Paper short abstract:

Based on a conversation piece, 3 to 4 participants will engage in a game format to experience creating a creative process that communicates the science they intend to and will be asked for feedback on how it could be implemented in their fields of research.

Paper long abstract:

Embark on a creative journey as we explore a conceptual prototype for a museum exhibit(ion), harvesting narratives as data to tackle the complexities of wicked problems. This proposal concerns a game to test how the elements within the exhibit proof of concept can be used to outline a creative process of building a narrative harvesting exhibit(ion).

This piece was developed for the research project ‘Soy Stories’: an NWO-funded project, which uses transdisciplinary narrative research approaches to engage with sustainability challenges in Brazil and the Netherlands that are geographically dispersed yet intertwined through soy (van der Vleuten & de Hoop, 2022). This prototype aims to engage audiences in conversation, allowing for both public deliberation and data collection thereon at the same time (drawing on the notion of situated intervention cf. Zuiderent-Jerak, 2015). As such, it seeks to explore possibilities for museums to relate to current societal concerns by acting as creative and participatory platforms fostering collaboration, deliberation and research (Gorman, 2020). The exhibit prototype will not be designed for one specific museum or place but will include possibilities that allow for embedding it in different museological and socio-cultural contexts. By building on that, the exhibit seeks to stretch and break paradigms and become a novel approach to bridging science, technology and society (Steward, 2006; Raelin, 2012). The goal of this collective effort - both the prototype and the workshop - is to stimulate continuous change based on how visitors in diverse museums engage with it.