
albeit labeled as a theme park, for me,
and I distinctly remember in one of the showcases
they had this giant touchscreen,
and on it you could feed fish,
and you could learn more about them
and engage with their environments
in really interesting ways,
and I remember asking my parents,
how does this touchscreen work?
Where are touchscreens?
When can I get one?
And at the time, iPhones weren't around yet,
and it was the only place where you could engage
with these really inspiring technologies.
The same can be said for aquariums,
and museums, and theme parks alike.
They really bring forward innovative technologies
in ways that don't reach the public
until they become commercially viable,
and in that, I can definitively say
that going to theme parks and museums
is the reason that I went to MIT
and that I'm at the MIT Media Labs,
so I'm really thankful to people like the ones
that are on this panel
that have championed those initiatives.
And then the other story that I wanted to tell is,
how many of you have ever been to a tide pool?
Just go ahead and raise your hand.
Oh, okay, a lot of you,
and how many of you have seen,
just shout out some names of animals that you've seen,
maybe an octopus, or a sea cucumber.
(muffled shouting)
Great, I'm sure you all said something different,
and I think that that's really cool,
so paralleling my experiences at museums and theme parks,
there's actually going to tide pools.
I think that they're one of the most exciting places
because every time I go,
there's a different story that's being told.
I'm having a different experience.
There's serendipity in what I get to discover
that day by going,
and I think that there's a lot of lessons
that can be drawn from ocean exploration
and ocean engagement that then can inform museum spaces
and theme park spaces,
and so I'm really excited to introduce this panel now.
We're gonna start with Sven Lindblad,
from Lindblad Expeditions,
and he brings people to the ocean
by creating marine focused expeditions
aboard small ships.
Sven has focused on global exploration
with the goal of inspiring people
to explore and care about the planet,
and so this is really exciting.
So you bring people to the ocean
and create immersive experiences for them.
-: Oh, okay, well, thank you, first of all.
It's been so much fun listening to everybody here.
Just Ella sort of triggered this,
and various other people have talked about
what were the triggers in their lives
that created some level of passion or interest
to do what they currently do as adults,
and she brought up rhinos in a somewhat different context
but when I was 19
I moved to East Africa.
Well I went for a summer and then I dropped
out of school and then stayed for the next seven years.
I was living in a national park called Tsavo.
5,000 square miles, the largest national
park in East Africa.
And it also had the largest population
of black rhino in the world.
And one day I was a little bored.
I was working at this tenant camp
because we didn't have any gas
and I decided to go out just to see how
many rhinos I could find in one day and I found 59.
Which was an extraordinary number even for us.
15, 20 a day were fairly normal
but 59 was extraordinary.
And then I went back 10 years later
and I was there for a week and did not find one.
And I think that's the point when I became a conservationist
way before I became a businessperson.
Because I felt that that was way way too much power
in the hands of people.
That we could essentially wipe out an animal.
In any case but that's not really what I'm here
to talk about but we all have something that gives us
that kind of base for whatever it is
we ultimately choose to do.
When I left east Africa I wound up becoming
particularly interested in the ocean
mainly because it reminded me of the Serengeti
kind of notion but that's a long story
but and now I run an expedition travel business
and partnership with National Geographic,
we have eight ships all over the world,
currently we have two in Antarctica,
two permanently in the Galapagos Islands,
one in the Channel Islands, three in dry dock
which is no fun but they'll be heading to Costa Rica,
Panama, and Belize, and Baja, California.
So over the years what we've tried to do is
give people extraordinary experiences,
we all know the ocean is wonderful, it's mysterious,
it's full of interest.
We know it's essential, we know it's under threat.
And we certainly know that it's not as well-understood
as it ought to be or needs to be.
And so this opportunity to bring in our case
something like 25,000 people a year to the ocean,
give them extraordinary experiences,
experiences of a lifetime
which is not a cliche in this case.
Each one, each expedition being different
because it's really almost totally dominated
by the forces of nature.
And then bringing them in connection with ideas,
scientists, naturalists, historians,
whatever it may be that inspires and enlightens
that time that we're together
I think is really potent and we also have a fund together
with National Geographic, we raise about
$1.5 to $2 million a year that we invest
in conservation, education, and exploration.
And now I've been talking with Katy
who I've known for a long time during her time
working with Bob Ballard about how we could use
these ships more effectively as platforms
for science, research, storytelling, what have you.
And so I'm gonna show you a brief video
because that's gonna illustrate it best
and I know time is of the essence here.
(upbeat music)
-: Ice matters to me because it's such an incredibly
insanely beautiful substance.
(cracking)
But ice is also a window into environmental change.
It's where we can see and touch and hear and feel
climate change in action.
Since 2007, our team has deployed timelapse cameras
to make a record of how glaciers are receding
as a consequence, apparently, of climate change.
Now, these cameras that we're in the process of installing
here in Antarctica right now are the first time
that we've had an opportunity to look at
this part of the world.
Lindblad has given us access to the ship.
The logistics down here are very, very difficult,
very expensive, it's hard to get to these sites
and the opportunity to work from this remarkable
floating logistics platform if you want to
think of it as such, the National Geographic Explorer,
is fantastic, and we're all together getting
these cameras in the right place at the right time.
-: We're here in south Georgia and we're doing
the very first biodiversity assessment
that's ever been done by a citizen science program.
We're here with National Geographic
and today we're gonna be doing a bio blitz.
There are lots of very educated people
who wanna contribute meaningfully to the world around them
and to the scientific knowledge of our planet.
And now with technology if you have an iPhone,
if you have a Samsung Galaxy or a tablet
or just your camera, you can meaningfully contribute
to how we understand the ecosystems.
-: The National Geographic Lindblad vessels
bring greater number of people to a greater number of places
than professional scientific parties can touch in a year.
And that's just such a fantastic resource
and especially nowadays when we all carry around
with us really remarkably powerful photographic devices
that just happen oh by the way to consistently
talk to GPS satellites.
So every time we click our smartphone button,
we're geotagging a particular observation
that no scientist likely was ever going to get to make.
-: We then collate all those photos that we've collected
on the day and we upload them to a website
called iNaturalist.
That photo now becomes a data point
for that biodiversity survey.
So the conservationists, researchers,
and anyone from anywhere in the world
can get the data and start to find out
what's happening and what's changing in
these fragile ecosystems.
(upbeat music)
-: We're hosted onboard a Lindblad expeditions
and the National Geographic Society do this research.
This is research that we're doing in several
parts of the world and specifically here in Antarctica.
-: Killer whales are the top predator in the ocean
so understanding the impact they have
as predators on marine ecosystems is very important.
Particularly with ecosystems that are changing rapidly.
-: Not only are they doing their work, but every day
they're sharing that work with our guests.
So this is an interactive process.
Science is being done, research is being developed,
and our guests are participating in that whole experience.
Everybody benefits as a consequence of that.
This is real citizen science.
-: How many killer whales are there,
where do they travel, what do they eat?
They sound like very simple and basic questions
but they're difficult, it takes a long time,
and we have to use some complicated research
equipment to do it.
-: I think it works both as an experience for them
and as a research opportunity for us.
-: Okay, time's up.
(applauding)
I'll be around for the next day, I'd love to
talk to any of you who have any ideas
about how this may be applicable to your work
or your ideas.
(laughs)
-: Fantastic.
So next I'd like to introduce Vikki.
Vikki is the president and CEO of the New England Aquarium
and its research and conservation institute,
the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.
She served as the president and CEO of the council
on foundations in the ocean conservancy
and she's also founded many organizations
that help empower scientists to engage
in the public discourse on environmental issues.
And we're very excited that she's here.
-: Thank you.
I think I only have one slide.
I'm the most low-tech one on the panel.
If I can find it, there it is.
So good afternoon or good morning everybody.
It's almost lunchtime so I just wanna thank Katie
for this opportunity.
It's just such a pleasure to be here.
I have sort of dipped in and out of ocean conservation
over the course of the last 10 years of my career
and I'm not sure an event like this
with such an amazingly diverse group of people
talking about this issue in such an interconnected way
could have happened, certainly not 10 years ago so
kudos to MIT and to Katy for pulling this together.
(applauding)
So I wanted to also share a little bit
about my personal connection.
I was fortunate enough, I am the daughter of a military
officer who moved around all over the world
and I was fortunate enough to spend my high school years
in Pensacola, Florida along the Gulf Coast.
And if you've ever been there it's the most beautiful
water and the most beautiful sugar-white sand and I
was also into surfers, not surfing, just surfers.
(laughing)
And I just fell in love with the ocean
and I wanted to be a marine biologist.
And I just knew it.
And I had a science teacher who was a bit of a mentor to me
who actually told me there was no place
for women in science.
And I am of an age where that was not
an unusual thing.
I was a pretty good writer and so I pursued
a liberal arts career.
And it's amazing how karma happens
and how life comes full circle because I'm still
pinching myself to be here at this meeting
with these panelists but also now leading
this beloved, iconic institution called
the New England Aquarium so be persistent.
I had all kinds of great opportunities
that came my way and I took them
and eventually found my way back into this world
and what I think of is my strengths in communicating
married with this passion I have for the ocean
and trying to figure out how do we get people
to care about these issues as much as we care about them.
And so the title of this panel is Immerse.
I am three months into my job at
the New England Aquarium so I know very little, frankly,
about how we design our exhibits,
how we pull all of this stuff together
and I wanna be very transparent and authentic about this.
I wanna call out Billy Spitzer who is our vice president
for education and exhibit design
so if you have any questions about that,
he's the guy to ask.
But I came to this institution because I really believe
in the power of aquariums.
When I was, earlier in my career I was recruited
by the Pew Charitable Trust to start a project
that became something called Sea Web.
And we worked at the interface of science,
communications, and policy, trying to help
scientists be more effective communicators.
And at the time the Pew Charitable Trust
ran a project called the Pew Fellows in Ocean Conservation.
There may be some of you in the room.
And that was housed at the New England Aquarium
so I learned, my early lessons about conservation
actually happened at the New England Aquarium
and it really changed the course of my life.
So I believe in the power of aquariums
which historically have been really there to entertain
and entertainment is fabulous and we've had panels
about play and interactivity and all of that's great
but I think there is a progression that's evolving
and we're kinda moving from kind of entertainment
to education to inspiration and then to what I'll call
activation.
And I came to the New England Aquarium
because I've run a major conservation organization.
I deeply believe in the power of communicating
science and research which the aquarium has had
a 50-year history of doing.
But then what do you do with all of that?
So I wanna be slightly provocative about this topic
of immersion.
We must continue to give people these incredible
experiences like Sven and the others on the panel have done.
Carlos has worked with us at the aquarium
in our science of sharks exhibit for example.
To edit film that really creates this impression
that you're right there with the sharks.
All of those things are amazingly important
but I'm here because I want to ask the question,
to what end?
How do we take all of this inspiration
and all of this education and really inspire people
to action?
And so I came, I think there is a real opportunity
for aquariums to become
21st century conservation organizations
and we're fortunate to be working with MIT
and I hope some of you will come to the workshop
this afternoon on the future of aquariums
which historically has been about what happens
inside aquariums but I think the new conversation is
what's inspired inside those four walls
that then makes you act out in the world
in new and powerful ways?
And one very simple example of that is the work
that we've been doing, our science
at the New England Aquarium helped the Obama Administration
justify the designation of the Northeast Canyons
and Seamounts National Marine Monument
just 130 miles off of this coast.
The Trump Administration is working on rolling back
a number of these protections for national monuments
both on land and on sea and early in my tenure,
a month or so ago, yeah, really early.
(laughs)
I lent my voice to an op-ed that I penned
that talked about the importance of these
incredibly beautiful places, the Serengeti of the sea,
actually is the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts.
And we need to be using our voice not only to inspire
but to also activate.
And we got I think something like 700 people
signed an online petition so those 1.4 million visitors
that come into the aquarium every year
can be mobilized to action and so I'm really eager
to talk with those of you in this room
to learn from you about how to do that with respect
and to really make change happen in the world.
So thank you.
(applauding)
-: Really good.
-: Yeah.
-: Thank you so much, Vikki.
Next we have Carlos Toro.
He is creating impactful experiences that draw
on the scientist to inspire action.
He leads a team of designers and developers
and filmmakers at Steer Digital.
And he's directed and produced conservation-themed
programming for the Discovery Channel
and National Geographic.
And he's recently partnered with Looking-Glass Factory
to produce experimental underwater volumetric content
featuring giant manta rays.
And so what I think is really great about this panel
is we just went from people that are taking you out
into the world, people that are bringing you out
into the world from these liminal experiences
and now we're gonna hear from somebody that designs
experiences within these liminal spaces.
-: So one thing that you forgot to mention
is it's Throwback Thursday.
(laughing)
So I have to open this up, right.
(cheering)
This is Smith Hill, Providence, Rhode Island.
That's where I'm from.
So the reason I bring this up is because
all hands on deck to me, like I wanna dig
a little bit deeper with that definition.
And in my mind it's not just like engineers, researchers.
It's like people that you drive by the neighborhood
and you might not think there's much going on here.
You know?
I was jumping in and out of that window a lot.
(laughing)
And I was exploring, I was exploring my backyard,
I was exploring my neighborhood,
I would be out all day and I wouldn't come home
til really late and so I think we know this
and I think we feel good about who's here today
and I'm not cynical about who's here today but
I wanna re-emphasize that these places are worth
investing in because there's kids here that can contribute
to this. -: Mm hmm, mm hmm.
-: So I'm gonna bring it a little bit forward and
I'm gonna show you that
(laughs)
my concept of nature at 17 wasn't that sophisticated.
Okay? (laughing)
This is us on top of a rock, we just took a photo.
(laughing)
This is what we thought being out in nature meant.
But one thing that I wanted to mention about this photo
is these are all first generation Americans.
And the biggest thing for them is to just
have financial stability.
It's not even about contributing
to this discussion at all.
This is like a luxury.
This is like maybe next generation.
But one thing that I saw was that I didn't wanna
miss that boat.
I felt like I was coming late to a dinner party.
Like the American dinner party which is like
get a home, have a safe, secure place for your kids,
move out to the suburbs.
But at the same time it seems like that model is going away.
It's just counter,
it basically is counter to what's happening
in the wider context, the environment.
So I don't even know if that something
that I wanna dedicate myself to.
So I decided to jump in.
Like I've always loved nature and there were
like some satellite dishes on that house
and through those satellite dishes we got Discovery Channel,
we got, you know, Nat Geo.
So the value of that is known to me.
And so a few years ago I really jumped in
but the funny thing about this was this was like
my bucket list item.
And I thought just one day of my life I wanna do,
as a filmmaker I do get access to these incredible
experiences, but I thought one day this was gonna be
like the top.
And then I blew right past that.
(laughing)
Right?
Yeah.
(laughing)
And so that for me was really empowering
'cause I felt like I could go back to the people that
I have new networks and new relationships
but I can also go back to the people I grew up with and say.
There's so much out there to be inspired by.
You know?
There's so much out there to be awed about.
You know?
It's not all doom and gloom.
Especially today, I think we should take like 10 seconds
for silence because there was a massacre this morning.
And this is the context in which we're working.
'Cause how we gonna make people care about this
when all these other things are happening?
So I just wanna take 10 seconds.
Okay, so I'll get into it a little bit more.
This is me being really stupid.
(laughing)
Okay? (awing)
Yeah.
That's a probably 12 to 15 foot tiger shark.
So it's just for the Discovery Channel.
But one thing that I really, really love
about this experience is it got me up close and personal
with these animals that are vilified, right?
Just soon enough you find out that those myths
just melt away and that was very important for my growth.
This is down in Ecuador were I'm doing some work as an
FFME ambassador.
And this is also the project, so we have Alex Hornstein
in the back and I teamed up with Alex to develop
a 32-camera holographic rig.
That I'm gonna show you guys.
And so this kinda comes back full circle.
I wanna be able to immerse kids in neighborhoods who,
and really everyone, but I have that bias too,
that I care about that population, right,
like I wanna be able to show them that there's really
amazing things out there.
And like how close can I get them to that?
You know?
So this project was meant to get much closer to that.
Alex was like hey we could make these things
look alive in a box.
I'm like, cool.
So there's a display outside where you can see the footage
that we picked up.
And there's some moments in there were you can
see this technology working really well.
But it's really beta, beta, beta.
Super beta.
(laughing)
So here's the moment here where you can kinda see
where you start to get a sense of the volume and depth
and this might have applications in museums, aquariums.
-: Mm hmm.
-: And Alex has a really, really cool presentation
about aquariums of the future.
And whether or not you can distinguish
whether what you're seeing in the tank is there for real.
-: Oh!
-: Or if you can trick the brain into believing
that this is all happening in there without
having to house these animals.
-: Mm hmm.
Hmm.
-: So this is the last photo, this is our studio now.
It's in Providence, Rhode Island, and it's right
down the street from where I grew up.
And for me it's not just an office location,
it's not just a studio location, it's a place
that people can come in and get acquainted with what
we've been able to see.
'Cause we've been privileged enough to do that.
So that's it.
-: That's awesome, thank you.
(applauding)
-: That was great. -: That was great.
-: Thank you.
(mumbling)
-: Yeah, thank you so much Carlos and thank you
for reminding us that immersive and actual experiences
should also be accessible.
Dan Fields is an executive creative director
at Disney Parks Live Entertainment
at Walt Disney Imagineering.
He leads creative development for all the Marvel-themed
entertainment in Disney parks and resorts worldwide.
And he's worked extensively with the Disney cruise lines
to produce day-long experiences and shows
like Star Wars Day at Sea and Marvel Day at Sea.
-: Thanks very much.
And I'm delighted to be here with so many great,
great thinkers and contributors.
I'm sure the outlier coming from the world of entertainment
and theater.
I have the honor and the pleasure to conceive
and develop and produce and deliver live entertainment
experiences in the parks.
I think that I was invited to participate in this event
because I do, one of my passions is finding ways
of drawing the guests deeper into an experience.
So long before I was an Imagineer,
I was the theater director of plays and musicals.
In Seattle I wanted to tinker with how to make
theater more engaging so I tried staging
Shakespeare's The Tempest with the guests
sitting on the floor and the play happening all around them
and recruiting the audience to help Ariel,
Ariel from The Tempest, not the sea,
to make some of the magic.
But then joining the heartbeat of the American theater
in New York, my very first job was as
the assistant director on the original production
of Lion King on Broadway.
So in case you're not one of the 90 million people
(laughing)
who have seen that production in the last 20 years,
probably the most defining moment of that production
is the very first one.
As the famous chant begins the show
and the song Circle of Life begins,
the entire animal kingdom parades through the aisles
of the theater, and that instantly makes
everyone in the theater a subject of King Mufasa
and also instantly more invested in that story.
-: Mm hmm.
-: About 12 years ago I became a creative director
for live entertainment, the live entertainment studio
at Walt Disney Imagineering.
And how to connect with our guests through character
and story and experience became even more important to me
in the theme park environment.
Now most of our young guests, they would meet and hug
Mickey Mouse as a large walkaround character
and well you might have done that when you were at Epcot.
(laughs)
So the puppets that we created for
Disney Junior Live On Stage
allowed two to seven year old kids to experience Mickey
and his friends as their size for the first time,
recontextualizing that experience.
And in case that wasn't enough for the toddler crowd,
we did engage them by dropping bubbles on them
and confetti on them, which of course makes us
the only time in history when it is appropriate
for this keynote transition.
(laughing)
We've all wanted to find the perfect opportunity for that.
I also created stage shows for the Disney cruise line
like this comedy Villains Tonight.
So in this case we allowed the characters
like Hades and Ursula to improvise with the audience
as part of the show to defang anyone,
any young audience members who might have
a fear of the villains.
And then even the streets of Hong Kong Disneyland
became our stage.
With the Muppet MobiLab, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew
who I think got his degree here,
(laughing)
could see, he could actually see from a remote location,
could see and talk directly to the guest
as he drove around and then he would lure them in
to become the subjects of his misguided experiments
with poor Beaker of course getting the worst of it.
You're gonna meet the writer and director,
show director of that event, Cory Rause,
at this afternoon's workshop.
So when you engage directly with the guests,
they're gonna stay longer and they're gonna play longer
and then surprising things might happen.
(laughing)
For the opening of Shanghai Disneyland,
we wanted the guests to feel like Darth Vader was really
there so we allowed him to occasionally take over
Tomorrowland; the guests didn't seem to be too concerned
with the Dark Side, they just followed him around
taking selfies. (laughing)
But my current challenge is bringing to life
the superheroes from the Marvel Universe.
Our guests both young and old are really eager
to have heroic encounters with these aspirational
characters and relate to their heroic qualities,
not just their actions.
So we try to create real, dimensional locations
and a narrative conceit to back up those experiences.
In the movies, we sit in the dark and we watch
a protagonist have an adventure.
So like in this theatrical show where Dr. Strange levitates
to battle with Dormammu, a demon from the dark dimension,
but in an inclusive and immersive environment
he can also take time to teach a powerful protection spell
to a young guest.
That's the icy token of Ictholan,
in case you were wondering.
For Marvel Day at Sea on the Disney cruise line.
If we focus on making our guests the center
of their own story, then we can put them directly
into the bifrost and transport them to Thor's
home world of Asgard like in this immersive
walkthrough experience at Hong Kong Disneyland.
So while it's thrilling to watch Black Widow
kick some Hydra butt, it's also pretty empowering
for some seven year olds to believe
that they can throw a shield like earth's mightiest heroes
in The Avengers Training Initiative
at Disney California Adventure.
Since I thought it might be a good idea to demonstrate
some relevancy to the ocean theme as best I could,
(laughing)
I will end with King Triton's Concert,
which was an immersive Little Mermaid show
that we created for Tokyo Disney Seas.
Our desire here was to cast the guests as mer-citizens
of Atlantica which is the underwater home
as I'm sure you all know of Ariel and King Triton.
The environment was 360 degrees of liquid effects.
(upbeat theatrical music)
And undersea scenery.
But most powerfully, Ariel swam overhead
just out of reach and looked guests right in the eyes
as she sang Part Of Your World.
So I'm really looking forward to being part of your world
and hearing your stories as well, thanks.
(chuckles)
And nailed it.
(applauding) (laughing)
(murmuring)
-: That was really fantastic.
So now given that I'm a student from the MIT Media Lab
and I wanna be able to represent the Media Lab's
involvement here in the All Hands On Deck forum,
I wanted to ask, at the Media Lab we have three
guiding words that are our principles.
They're impact, uniqueness, and magic.
And I was wondering how those three words
impact your work either with conservation
or with bringing people to these amazing places
or creating more accessible experiences for people.
So again, impact, uniqueness, and magic.
-: Well nature is, whoops.
Nature is unique.
We don't have to make it unique.
It's full of magic and we certainly have impacted it
and we hopefully can begin to impact it somewhat
more positively.
And so that's a very, very logical confluence of words
in terms of if you take people out and you expose them
or you bring them to an aquarium
or you take them to Disney World
or through your immersive 32, it was so much fun
listening to Carlos's and seeing his images
last night over dinner.
That's just unbelievable.
And this place in Ecuador is the best place in the world
to see large aggregations of mantas, just as an aside,
so you should speak to him about that if you wanna
go see them.
But so to inspire people and to find ways to show them
the awesome aspects of our natural world
and then to begin to have a conversation in one form
or another about what kind of positive impact
we can have is an important idea
in whatever form it takes.
-: Could you repeat the three words?
-: Impact, uniqueness, and magic.
-: Okay.
-: So I spent the last six years of my career
running something called The Council on Foundations
in Washington DC, it's the trade association
for organized philanthropy and I learned a lot about
what motivates foundations, what they care about,
how they choose to fund a lot of the great work
that all of us want to be doing to change the world
and I learned a lot about how they define impact.
And so that's what immediately came to mind is I think
that we have perhaps thought too much about impact
in that context and not enough about the magic
and the uniqueness which can't always be measured
in the way that some of our systems
require us to measure it.
So I think there is a really healthy tension
among those three words that we can't ever forget
what it is were trying to accomplish but we can't
lose the heart in all of this.
And sometimes I think that happens too much.
-: That was a very sophisticated answer.
-: Oh!
(laughing)
-: Brilliant. -: Hardly.
(laughing)
-: So our company, we have another company
called Steer Films which I'm a director for,
and the tagline is impact driven.
That's all we wanna do.
We just wanna work on things that matter.
Things that are timeless, like nature.
Like, right?
Just seeing things work on these trips
the way they're supposed to, it's an interesting luxury,
it's a weird time right now
where that feels like a luxurious thing to witness.
So all I can say to that question is that I completely
agree with that.
With those words and that mission.
And it's something that we strive to do as well.
And I think we find magic inherent in the natural world,
just being able to go out and witness
and come back and talk about those stories.
So those are the things that inspire us.
-: Yeah.
Obviously magic is one of my words as Disney.
(laughing)
But the practical application for it
whether it's as a technologist to then
to dream something but then understand
how to make it real as you and your colleagues
at the Media Lab are doing
or to use the magic in storytelling
to find something relatable for a child.
Take the example of Moana.
That's just a story about defying expectations
for that young girl.
That becomes, that magic is in service of the story.
So we put in everything we do and then on the back end
you can grow up to hopefully be involved
in one of the 140 disciplines at Imagineering
that makes that magic happen for the young guests
who will then make an impact, it's all gonna feed in.
-: That's awesome.
Sven and Vikki, I had a question for you both.
So both of you engage a lot with going beyond
these liminal spaces like museums and theme parks
and actually going out into the world.
And I was curious how do you bring back your field research
in a compelling and a compacting narrative to tell
in spaces that the public can engage with?
-: Go ahead.
-: Well that happens in a multitude of ways.
And it isn't consistent, necessarily, remember
our primary business is bringing travelers
and showing them these awesome parts of the world.
And then we're trying to look for creative ways in which
we can use these platforms to make those experiences
more impactful beyond those privileged relatively few
who have to the opportunity to go to those places.
And that's exactly why I'm here and that's exactly why
I love Katy is (laughs)
because she represents to me for the behalf of the planet
an accelerator that can use us as a tool
to improve the ability to communicate more broadly
as a consequence of what we do as part of our daily
business, if you will. -: Mm hmm.
-: So I'm here to really, really hope that
there's a bunch of people in this room that will
at some point go to Katie and say,
"I have a great idea that might work for Sven's boats."
(laughing)
Let's figure this out.
-: So I'd like to say that the Boston Harbor
and the Gulf of Maine are in many ways
the New England Aquarium's very best exhibit.
So to my point earlier it's not just what happens
in the walls of the institution,
it's what happens out on the water and so our science
and research team for many, many years
has been gong out and I'll go back to my
Northeast Canyons National Marine Monument example.
You know, we do these aerial surveys
once every several months and every time
the researchers come back they have these amazing
stories of what they see and under the water,
on top of the water, you know, whales and sharks and
just things that in abundance that we can only
imagine and dream about and so part of that
is to come back and say this is why we have to
protect these places.
We don't even know what's there to the points that have
been made many times prior.
So I just think it's part of our,
it's in our DNA to find it, to study it,
but then to bring it back and share it with people
so that they can be inspired and educated to take action.
It's a very circular process.
-: Very fascinating.
And so I know that we're the last thing
between you all and lunch.
(laughing)
I'm gonna ask one more question
and then maybe we can get quick answers from you all.
So how do you create a sense of exploration
and discovery or serendipity in immersive experience
designs or in the experiences that you create?
-: I should start.
-: Yeah definitely you should start.
-: Again, a sense of exploration.
-: I need to give that like two seconds.
-: Well I can talk about that in a theme park
environment I'm sure many of you have been
to some theme park whether it's Disney or otherwise
but there's the planned activities, the ride you go on
or the show that you queue up to see
but it's ever more important to have serendipitous
experiences, to bump into a character or a show,
something you didn't know was around the corner.
And we've actually done the research to find out
that those kind of experiences greatly improve
people's feelings about their experiences in our park.
Even in a highly-programmed environment like that
it's our responsibility to make sure
that not every moment is truly programmed for the guest.
That surprise and delight is an essential human need.
So we do our best to try to program it so you can have it.
(laughing)
-: Yeah I was gonna say that's a little challenging.
It's probably something I'm gonna get better at
and I can explore through our work.
So the thing that we have to contend with is
let's say we're putting a VR experience together.
A lot of that is scripted.
Right, if you're having a voiceover,
really push those moments that the viewer
can then anticipate.
That's a great question like how can we incorporate
serendipity into that experience,
but I don't have a clear answer for that today.
-: So I had this fascinating conversation a few weeks ago
with a man named Peter Chermioff who is the architect
who designed the New England Aquarium.
We're the first and oldest in the country by the way,
50 years next year.
And we were the first to have this kind of giant
ocean tank.
How many of you here have been to the New England Aquarium?
Yay!
(laughing)
So the first to have this giant ocean tank
and I think what we often forget is that serendipity
comes in the quiet sometimes too
and just in being able to sit there and ponder
and so I had never known this but there are
sort of windows built into the outside of the ocean tank
as you make your way up and they're a particular size
so that a small family or a group of people
can just stand there and observe this tank
and the interactions within the tank
at various levels as they ascend and descend.
And we've heard so many anecdotal stories about how
that's where people get that inspiration.
It's not anything that we have programmed or
necessarily even intended, it's giving them the space
and the quiet to have their own experiences.
-: Well nature is really spontaneous and
(laughing)
full of serendipity all the time.
And when you think about it, how many of you
have been to the Galapagos Islands, for example?
Okay, some of you.
All of the rest of you should go at some point.
But when you think about it
it's analogous in many ways to a production like
Disney World except we don't have to produce it.
(laughing) -: Mm hmm.
-: It's produced itself.
What we probably should do is do a better job
of investing in its health so that it can keep on
producing all this magic and all this serendipity
and all of this wonder.
So I guess I'm kinda lucky 'cause in many ways
'cause I just have to get people to a place
where all that-- -: Happens.
-: Stuff can happen.
Do it safely and do it with teams that can
help people along the way and provide
the little inspiration that we can provide
compared to what it is providing on its own.
-: Mm hmm.
Well thank you so much, that was an excellent final answer.
And so if you enjoyed this Immerse panel I encourage you
to attend the transmedia workshop,
the shared explorations beyond the screen workshop,
or the New England Aquarium
future of the aquarium workshop.
Thank you all very much and thank you to our panelists.
(applauding)
(murmuring)
-: So just kidding, we're not having lunch just yet.
You're about 10 minutes away from lunch
so just bear with me here.
(laughing)
Yeah actually I do need that, thank you.
So to get your mind off sandwiches and transform it to art,
I want everyone to close their eyes for a minute.
And I want you to think about a piece of art,
a creative work that may have inspired you
in your life in some way.
Whether it's a play or a novel or a piece of art.
Now think about how that affected you in your life
in some way.
Now open your eyes.
Has anyone not been inspired by something
within their life in a creative form?
That's what I thought.
And that's what our founders thought
and that's what Schmidt Ocean Institute thinks.
So our organization is uniquely positioned
to be able to share science and art together.
Schmidt Ocean Institute is a non-profit that
advances the pace of marine science with technology,
open sharing of data, and communications.
Our co-founder Wendy Schmidt firmly believes in this,
and not just sharing the science that takes place
on the ship, but using it to transform why people care
about the ocean.
And it was her idea to start our Artist At Sea program.
So why select artists?
Well artists, like scientists, have a curiosity.
And they're not just interested in the result
but the process and they have a unique way
to illustrate that.
For example, up here is one of our Artist At Sea
participants, Lily, who recently was on Falcor
using our remotely operated vehicle, Sebastian,
to paint images of species that they found on the sea floor.
But artists not only can share the process,
they can help tell the story and they do so working
not just side by side but by directly with our scientists
on the ship so they are not just on Falcor,
our research vessel, doing art while scientists
are doing science things,
they are participating in the science and using that
experience to then translate their art.
Our Artist at Sea program started in December of 2015
and has been going strong for 20 artists
who have sailed on Falcor.
Each year our open application process
which is open to artists internationally
continues to bring in new art, new types of artists,
and greater interest in our science art program.
Last year we had 91 applicants
and we will have another open call this December.
Now these scientists and artists work in tandem together
and these relationships have fostered collaborations
not just while at sea but after the fact.
The artists range from many different disciplines
and we try to get as many different types of artists
as possible on Falcor to translate the science
and share within new mediums.
We've had musical composers, cartoonists,
traditional painters, fiber artists.
We really try to embrace all of the arts
and creative disciplines.
And these artists themselves find new ways
of creating and interacting with the science
and being out at sea.
Our impressive cohort has ranged from international
and national artists who not just use their art mediums
but also use the ship itself.
For example, the rocking of the boat could sometimes
be a hindrance for someone who's trying
to do a fine-detail painting, but some of our artists
have embraced that movement and worked with it
in their art forms.
For example Ben Cosgrove who wrote a composition about that
or Rebecca Rothstein who I think is here
in the audience today who used the movements of the ship
on her paintings.
We even have a same type of science taking place,
for example, multi-beam mapping which is looking at
the sea floor and mapping the sea floor bed
and having different artists translate that in unique ways.
Our artists not only participate in science expeditions
but recently we started an artist expedition.
And we did this with a transit so when the ship
was going from one place to another we took this
an as opportunity to not only bring on a bunch
of artists, six in fact, but also a scientist
to work together and they learned how to do
multi-beam mapping, the artists participated
in night watches and also learned
how to clean up that mapping data.
Now all six of these artists were able to transform
what they learned into their art.
And some of that is displayed here today
and we actually have two artists here from the expedition
who will be standing by their work at lunch.
These science-art relationships foster long-lasting
collaborations; many of our artists continue to work
with the scientists post-expeditions.
For example, Kirsten Carlson who was
an illustrator who came on one of our ships
is still working to do illustrations
with the scientists she worked with and some of their
sea to sky science.
We also have artists that have come together,
two of our artists who didn't know each other
before this program came together
and applied for a National Science Foundation
Antarctica program that was successfully funded
and they went to Antarctica together
and used some of the art that they created on Falcor
as a starting point to build their exhibit
and their relationship through their continued works.
These science-artist collaborations continue.
Another example is one of our artists,
Michelle Schwengel-Regala who was one of our
earlier artists and a fiber artist who crocheted
our CTD casts that were displayed on the screen.
And this was a really unique expedition
that might have been very hard to explain or translate.
They were looking for unique proteins
in oxygen dead zones.
And what she did was take these crocheted CTD casts
and string them together to tell the whole story
of what they found on that expedition.
Now that inspired her to start working with metal,
malleable metal, and make mesh metal sculptures
that actually illustrated the water columns
that those CTD casts were collected at.
And what's funny is she kept in touch with the scientist
from that expedition and he was in Honolulu visiting
when she happened to be showcasing those new sculptures
at the Honolulu Biennial.
And he walked in and immediately knew
exactly what locations those sculptures were from.
And I just love that story because it's a perfect example
of how art can really work with science
to make it more approachable to the public.
Our artists that come on Falcor also require
to participate in community outreach.
And what this entails is journaling or blogging about
their experiences and we usually ask for two to three blogs
that are reflective of their time at sea
and working with the scientists, and we put that out
on our website and through social media.
But we also engage with audiences remotely
while we're out at sea and so the artists participate
in a ship to shore connection
and that has taken place with classrooms,
at galleries, at communities, and allows them
to tell their perspective of what's going on
on the ship and what they're doing.
And the artists can also share post cruise
when we're in port we've had them give tours
of our research vessel, sketching tours where we bring
other artists on board and they're sketching the ship
as they get to tour the different research platforms
that we have available.
With the art that's been collected we started getting
quite a bit as you can imagine with 20 artists.
We wanted to share that and not just keep it
for ourselves and the scientists on the ship.
And so in 2017 we started a traveling exhibit
with the works of the artists from the program.
This has now been traveling to 14 different exhibits
across North America in museums,
aquariums, community centers,
conferences, and even the America's Cup
thanks to our amazing sister organization
at (mumbles) Racing who's here today.
And these artists have an opportunity to present
their work to interact with each other,
to interact with the press and the public
and share what they've done.
It also allows us to engage with the public
in new ways and show that science can be transformed
in many different venues and in many different ways.
So as we move forward with the Artist At Sea program,
we hope to have many more artists and unique
programs and projects related to this.
We have an open call that will take place this December.
We also have our expression of interests
out right now for scientists and engineers
and you should have all gotten a postcard today
that showcases three pilot tracks.
Our oceanography track which is what we typically do
but also we have a technology and coral reef track.
And this also provides new venues and avenues for
ways to work with art in creative and unique ways.
And with that I will say we can go to lunch now.
I do wanna make sure that you all take a moment
to explore the art that's displayed today.
We also have Keith Ellenbogan who's work is going
to be shared on the video wall along with
the Artists At Sea exhibit.
He's funded by the National Marine Sanctuaries Foundation
and his work is showing the amazing photography
from Stellwagen Bank.
Thank you so much and enjoy your lunch.
(applauding)
-: I haven't walked on the beach or immersed myself
in the ocean for over two years.
Now, for some background.
I live in a coastal city.
I hold a Master's degree in environmental studies,
and I'm a former National Park ranger
of an ocean-based national park.
But in the summer of 2016 I severely sprained my ankle
and I haven't fully recovered my mobility,
in part due to an underlying physical disability.
A condition I was born with but I only recently
found out that I have.
My access to oceanic endeavors is limited
not just by my body, but also by society
and that's what I'm here to talk about.
Ableism is entrenched in ocean conservation and research,
and neither will be accessible until we start
addressing that more directly
in spaces like this very room.
And access and accessibility don't refer
just to disability.
Access is a beautifully multifaceted word.
It has far too many meanings and possibilities
to address in two minutes, but when I say the word access
I'm holding open all of those many meanings
and possibilities, including those both physical
and figurative.
I want to use the privilege that I have of being
in this room today to generate and amplify
creative, collaborative ideas for promoting
and ensuring equitable access.
We must work together to continually reimagine
how participation and leadership in ocean exploration,
research, conservation, education, and storytelling
can be made more accessible for all people
whose stories are not part of standard narratives.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi everyone.
My name is Fernanda, I am an interdisciplinary designer
and I've spent the last year on an adventure.
I was living in London, Tokyo, and New York
over this past year and I did this as part
of my Master's research in a program
called Global Innovation Design.
And in it, a group of designers spends time
in these three amazing places
doing research on how to solve global issues
for areas they're passionate about.
We're a very diverse group but for me that's meant
thinking about how technology's changing
our human relationship to nature,
how that's different in these different places,
but also the universal elements of it.
As a designer I spend a lot of time thinking about
systems, how we live in systems and how we might
design with them in mind.
And I think nature is the biggest system we're all
a part of and it's necessary to think about it
when we're designing solutions for the great big
challenges we have ahead.
So as a traveled in London I worked on an effort
in connecting urban citizens to urban wildlife
for the benefit of humans and animals
using audio recordings.
In Japan I experienced the deep awe that comes
with living in a place that subject to natural disasters
and typhoons and hurricanes and the tension
that comes with the desire to control nature
and the need to work with it.
And most recently in New York I've been working
on how bio-materials might be used to engage
and educate young people and students
into understanding and learning more about nature.
And I'm curious in how we can do this in a way
that's accessible, that benefits kids and communities
and engages everyone.
And this last one is an ongoing project
so I'm really looking forward to being inspired
over the next couple of days
and to keep this conversation going with you all.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi everyone, my name is Liz,
I'm representing my local beach today in California.
(laughing)
So I come to MIT Media Lab Space Enabled Group
from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
Where I was a creative strategist for six years
designing, helping imagine our future for space
in a variety of different ways.
One of those ways was the NASA travel posters,
have any of you saw those awhile ago.
(applauding and cheering)
I illustrated two of those.
Thank you.
And this one specifically was Europa
so we're talking a lot about Earth's oceans today
but my focus primarily in the past was on ocean worlds
like all over the solar system.
So I'm stoked to be here doing some Earth stuff today.
So yeah and so a part of it was storytelling.
It was really important in terms of helping
young children and everybody just imagine our future
in outer space, particularly Europa.
So Europa is this big, icy world,
it's a big, icy moon of Jupiter
for those of you who don't know.
In the middle it's really, really hot
and what happens when you get ice and heat
is water, right, and so the middle of this moon
is all an ocean, it's like this giant ocean.
And so there's gonna be some missions later on to Europa,
the Europa Clipper in 2024 that will be
trying to look for life or signs of life on Europa.
And yeah and so it's really great to be able to be here
and explore our future in the ocean with everyone here.
So thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hello, my name is Miles Lipson,
I'm also a graduate student
with the Space Enabled Research Group
in the MIT Media Lab.
And I'm here to talk to you about a proposal
for a museum experience that our group has put together
with the goal of increasing the public sense of awareness
and sense of stewardship over Antarctica
and the southern oceans.
And the idea of this project grew out of the
Here Be Dragons event earlier this year at the Media Lab
and since then I've been working with my colleague Liz
who you just heard from as well as
some other members of the group
to ask how can we achieve this.
And the concept we have is for a set of programming
that combines two elements.
An immersive, in-museum exhibit that has
a multi-sensory immersive experience that draws on
various earth science and other data sets
to tell a compelling narrative about Antarctica
arranged around three themes of space, life, and ice.
And then also a citizen science component as a follow on
using a low-cost water monitoring sensor
that our lab has developed which could be used
as part of programming either at the museum
or in local schools.
And the thesis of this work that we want
to actually demonstrate and hopefully prove
is that by combining these two elements together,
we have longer lasting and stronger effects
towards our objective than either of these elements
in isolation or even both elements if they are done
in an uncoordinated manner.
And so at this point we have a concept
but we're looking for others to work with to potentially
actually test this out as well as make sure that we can
build a productive use for the data
that we'd be gathering from this so if you
think this is an interesting project, please approach me
or Liz or someone else from the group
and we would love to work with you to take this forward
and see what kind of results we get.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi, my name's Rebecca.
I am an artist working in painting, installation, let's see,
there we go.
Painting, installation, public art, and sculpture.
And I was invited out to sea four years ago,
I've had an interest in oceanography, in geology,
in microbiology, and I was invited out to sea
four years ago first on the Nautilus and then on the Falcor.
And that experience really changed my life
and from that point on I knew I wanted to just focus on
sort of exploring the ocean, creating work that
sheds light on these places and these processes
that are hidden from view.
And so this is a piece actually, this is just
open last week at the Georgia Museum of Art.
I'm working with the scientist Mandy Joy who
was supposed to be here and she's sorry she couldn't be here
but I was working with video footage of
(speaking in foreign language)
and we programmed the lights in the piece to
mimic the movements of the (speaking in foreign language)
and the bioluminescent patterns.
It's triggered by somebody walking by the piece
so there's this interactive component
and I'm really looking forward to doing more of
that kind of thing, sort of multi-sensorial
kinds of experiences 'cause I feel like
through that connection with the public
and with the viewer, we can, connecting them with
this sublime place we can sort of forge a dialogue
about climate change and about environmental stewardship.
I'm also going with her next week on an expedition
if we get the visas but supposed to go down in Alvin
which I also had the wonderful opportunity of doing
two weeks ago and it was life-altering.
So if you wanna talk about bioluminescence,
I can tell you about it, it was amazing.
Thank you so much.
(applauding)
-: Hi everyone, my name is Megan Liebetkan
and I am a graduate student
at the University of Rhode Island
Graduate School of Oceanography.
My research is in submarine vulcanism
but today I wanna talk to you a little bit about
my event series that I launched last month
called Synergist.
A synergist is somebody who cooperates to create impact
that is greater than they could do alone.
The mission of Synergist is to expand community engagement
in the sciences and the arts by creating space
for artists and scientists to showcase their work
and inspire one another and celebrate their explorations.
So each event or volume has a theme.
That theme is abstract so it leaves room for
many different participants across disciplines.
Volume one, our first event, occurred on October 28th
so last month, last week.
Our theme was (speaking in foreign language).
That is a genus species of a rarely-encountered
deep ocean undulating jellyfish.
It's this purple orb in the middle of the screen here.
So we had a multitude of explorers from STEM disciplines,
art backgrounds, painters, designers,
experimental musicians, all sorts of different things.
And the idea is to keep this open to the public,
it will always be free.
We are not located in museums or formal institutions.
Based in sort of music venues and bar settings.
And although it's open to all,
our target audience is young people 20s to 40s
that don't typically engage in STEM.
So people that aren't necessarily self-described
STEM enthusiasts we're trying to pull them
to experience the wonderful world of science and immersion.
So thank you so much, if you wanna check us out,
Instagram, synergist.ball, or email me.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Ah.
This painting depicts a story, and that story is
that the ocean is the source of all life
and we are born from it.
Each and every one of us can draw on the inspirations
from this story experience to imagine and create
a beautiful world that sustains life.
But for many this message needs to be renewed.
So we build our inspirations and imaginations
to share with the world in art, stories,
technology, science.
But what happens before we build that?
First we were quiet, we were listening,
and the inspirations came through.
So how can we allow, how can we invite more people
into this process of receiving these inspirations
from the ocean?
My name is Jonatha Giddons.
I am a National Geographic fellow
with the Exploration Technology Lab.
And we are working on a global biodiversity assessment
of the deep ocean, using deep ocean drop cams.
And the goal is to establish a base line
of deep ocean health.
So my vision with the drop cam program is to share
our findings not only in data but also in stories
and in art.
So more than just data, each place, more than just
a number on a map, each place will have a picture story
that comes about from quiet contemplation
and the inspirations of that place
and each place will have a narrative story
that comes about, that's crafted by carefully
listening to that place, distilling a message,
and sharing it with the world.
So this is my vision to be able to share
the wonders of the deep sea
not just with data, but also with these stories
and so I'm seeking ways to bring these two forward
as we move forward into the future.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Marine flora and fauna have been the catalyst
of innovative advanced medical research
treating the human body from sickness and disease.
As we study the similarities between marine life
and the human body, it is equally important to recognize
that the water itself has healing properties
that are beneficial to the body
being that we are 70% water.
As a marine scientist, a Master's of marine science
and a licensed massage therapist, I have merged
my disciplines to focus on water therapy as a form
of facilitating healing.
Through osmosis of the skin which is the largest organ
on the body, I help exchange stagnant toxic water
within my clients while exchanging with highly
living waters or free forming waters around the world
that are collected by clients of mine.
And in this exchange, we are trying to make the hydrogens
of the body that are very toxic to be replaced
with these living waters.
Another type of therapy that I also do
is water art therapy which is a psychological approach
to treating emotional imbalances
through adults as well as children.
Over here we have someone who had a very tumultuous breakup.
The one in the middle is me changing
and merging my careers.
The two on the sides are children dealing
with the loss of a parent.
The goal is paying attention to the quality of water
because the water quality also impacts
as much as the species they inhabitat.
Excuse me.
(chuckles)
The water quality is very important because
it affects the physical as well as the psychological ways
of healing the human body.
I am the owner of Healing Waters Mobile Massage,
The Stork's Next Womb Care Massage,
and I get waters from all over the world to treat people.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hey everyone.
I'm Kyle Sorenson and I am an animator
and songwriter from Montana and along with my colleague
who's not here right now, Emily Narrow,
who has more of a biology background,
we produced the first episode of a new
children's web series called Deep Sea Singalong.
And in a nutshell the idea for this series
came to us when we realized that watching videos
of ugly fish turned us into 10 year olds.
(laughing)
Emily is a crew member on the NOAA ship
Oceanus Explorer.
She's actually out on the ocean right now
which is why she's not here.
And during expeditions they regularly discover
and capture footage of never before seen lifeforms
so if you're into making videos
about brand new ugly fish, she's a good person to know.
Truly though we think that many of these
ugly, awkward, sometimes eerie deep sea creatures
are brimming with an undeniable if slightly macabre
brand of charisma.
Making humorous educational videos about deep sea fish
has the potential to inspire children with curiosity
about ocean science as well as to promote
an inclusive moral message that encourages children
to form sympathetic attachments
with animals that aren't as conventionally attractive
or impressive.
So catch me at some point if you'd like
to watch the video, it's also on YouTube, and thanks.
(applauding)
-: Hi, I'm Nadia, I'm a freelance writer
and conservation communicator from Malaysia.
I write stories, local stories, narrated by local voices.
And I would like to showcase stories which have
the ocean as a conduit to moments of beauty
in our everyday lives.
So for the first picture, why the story
was really important was that is a female green turtle
rescued by local fisherman from a retention pond
as a power plant and why this story was important
was because local fishermen are still killing turtles
that are accidentally caught in fishing gear
and this was a really important story
to share with the community.
And the house you see at the bottom
is a 50 year old house built by two local women
from the east coast of eastern Malaysia
and is currently being repaired and restored
by a woman's group who are working on coastal conservation
and it shows their resilience, independence,
and also just the communal spirit of the community there.
And that lady is preparing a really delicious snack
called (speaks in foreign language).
Which is a fish parcel made of sardine, coconut,
and excellent local ingredients and flavors,
and she is part of an NGO that uses food
and culinary heritage as an entry point
to talk about wetlands and coastal conservation
and the stick that she's using is from the mangroves
and the ingredients show the link that we have
with our natural environment.
And the last photo you'll see is the national heroine,
a title conferred to this lady from Ache, Indonesia,
which is called (speaking in foreign language).
She lived in the last part of the 16th century.
She's the first female admiral in Indonesia's
recorded history and some say in more than history
and for me this story is really personal.
I am researching about it right now because
it's showing representation, faces from Malay archipelago
who have the maritime heritage, the naval knowledge,
and just skills to navigate the ocean
and for people like me I want to see
more faces like her in the mainstream media.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi, I'm Julie Jacobowski and I live
in two ocean communities.
One is the ocean science community
as a graduate researcher for the MIT Woods Hole
joint program where I study physical oceanography.
And the other one is as a surfer who lives
on the New Hampshire sea coast and surfs every day.
A while ago this year I posted an article
I had written for the Woods Hole Oceanus Magazine
about the ocean research I had done at the Galapagos Islands
and I honestly didn't think people would be that interested
because most of my Facebook group is not
ocean science people.
The reaction I got was much greater than I thought
so I started wondering how interested
is the broader ocean community in ocean science?
And one of the things I did was I wrote a survey,
I posted on Facebook and Instagram asking two questions.
What do you want to know about the ocean that you don't?
If you could ask a scientist to study anything
about the ocean, what would it bed?
And I thought maybe I'd get like 20 responses.
Within five minutes I had 20 responses.
By the end of the day I had hundreds.
And what this showed me was that the ocean,
the broader ocean community which consisted of surfers,
fishermen, commercial boat captains, vacationers,
people who just walk by the beach
and a lot of people who live at the beach
really desperately want to know about ocean science.
And these questions were super inspiring.
I was almost in tears reading it because
they were well thought out, it covered everything
you could think of about the ocean from coastal issues
to questions like how do stark fish reproduce.
And they had no way of finding the answers.
And then I found out when I started going to the beach
people were approaching me and saying hey,
we really want to know the answers to these things
and so the broader ocean community that interacts
with the ocean every day and impacts the ocean every day
really, truly wants to know
what ocean scientists know.
And the only way for them to find it out is Google it
so I tried it and I Googled some of the questioned they had
and there are some questions that had resources
on the internet that you could send
to answer their questions but most of their questions
were things I had to go into peer reviewed
science journals, download, understand the journal,
and then I could answer their question.
And that's not something that the general public can do.
It costs a lot of money and it takes a lot
of specialized training.
And so I found out that it's not the ocean community
that's interested in the ocean sciences.
They really truly are and they're the ones impacting
the ocean on a daily basis.
In order to make good decisions about how they impact
the ocean, they need to know what scientists know.
So my question for everyone here and I think
it's a reason a lot of people are here is
what are we gonna do about that?
How are we gonna fix the situation?
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi everyone, I'm Sam Mitchell, I'm a researcher
at University of Hawaii in deep sea vulcanism.
But I'm not going to talk to you about that today.
Instead I'm gonna introduce to you a new and growing
community mainly through Instagram called
the sci community.
Now what we are is we are a group of scientists,
educators, communicators, artists,
and our primary aim is to bring science to the young
through of course the growing social media forums
which are being used more and more on a daily basis
by young people.
So part of this, say we have our Instagram
which is mainly where we are centered.
We have only started back in January and already
at this point now we have around 11,000 followers
and we continue to grow.
We're made up of over 100 scientists and one of
the things we pride ourselves on is representing
diversity among science both we are collaborate
with groups for women in science, for LGBT representation
in science, for ethnic minorities in science,
and we really pride ourselves on that inclusivity
and bringing everyone together.
And what we do is we basically profile scientists
every other day or so and bring a new face to people
they talk about either to research or new ways
that they communicate science and it just gives everybody
a chance to get out there and also apply to their own base.
We are also on Twitter and we are starting to grow
on YouTube as well where people are doing longer videos
where they can talk about their research
or ways that they communicate to people.
But the reason why I'm talking about this to you today
is I'm looking for more representation from
ocean science community.
We do need a few more.
I'm a geologist background and there's only
a few of us anyway but it'd be great to see
some more people within oceanography
or anyone who has a passion for communicating
ocean science to bring this to our community
and to really help impact how we perceive
ocean science and communication
for people of a young age, particularly through
high school and undergraduate college level.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Thank you for this opportunity,
I am Beno from Fabla, Peru and I am coming from
the Amazon Rainforest.
I don't know if maybe how many of you
have been in the Amazon Rainforest.
Not too much but I would love to invite you to be there.
We are developing a floating flat lab
that will navigate the Amazon River and tributaries.
For people that don't know about the Amazon Rainforest
it's an amazing biolab where almost everything around you
you can eat almost everything around you
(laughing)
but also anything around you can eat you so it's a
(laughing)
very challenging place but it is a place where you can
really learn about nature, the connection with
a global scale and also we face many different challenge.
Of course global warming, deforestation,
species extinction, massive extinction of species.
So that's the reason why we are developing this platform.
That will navigate the river connecting global communities
as you know with local communities to develop
solution for many different problem.
For example, water quality.
We are 3D printing fishes that have biosensors
to detect heavy metals, oil, urban waste, et cetera.
Also even if this is one of the most
biodiverse areas in the world we have 90%
child malnutrition so we are exploring superfoods
to print vitamins for kids especially, et cetera.
So we are developing many different projects
as a global community, not only with countries
around the Amazon Rainforest, it's an invitation
for everybody so I would be happy to join you of course
in this sense, thank you so much.
(applauding)
-: Hi everybody.
My name is Shanise Stanitsky, I'm a complex systems
scientist focusing on marine systems and
an experiential artist and now a mother of submarines.
(laughing)
Oh no it's blurry!
So I'm here to talk about
the community submersibles project.
We are basically indulging in this concept of exploration
where exploration by submersibles is
in the popular imagination the sort of metaphorical
journey into the most remote corners
of the human experience.
And it's in a lot of ways analogous to space travel
except that it's absolutely full of life
and not just life, I mean, it's full of these guys.
(laughs)
And they're magical and they're glowing
and they're just completely wondrous.
They have nothing in common, well,
they have little in common with so many
of the organisms that most people see in their lives
and it's impossible to explain to people
what the visceral experience of being confronted
by such extreme novelty on your own planet feels like.
And so the purpose of this project is to sort of
live inside the question, what if anyone could do it,
what if anyone could go?
And so
(laughs)
you can't see but I adapted two submersibles.
The one on the top that's all blurry
with all the people gathered around it, that's Fangtooth
and this one down below is Noctaluca.
And in service of this access issue,
two sort of imperatives emerged and they are
destroy the transactional financial model
that (laughs)
where entities pay absolutely astronomical
amounts of money to go on dives,
and the other is to show people what happens
to you down there.
And so we've sort of started building
this culture and community around this experience
with the intent of softening the kind of hypertechnical
way that the ocean exploration is portrayed
because there's a psychological accessibility issue as well.
And so we're kind of acknowledging that this is
an exercise of the human spirit, exploration is.
And so...
I forgot what I was gonna say.
Doesn't matter!
(laughing)
So what we're doing is we are trying to engage makers,
builders, dreamers, fabricators, engineers,
artists in particular to sort of help communicate
the psycho, emotional, and aesthetic qualities
of this extremely profound act of exploring the deep.
And so we're having our artists that are on our crew
are repainting the subs to be beautiful
inside and out.
We are shooting a music video inside of Noctaluca
with a scrolling underwater scene handpainted
that scrolls past the view port with it on land.
We're taking it to festivals like you can see on top
and just generally creating this joyful
and expressive community around it and then
once we have people feeling like this concept
is approachable and they're engaged then we're like
actually, now you're gonna become a mechanic
and now you're gonna become an engineer
and now you're gonna be a pilot.
And we're doing it and you can too.
(laughing)
And so this metaphorical act of,
these like internal acts of bravery in confronting
the inaccessible and really investigating
what that means in an internal way,
this is mirrored perfectly by the outward experience
of journeying into the unknown.
And so I just wanna leave you with that thought
and I hope you'll join us and I have stickers
and come talk to me, there are lots
of practical aspects of this, it's a really big vision
I just wanted to give you a little slice of it
and that's it, thanks.
(applauding)
-: Thank, let's give another round of applause
for all of our lightning talkers.
Great job everybody.
(applauding)
So just a couple of logistical things
before we break up into workshops right now.
So we have five workshops this afternoon.
Everyone will go to two of them.
The one at the top, transmedia storytelling,
everyone will go to at some point this afternoon
and so half of the room here will go
to transmedia storytelling which will be just outside
where we had lunch, and for the first session
everyone else will break up amongst the other four.
Future aquarium will be on the fifth floor,
aqua games is in a room on the fourth floor,
the -493 means it's on the fourth floor.
Shared exploration is in 240 on the second floor
and then the Lego workshop will be at the MIT
sailing pavilion which is across the street.
So go down to the lobby and a group
will go across the street.
This is the schedule so we are a little bit behind
so right now as soon as we break
just go straight to your location so we can start
promptly at 1:45, we'll have an hour and a half
and then between 3:15 to 3:30 that'll be the chance
to move to your next workshop location.
Another hour and a half, and then we'll come back here
for the wrap up.
If you haven't noticed, look at the back of your name tag.
That will show you where you're going.
It has your workshop assignment, the times,
and the locations on the back of your name tag.
What if I don't have workshops on the back of my name tag?
You ask.
Go take a look at the descriptions either in the program
or on the wall just outside this room
and go to whichever one you wish.
If you have an assignment,
please go to where you're assigned
because the rooms we have are very limited
in terms of space so we can't just have everybody
going to wherever they want.
One final note is that we do have an online opportunity
for all of our online viewers to participate
in transmedia storytelling for the first session.
So this is the link, it's also on the
allhandsondeck.community forum agenda page
so go there.
Philip from the MIT Media Lab Learning Initiative
will be running that concurrently with the storytelling
workshop so please go check that out
and everybody here let's break and go enjoy your workshops.
Thank you so much everyone, it seemed like it was sort of
milling around, seemed like workshops went really well
and since we're running a little bit behind
I'm just gonna turn it straight over to Catherine Havasi
with shared exploration beyond the screen.
(applauding)
-: I need the clicker.
It's on the table?
Oh it is on the table, that's fantastic.
Hi everybody.
So my workshop was shared exploration beyond the screen
and we focused on immersive experiences for the ocean
with the idea that we could help bring the ocean
into environments and to populations
that would normally have the idea,
the ability to work with it through immersive experiences.
So I guess the next question that you probably have
if you weren't in the workshop is,
and maybe even if you were,
what is an immersive experience?
And that can be very broad.
The idea that we're going to bring our senses into it,
that we're going to put people into an environment
where they can use a combination between art and science
to really have great visuals and great experiences
that bring them inside a situation like the ocean.
And there's quite a range of immersive experiences out there
right now, probably a bunch of you have gone to
escape rooms or you've seen something like this
or you've been at an immersive theater show.
And so that's one end of the equation
and there's been a lot of work in museums as well
in bringing these experiences to life.
And if you think about it
it's kind of always been true.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, I remember going to the
Carnegie Museum of Science and going down
in that little elevator to the center of the earth
in like the '80s, I don't know if anybody remembers
that or if anyone's from Pittsburgh,
that's also an immersive experience.
Thank you.
(laughing)
Literally everyone who's from Pittsburgh
immediately lights up when you say that
and you tell that story so it really shows
the power of these things.
And we talked about that.
So how many people here
have been to an immersive experience?
Awesome.
How many people here have created an immersive experience?
Even more awesome.
Okay so our workshop came up with some ideas
and we talked about big themes.
A big idea of how to use immersion was really
to work with scale.
The idea that there's so much in the ocean that is small,
that is vast and exciting, to be able to work
to bring the vastness down to be accessible
or to bring the small up to be something
that understandable was a big theme
that many of the groups in my workshop worked on.
Everything like immersive microscopes to be able
to take a look at all the tiny stuff that's going on
inside a handful of ocean water down to 360 degree domes
to really understand what's going on in the sentiment
in the ocean floor.
A lot of people talked about burrowing animals actually
and understanding what it's like underneath
the floor of the sea and the colonies that are down there
and also the ocean has a giant vertical scale.
Could we move that to a horizontal scale
and be able to work and build an environment
for that kind of thing?
And the other side would be really to build
living connections, you know, in an environment
where for any number of reasons the ocean
isn't accessible, can we find ways to connect
people with the ocean via livestreams, via sensory data.
Both with researchers who are out there actively
doing work right this second but also with environments.
Particularly interesting idea
was can we build something like one of those tunnels
that goes underneath a railway or a road.
Where the tunnel is continually evolving as the environment
and it's echoing a marine environment so as you
walk through it you can kinda hear and maybe even see
art or something what was going on there.
The big idea there is can we merge the street
with the ocean, can we make it something
that people experience every day so they don't need
to go out and they don't need to say hey, today
I'm gonna go experience the ocean.
It becomes part of their life.
And with all of that.
We came up with some themes.
The number one theme that we ended up talking about
a lot was accessibility.
And that's something that whenever you talk about
immersive experiences, you end up talking about
scalability, one person with a VR headset
is not very scalable.
And plus scalable content creation.
One person with a VR headset and a story
that takes a team of 10 people to write
is also not very accessible cost wise for people
like schools, high schools, underfunded museums,
all that kind of stuff.
How do we build up the economy of scale here
to be able to make this actually work?
As well as focusing on inclusive design,
bringing in underrepresented groups
and indigenous groups and really making the design
accessible to them.
We talked already about reaching folks in landlocked
communities and I think the consensus is
one size doesn't fit all and really within our discussions
we talked a lot about the need for diversity
and building these experiences, both with regards to
everybody involved in the, everybody in the people
who are bringing to the table but also in bringing
artists and scientists together.
To really understand what people, what each other was doing.
And in some ways that's how museums and aquariums
are evolving so we wanna help people
to rediscover aquariums and museums.
And go there for reasons that are different
than what they expected.
And we talked about the concept of art
as emotional priming to really get people
excited about things and being ready to learn,
being ready to engage.
And there was a lot of bring an artist to work day,
how can we bridge this boundary, right?
And there was a lot of very practical discussions
about what's going on in aquariums right now
and the sort of barriers that keep them
from being able to go do that but I think
an important point was you know aquariums and zoos
really know how to reach underserved populations?
And that we need to really activate and work
with those teams within the groups.
And finally a little bit of a cautioning note here
which is that there's a lot of really great, exciting
visual stuff happening in immersive experiences right now
and then there's a lot of science happening
and people, a certain population will go to the science
and they'll check out, and a certain population
will go to the shiny stuff and they'll be
very excited about it but they won't open their mind
to learning so how do you bring the two together
and build something that's really able to bring
a message home and cause people to learn,
cause people to open up and bring home more than just
that was a really cool thing that I got to see.
And that was sort of the big quandary question
that we really took out of it.
Okay.
Thank you guys.
(applauding)
-: I have no slides, hooray.
Hello, I'm Novi San, I led the aqua games workshop.
If you were in my workshop, raise your hand.
(cheering)
Those are my game designers, yeah!
You guys did an amazing job.
If you work for say a theme park company
or someone that builds water parks,
there's a lot of really smart game designers out there,
you should go find them because some of the stuff
they came up with was amazing.
So I'm just gonna give you a quick breakdown.
The game, the prompt was to try to create experiences
in the water, above the water, with the water in some way.
That can bring the ocean where it isn't
and that gets people more engaged with the ocean
whether there or not.
And all of these have met that prompt.
A big theme was obstacle courses.
There seems to be a giant desire to have
the sort of Tough Mudder Spartan Sprint kind of things
in the water so lots of amazing,
one is sort of more of a meow wolf sized aquatic
environment that sort of maps the entire earth
and lets you go around and actually experience
all the different types of oceans and the things
on the bottom and sort of like rock climbing
under the water, going past geothermal vents,
things like that.
Another one is called Fish Run which is a very similar
idea that you've got lots of tag team
and relay type things that go between
land and water so you're experiencing mangroves
and then you're up on the land and then you're back
into the different types of ecosystems.
There's lots of converted board games.
So one we have Connect Sea Floor which is basically
(laughing)
a version where there is a coach or an adult
that is throwing out Frisbees of different colors
and teams have to go and grab the first one
and then they have to ultimate Frisbee style
til they get back to the grid
and then actually dive down and strategically place
the different checkers into the Connect Four
and if you don't do it in time everything explodes.
(laughing)
There's also the inverted or what we call
inverted type games called Flink, called Float and Sink.
So if you imagine Jenga but you're actually putting things
that are more or less buoyant and the entire thing
might tip over on you and there's ways of,
there's actually an economy, the market
where you can actually trade different types of blocks
to more strategically place them.
That one's super fun.
There's one called H2Go which is kind of a combination
of the big year that's done in the birding community
and the bio blitz so we were originally calling it
pelagic Pokemon.
This idea that you take a long time
or a very long period to sort of collect
different real species of aquatic animals and plants.
We did a massive artwork so you had to go out
with your team and find plastic in the ocean
only of a certain color for your team
and then when all the teams assembled
they would actually place that plastic on a giant net
so that it made a huge image, a huge painting on the ocean
and then when you had a friend with a drone
or perhaps a satellite they would come over
and photograph the giant painting
and then once that had happened your entire team,
everyone involved, would grab the net,
and remove that plastic from the ocean communally
and put it into the recycling where it belongs.
And then finally there's blue Jell-O.
(laughing)
it was originally called blue Jell-O shots
because we thought well maybe adults would only play it
after they've had a few and kids were definitely
just going to play this.
But basically it's the quick idea that you could do it
even with a Nintendo Twitch.
Basically it was a wearable kind of thing.
You'd put on your turtle shell or you would put on
your shark tail or you would put on a different species
so that you would literally become one of the animals
in the ocean and then by properly doing the right motion
if you were a shark, that would actually propel you
through the different environments
and this could be an actual environment
or it could be a simulated environment that was giving you
ROV footage that you could then tag
different types of animals that you were interested
in eating if you were a shark or if you were a turtle,
et cetera, et cetera, and that could also help tag
machine learning and classifier sets.
So again we had lots of themes to come together.
We had a lot of fun, I hope everyone had
as much fun as I did and the best thing I can say is
I want to play all of these games.
(laughing) So thanks.
(applauding)
-: Hey, hello.
My name is Scott Penman, I'm a research associate
at the Design Lab here at MIT.
-: And I'm Billy Spitzer from the New England Aquarium.
-: So we had a workshop called envisioning
the future aquarium experience.
For those of you that don't know,
the New England Aquarium
is coming up on its 50th anniversary
next year, so we've actually been working with them
over the past year or so to try to envision
what do the next 50 years look like?
And that's obviously a pretty tough question,
it's kind of impossible to imagine
what anything looks like in 50 years,
just imagine what things looked like 10 years ago.
But one thing that we wanted to bring to bear
on this workshop was the idea of conservation.
Now instead of kind of leaving it as this big
possibly scary term we wanted to break it down
not into what will the aquarium do
but what is the experience of conservation?
So as a visitor to the aquarium,
how do I actually understand what conservation is,
what it means, and in doing that we talked about
the values and the three kind of categories
of awareness, guidance, and impact.
So how can the future aquarium experience
actually enhance awareness of current issues
and problems facing the ocean world?
How can it actually guide its visitors towards
actionable steps that they can take,
and then finally how can it really convey
and show the impact that each person has
on the conservation efforts?
And we believe that the aquarium has an important role here.
We believe that when you start to think about
the changing cities and the changes and develops
in technology, the aquarium really has an incredible
potential to bring awareness to its visitors
of these issues by immersing them
in new sensory experiences.
And we also wanted to focus not just on the aquarium
within the aquarium walls but also start to talk about
well what happens when that experience expands
outside of the aquarium, starting at the home,
going through the aquarium visit
and then all the way into the city beyond.
And again we really believe that the aquarium
can provide a lot of guidance and really enhance
the impact here through educational, empathetic takeaway.
So this was all the kind of stuff that we gave
our workshop participants, we kinda threw a lot of this
at them and then let them kinda start to think
about what possibilities might be
and we encourage them to think okay,
you have these three values of impact, awareness,
and guidance, how do you start to come up with ideas
not just in the aquarium but also in the city
and also in the home?
And the stuff they came up with was really amazing.
-: So just to give you an idea of some of the themes
that came up, one question that came up is that
if an aquarium is really about looking at animals
through a glass, it's almost like having a screen
and as screens get better and better,
what's the role of an aquarium with live fish?
And one of the things that we were talking about
a little bit is what's happening with movies
and what's happening with restaurants.
Fewer people are going to movie theaters
because a lot of that media experience is available
at home or on your mobile device and so on,
but restaurants are doing great.
Why are there so many restaurants,
and so many people going to them?
Because it's not just about the food, right?
And I think there's an analogy to aquariums.
It's not just about looking through a glass,
it's about a social experience,
it's about interacting with other people,
it's about being in a civic space,
it's about multiple dimensions at the experience
and one theme that came up around that was that
to not sell short what entertainment is about.
Entertainment is not just something that's frivolous
it's also about making an emotional connection
and emotion and learning and action and motivation
are all intimately connected in our brains
and so that's something that's really important.
Another theme that came up is the fact that what's happening
out in nature we see a lot of changes,
a lot of in some cases devastation yet what you see
in aquariums tends to be much more pristine
and how can we bridge that gap?
So some of the ideas that came up were around
creating experiences more virtual or more simulated
that could help people see those environmental changes.
So it could be a virtual tank or something like that
that would enable people to see that
and then there were some really interesting ideas
about taking the aquarium outside the physical walls
and really being more community oriented.
There were examples that came up
of pop up aquariums that could be mobile.
The idea of kind of an aquarium trail
instead of the Freedom Trail that really
enabled you to experience things
related to the ocean throughout the city.
So I think that really those elements
of the aquarium that are beyond the fish tank
are really what popped up through this which was
really pretty neat.
-: Yep, that's it, thank you.
(applauding)
-: Hi everybody, I'll be quite brief since all of you
or most of you participated in this but
we had a lot of fun, we really worked on trying
to develop a tool kit for how we can take
the passion that you all have,
the missions that you are serving,
the research that you're doing,
and transition from that mission
into a clear statement of your passion
and that passion into a clear statement of narrative.
We did a little exercise asking everybody to
take their passion statement that they wrote
for themselves, they shared it with each other,
then they also had to do with the tweet
or the elevator pitch version of that
so because we know that challenges of too much information
can sometimes get in our way for the stories
that we need to tell to bring people closer
to our passions.
We also then moved into a narrative stage
where everyone was asked to tell their passion
through a story about a little girl named little Brianna
and many people took that challenge and were able to form
a narrative statement to tell their story.
We also did take a few moments to just acknowledge
some of the challenges of transitioning a fact-based
stance into a narrative format and what some of
the discomfort was with doing that.
We also spent a little time talking about
how to understand who your audience is
so that you're not just telling a story randomly
but who is your primary audience, who are your second
and third audience goals and eventually that will lead you
to telling this story in a different way depending on
who that audience is and in that category we talked about
a philosophy of wading, swimming, or deep diving
in your subject matter and in how you engage
those different guests that you're trying to reach
with your story.
And then as a wrap up we applied story to the
Ayala challenge that Ayala posed this morning,
can we use humor and story to solve some big problems?
So we did a great little story workshop
where everyone created stories,
half the room created stories to solve the problems
of overfishing and the other half did
plastic in the ocean and I think there's some excellent
stories and some of those will get sent to Katy
and hopefully circulated.
So you could see what I learned today is that
everybody in this room is creative
and creative storytelling, it's an iterative process
and you all took a great first step today.
(applauding)
-: We have a prop. -: Woo!
-: Hello everyone, I'm Harmfen Baak,
I'm one of the Lego designers that worked on,
the device here is just fresh out of the Charles River,
it's still a bit wet.
(laughing)
We just had a workshop where people could experience this
so what is this?
It is a Lego mine storms robot, it can go underwater
and the idea is that actually--
-: Only two feet.
-: Yeah so it doesn't go that deep.
One of the many inputs that we got actually
in should go deeper.
The idea is actually that middle school and high school
students can use this to do research in the ocean
so we have done this this summer with some high school
students, this was second time where we showed it
to those people, now to the professionals.
I was quite excited to see what they would think about this.
Most of the input that we got actually was like
okay, we need more sensors, we need this this this and this.
Turbidity and a hydraphone would be amazing.
(laughing)
Cool so actually I guess that sort of tells us
that in the bigger picture this
people think this is a really good idea.
That this is something that we can use actually
to have kids experience the science of the oceans.
So that's really great to hear.
I guess the key takeaway is was that okay
so we have a really great tool here to do science.
The price might be a little bit high in its current
inclination, shouldn't we think about maybe
unrepresented communities.
And there was really one great idea that we hadn't
really thought about what if this can be
more in the form of a library.
So you can actually borrow this one for say
a semester or a couple months to do some research
and then it goes through like a different
community and that was really sort of eye opening,
okay, this is actually a thing that we hadn't
thought about 'cause we were also very busy
just keeping it water tight which was quite of a challenge.
And again so after we had a second workshop,
people came around and said yeah what about
deep diving and the narrative and all that kind of stuff.
-: The narrative.
So I don't know how they got that idea but
actually it was really important because we have
a really great tool, it's a very sort of science-y,
data-driven, engineering, you can do programming
and scratch and all that kind of stuff.
But actually why are we doing this?
Why am I learning this, why am I learning about the ocean?
I think that really sort of sets the bar for us
to come up with a really great narrative
and a way to sort of get kids excited
that are not just the nerdy kids
that are into programming and so on.
So it was a really great session so we're hoping to
continue with this thing and make a better version of it.
Thank you.
(applauding)
-: Thanks.
Let's give a hand for all of our workshop leaders.
(applauding)
All of our unsung heroes, the (speaking in foreign language)
who were taking notes.
And to all of you for really diving in there,
pun absolutely intended.
And to all of the workshops so thank you very much.
Now we're gonna transition into
a couple of short updates on some ongoing projects.
Dominique Rizolo will kick us off with a little report
back on the 2017 Ocean Exploration Forum.
Which was focused on data.
And then David McKinney from the NOAA office
of Ocean Exploration and Research will give us
an update on a series of workshops that have been
going on in collaboration with XPRIZE called The Big Think.
So Dom.
-: Thanks Katy.
I didn't know I could change into my Chucks, that's awesome.
(laughing)
Alright, we're sticking around, we're gonna wrap it up
but we'll bring up a slide here and transition into
a little bit of an update since our forum last year.
My name is Dominique Rizolo
and I'm at the Qualcomm Institute
at University of California San Diego,
I'm a research scientist there and we like to say that
Qualcomm Institute is sort of, I don't know if I would say
the Media Lab is the Qualcomm Institute
of the east coast in some ways.
On campus we're the home of quirky,
curiosity-driven research.
And just a little quick story on curiosity.
I'll get some visuals going.
So we all have our ocean stories,
I just was reflecting on that earlier.
Thinking about wow I didn't grow up near the ocean
but I was a water baby like many of you in the room
and in the forest around where I lived
it was filled with creeks and swamps and ponds.
For some reason I felt that that was the place
where I needed to go explore and I mean I remember
these days as a kid getting old dive mask
that I found at a garage sale and grab an fishing knife
and jump into that water and exploring.
Imagining that I was a deep sea explorer
swimming down into the murky depths
and hunting for treasure and sea creatures
so I had a chance to go back to one of these
childhood ponds not too long ago
and I stood at the edge of this coffee-colored water,
I'm like, really?
Like, (laughs) what was I thinking?
Right?
But that's the power of curiosity
and that's what drives so many of us.
I mean taking us to places that, I don't know,
they just sort of push us to our limits.
So I wanna talk a little bit about the forum.
We'll get going here on some, oh, here it is,
oh, I got the clicker, awesome.
I don't have to do that.
So.
So the National Ocean Exploration Forum
our focus last year was ocean exploration
in a sea of data so we've demonstrated
a certain ability to more effectively
and more efficiently explore the world's oceans.
The real challenge to some of us is how do we explore
ocean data?
Such a huge quantity of data that we've collected
through this whole enterprise of ocean exploration
that maybe we're in a position now where we can
as a compliment to our more deductive approaches
to marine science, sort of dabbling in more inductive
approaches to marine science.
How do we dive into these data really powered by
a different community, one that we're moving
a little bit closer to now
and that's the data science community.
And we convened, this is in October 2017
at the Qualcomm Institute on campus at UC San Diego.
This was a large effort that was driven by David McKinney
and Vicky Farini and Adrian Copeland
so we had a great team of co-organizers and supporters
to bring the fifth National Ocean Exploration
to UC San Diego.
So an important part of these forums is fellowship, right?
And it's not just about maintaining momentum
but building momentum, building new kinds of momentum.
So the fellowship part is very important,
the time that we spend not only in this room
but outside this hall, getting together
and interacting with one another as a community
and building new communities.
But one of the things we felt was really exciting
about this forum is to bring students into the forum
in a capacity or in a way that hadn't been done
previously and pair these students with mentors
in engineering, computer science and engineering,
and data sciences to work together with ocean scientists
and with other data science mentors to go after
some of these research challenges.
And it was wonderful to have them there as part of the forum
not traditionally part of the ocean exploration
community but exploring ocean data.
So we did this through a number of different
demos I should say they really were experiments.
And they made use of a number of the data visualization
labs on campus, we had a project that focused on
sonification of ocean data, this is sonometer data
that was Bob Ziak from PMEL and David McKinney
as well working with Adrian Copeland and Sharoq Yatagari
and Grady Kessler on the sonification data
but also exploring the use of ambisonic recording
to explore soundscapes underwater.
A whole different kind of exploration.
I think that was probably one of the more interesting
experiments at the forum.
We had some under ice data that was part of
the Rosetta ice program in Antarctica
so radar data that allowed us to look deep inside
the ice in Antarctica, this was a collaboration
with Nick Frearson, Aviv Petrovich, a graduate student
at UC San Diego, revealing these data in ways
that had never been revealed before through
novel approaches to visualization.
We explored a number of different immersive laboratories
looking at bathymetry with Vicky Farini.
This is John Delaney's OOI experiment
that he shared with us at the forum.
Working with his team
and then in our wave lab looking at the power
of point based visual analytics for understanding
core reef environments.
And so our goal through our lab at Qualcomm Institute
is to enable analytical reasoning through
immersive and collaborative visualization.
And that's the important part too,
this is not about putting an HMD on
and looking at knee point clouds.
This is about bringing together
not only your colleagues but other stakeholders
and having a conversation about those data,
fully immersing yourself in those data in 3D
and in a collaborative and interactive way.
So since then we've been able to bring some of these
data to other communities on campus,
particularly through the new emerging undergraduate
and graduate data science programs.
So we have now projects up on the data science hub,
we can build undergraduate teams of students
who never though they would do anything having to do
with the ocean on campus to explore these data
with their faculty mentors and their domain experts,
in this case Vicky Farini is an example of
diving into more ocean floor data
than most of us know what to do with
so this has been a great thing for us
to bring in those data science students,
undergraduate and graduate students and get 'em excited
about marine exploration.
And sometimes this involves getting students out to sea.
This is Antinella Willoughby who's gonna be
sharing with you tomorrow, one of the things
that's really powerful about these forums is that
people get together, make connections,
and in this case these are engineering students
who through these connections made at the forum
went out to sea for the first time.
And this is Antinella and Jessica Sandoval
on board Nautilus.
And so we're really excited that this forum
was able to catalyze these kinds of collaborations
getting students out into the field, turning wrenches,
digging into the data,
and discovering new and amazing things.
Sharayas Kamat, another one of our students
who would have never imagined that he would do anything
having to do with marine sciences.
Went out on the Tommy Thompson to collect thermal data
which is a big project that we're working on now
to look at thermal fronts in the ocean
and bringing together our electrical engineering
computer science and engineering students
and getting them exposed in a really
sort of physical and visceral way to the world
of ocean science.
So thanks Katy and your team for bringing us here
and thanks so much, appreciate it.
Oh. (applauding)
And just one last note, the report for those of you
who are interested from last year's forum
is gonna be available at the reception.
We have limited number of copies but please
pick one up, thanks so much.
(applauding)
-: All-important clicker.
(laughing)
So.
Great so as it turns out I get the last
presentation of the day which is great
after a really long day and also Jodica Vermani,
many of you know her, she's with XPRIZE.
She is actually in Greece right now with round two
of the XPRIZE, the autonomous underwater vehicle.
So I'll mention her in a second.
So she's not available and Jerry Schubel
who worked with us on these workshops is also
not available so it's the last presentation
and you're getting the third string
so I'll do the best I can.
(laughing)
So this all started, again, a lot of you are familiar
with XPRIZE whether it's from space
or from ocean stuff, they're increasingly important
in our world as a way to promote innovation,
getting entrepreneurs involved.
Sort of spinning off of what Dominique said,
people who might not otherwise think
of themselves as oceaneers are formed into teams
to get some potentially interesting results.
So the test here that Jodica is dealing with in Greece
is for an autonomous underwater vehicle
that can be launched from shore or from the air
and at two depths, 2,000 meters and 4,000 meters,
which is quite deep, do a number of things.
Collect a photography, collect some high resolution
bathymetry, and thanks to NOAA with a little add on
follow a chemical signal to its source.
So pretty amazing stuff and we're hopeful
that the XPRIZE process will result
in great new instruments for ocean exploration.
But as part of that, XPRIZE wisely carved out
a chunk of money for a public engagement component
and these are some of my favorite posters
related to ocean exploration.
I don't know who did them but
they're beautiful and have great messages.
One of the interesting things it says 95%
of the ocean is unexplored, Neil Jacobs said 80%.
It's a really interesting number because
you can have lots of debates about what it means
to be explored.
But for our purposes and for the public
95%'s a good number.
So Jodica took an interesting approach
in setting up these workshops.
She wrote a paper, a very, very good paper
that we'll make available, right Katy?
On the website afterwards as a resource for you.
Ask the question how come space is so cool
and how come everybody thinks NASA's a great agency
and how come everybody wants to go into outer space
and explore Mars but the same isn't true about
the deep ocean?
How could that be?
And so rather than bemoan our fate as ocean people
and be jealous of NASA and wish we had their money
and all that kind of stuff, Jodica actually looked
into some of the details and found
some pretty interesting results.
That only three of which I'm gonna highlight as examples
and please go read that paper, it's really good.
So the first thing she found or proposed is that
generally in news stories, in film,
in anything else related to space,
space is presented as being grand and infinite
and wonderful and an amazing place
that you want to think about.
One of the presenters at the first XPRIZE workshop
Bob Weiss who's a film producer said,
"Space offers an infinite number of panoramas
"in which the mind can wander."
The oceans, well, not so much.
You're restricted to cold, dark,
and maybe you're looking through a porthole
and it's kind of claustrophobic.
And so just as human beings we respond
to those two scenarios in very different ways.
The other thing is that space stories
are almost universally positive
and at the workshop the first one we had
and I'll talk about it in a second,
we tried to think of negative things about space
and we came up with space debris.
Now there's talk about militarizing space,
that's pretty bad.
But other than that it's kind of hard
to think of something really negative about space.
On the other hand, I really like the manta image
today from Carlos, this one looks like it's dying from
hypoxia, the turtle probably should have plastic
wrapped around its neck and then all that great debris
in the water.
A lot of our ocean stories are that way.
And so while that may be the reality and regrettably
it is and we can add to that list as we all know,
when all the stories or typically the stories
about the ocean are these negative stories
it's got an impact on the public's imagination.
And as a federal bureaucrat
this is one of my favorite slides.
(laughing)
On the one side you've got I think I counted 18
private sector government agency and everything else
involved in space.
In the world.
Okay, these are the national space agencies,
you've got Virgin, you've got Blue Origin.
And the Indians, the Canadians, everybody else.
18.
I didn't even try and count the other side, right?
And what's interesting is that the 18 have
a fairly consistent message.
If you're reading something about the landing
on the comet, was last year or 18 months ago,
from the European space agency, that's pretty aligned
with what NASA's doing and it's pretty aligned
with what everyone else is doing in space
and it's all a good story.
There are that many different messages out there.
About the ocean.
All from a slightly different angle,
all of them trying to distinguish themselves
in some way from all the other ones out there
so they can raise money or promote their agenda
or convey a message that they think is important
to the public and that too is part of the problem
with space and ocean.
So.
With that small challenge in mind,
and there's more of that list so please again
read the paper.
With that challenge in mind, Jodica organized
these Big Think sessions.
And the first one was very interesting because
what maybe 30 people and I believe there were four
ocean exploration people involved.
And I'm eternally grateful that my boss Alan Leonardi
wasn't able to go so I went in his place.
Worked out pretty well from my perspective.
But Jerry Schubel was there, Carly Weiner was there.
And maybe one or two others from the ocean side.
Everyone else they were filmmakers, public relations people,
educators, journalists, fiction writers.
Lots of different perspectives on how to influence
the public were there so we got past the kind of
typical conversation that ocean explorers usually have
when they get together.
You know, and we had a conversation much like
we're having here where we've got such a diversity
of interests that we can actually get past the kind of
normal descriptions of what ocean exploration is.
So condensing it and I don't expect you to read all of these
but there were two parts to it after we had to identify
our favorite space movie and our favorite ocean movie
and guess what, there are a lot more space movies
than there were ocean movies.
These were the things that people found inspirational.
And these are the things that people found memorable.
And you can kind of, this is predictable in a way
but it was kind of interesting to have this convergence
among all the people about what inspires people
and what makes something memorable.
From storytelling perspectives, from journalism perspectives
and from media perspectives.
What's not on this list is things that
make me depressed or things that make me feel hopeless.
And so going back to the slide with the gasping
for oxygen manta or the ray.
The theme then became so recognizing the problems
that we have, what can we do about it to present
in a different way to the public?
How can we message differently so that
people can start to care about the ocean
and not just give up before they learn anything about it?
Which leads us to Big Think 2 which was in September
just a month and a half ago at Jerry Schubel's
Aquarium of the Pacific.
So a lot of overlap, not complete overlap,
but again very few ocean exploration people involved.
Now.
I don't expect you to read this list but the task was
so now that we know what inspires people
and what makes people, what's memorable about events
for people, what can we do in concrete terms in
different time horizons?
So in less than two years, what can we do,
two to five years, and in five to 10 years or more.
And you can probably tell this is a brainstorm
and you can tell there's gonna be a report
that will kind of polish this all up
but interestingly, a lot of the ideas here
are also ideas that you guys have come up with here, right?
So small ROVs crowd driven with experts' commenting,
well that's not too far away from Lego or open ROV
or some of the other things that can be done.
Science reality shows featuring XPRIZE competitors.
That could work.
But over here, we're kind of joking that unifying
#influencer campaign, all those like 800 little logos
on the one side, getting all those people organized
well that's probably a dream but nevertheless
we could try and maybe get a bit more organized.
Other ideas, over two to five years.
Again, similar things to what we're talking about here.
We'll make these slides available afterwards as well.
And one of my favorites here, I don't have a pointer but
we need to put Aquaman on the Oceanus Explorer.
I have this vision of Aquaman holding on to a
deep discoverer ROV coming out of the water
and visiting the bridge.
Someday maybe we'll get that done.
(laughing)
But you know lots of more practical things as well.
I would love to see Aquaman on the Oceanus Explorer,
I think that'd be awesome.
(laughing)
But things really concrete that are worth pursuing
like NOAA and NASA collaborating on an explorer's day.
So not an ocean exploration day but just an explorer's day
to kind of promote and spark the imagination.
And then the group was either super optimistic
about what could get done in this time period
or ran out of ideas but in any case in the longer term
it started to get, it seemed like a long time away
and ideas were some of these here that you see.
Certainly the idea of capitalizing on NASA's ocean worlds
campaign; Chris German in the audience is very active
in that along with other famous ocean explorers who are
making the linkage between NASA and NOAA on ocean worlds.
There's quite a bit that we could do here as well.
So the upshot is that it's not really about oceans
versus space, it's really about oceans and space.
How can we leverage each other, how can we promote
the ideas of ocean exploration, how can we take
some of the positive messages that NASA's so good
at delivering and delivering them about the ocean
while not neglecting the important work
that needs to be done?
So here Jodica and Jerry in Long Beach.
They wish they were here, Jerry'll be here tomorrow.
Jodica sends her regards.
Thank you very much.
(applauding)
-: Thank you David and Dom.
And we're actually running early and the bar is open.
(cheering and laughing)
So not for those of you under 21.
So I'm going to just wrap it up for the evening,
(clapping)
it's been a long day, you guys have put
a lot of brain power into it so let's call it early
and go enjoy our reception.
The art exhibit is still up so please
if you didn't have a chance to look at it during lunch,
take a peek.
Thank you and we'll see you back here at 8:15 I think.
(applauding)
Something like that.
(laughs)