Colloquium: Prof. Bauke Steenhuisen
Tuesday, 6th November 2018, at 17.15 - 18.30
ETH Zurich, UNO B 11, Universitätstrasse 41
Why Scientists and Engineers Should be Storytellers
Science and engineering tend to distance themselves from ‘storytelling’. Writing fiction is generally not part of our curricula. Telling stories is not what we want scientists or engineers to do, apparently. But why not? I will argue the shameless opposite. Storytelling is an indispensable instrument when studying and developing new technologies. Storytelling is a powerful instrument that we should want scientists and engineers to use. Moreover, we need storytelling in particular in response to the rapidly developing technologies in the fields of robots, artificial intelligence, big data algorithms and many others. These developments do not only inspire many stories, often dystopian. We also need well-targeted stories and well-informed storytellers to create sufficient checks-and-balances in the process of developing technologies and their accompanying policies. I will substantiate this argument, showcase some stories and demonstrate how it can be taught.
About Prof. Bauke Steenhuisen
dr.ir. Bauke Steenhuisen is assistant professor at Technology, Policy & Management in Delft since 2009. His research has a broad orientation, focusing on trade-offs in public enterprises and their operational complexities in the context of management, stakeholder engagement, public oversight and politics. He collaborates in a number of research projects in the domain of infrastructures and governance. He did his PhD research on competing public values in the provision of rail and electricity transport. Before that, he graduated as an engineer in a master on system engineering, policy analysis and management in 2004.
His teaching focuses on multi-actor decision-making when designing complex systems. For several years now, and with increasing force, he uses theatre, poetry, gaming and storytelling in his courses. In the past two years, he started teaching engineering students in the Honours program a course dedicated to storytelling. The novel Igod (Dicke & Helbing, 2017) served as a key source of inspiration.
You can read a Summary of the talk on ISTP News.