Immersion to Action

What it is. A 2023 cross-disciplinary program at Swissnex San Francisco studying how immersive and experiential science programming shapes audience behavior after the program ends. Funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung (Scientainment, CHF 220K). Romie Kind served as Program Manager and Lead.

The brief. Most evaluation of public-engagement science programming asks whether the audience enjoyed it. That question is well-instrumented and not very useful. The harder question is whether anything in their actual life changes after they go home. Bootcamp-style intensive programs are a natural test environment for that question because the cohort is small enough to follow up on and the dose is concentrated enough to expect a real effect.

Our role. Romie Kind led the design and operations of the bootcamp from concept through cohort selection, programming, and the evaluation back-end. The program ran on a CHF 220K Gebert Rüf Scientainment grant out of Swissnex SF and used the existing science-communication community in the Bay Area as recruitment and review pool.