Honing Curiosity @ MIT MediaLab

What is curiosity? What are the conditions of curiosity? Is it curated? Can you harness curiosity and begin to use it? How does one teach curiosity to enact radical change?

Curiosity follows the same neurological pathways as an itch and inhibits fear. Curiosity transfixed, reconfigures emotions, and begets pleasure, and we want to understand how to teach the skills of being curious. Through the lens of olfactory experiences, while integrating concepts from both scientific study and design, we are looking forward to exploring how to teach curiosity to people from all walks of life, and are curious ourselves of what we can learn about how we, as humans, formulate questions and share stories with others. 

For this workshop, I partnered with Andreas Mershin of MIT, Chris Rose of RISD, Hannah Choi, and Linden Gledhill.

The first of what will become a series of workshops and courses exploring how we define and understand curiosity, we spent time exploring an MIT Olfactory Lab, understanding where the spark of curiosity comes from, and began to ask how we might begin to harness these questions to push the study of curiosity and exploration forward.

We’re always open to cross-discipline collaboration and exploration. Please reach out if interested.