Curiosity at Work: A Swedish Perspective

“All companies, all organizations exist on the same arena… And, by coincidence, those things — change, surprise, and things that are hard to predict — are molded for that curious mind. So in my view, there is a perfect match between what companies need and the curious mind.” ~ Peder Söderlind

Peder Söderlind describes himself as a Swedish author, researcher and entrepreneur, but I believes he’s an important emerging curiosity theorist. His writing and thinking on the topic are rich in all the best ways — evocative, provocative, constructive.

Our conversation moved from “local, difficult, and meaningful” problems for keeping our minds curious and framing problems as opportunities, to the paradox of fatigue and the importance of seeing.

If you are not seeing the world as it is, or seeing yourself as you are, it’s really hard to formulate what you don’t know–or even what you don’t know you don’t know–and then there will never be information gaps and you will never become curious.

I was fascinated to learn about curiosity in the context of the Nordic social model of work life and the Swedish concepts of folkbildning and the Law of Jante.

Peder defines curiosity “as a movement that we are doing together, from what we don’t know, towards something unknown.”

Curiosity is, he says, a collective movement toward something new.

Choose to be Curious · Ep. #237: Curiosity at Work: A Swedish Perspective, with Peder Soderlind

LISTEN TO CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS #237: CURIOSITY AT WORK: A SWEDISH PERSPECTIVE, WITH PEDER SÖDERLIND

Read more about Peder Söderlind and his work on curiosity in organizations in Sweden. I enjoy following him on LinkedIn — I’m using the translation feature a lot more these days!

Peder was nominated for Swedish Learning Association‘s “Enthusiast of the Year in Learning” award. QUICK: Voting closes June 30th. It’s hard to imagine a more deserving recipient!

Learn more about Amy Edmondson‘s work on leadership (her name comes up a lot around here).

For related conversations, try these C2BC Classics: Appreciative Intelligence, with Tojo Thatchenkery; Diagnosing Curiosity with Stefaan van Hooydonk; Curiosity in the Workplace, with Alison Horstmeyer; and Cultivating Cultural Intelligence, with Asma Ahmad.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Rush of Clear Water” by Glacier Quartet Araby, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

The Choose to Be Curious shop is under (re)construction. Back soon!

Images of Curiosity: Visual & Domain-Specific

“The way that we think about knowledge–what we refer to as epistemic beliefs–have really predictable shifts. And I think those have a really important interaction with what we could possibly be curious about.” ~ Emily Grossnickle Peterson

Can we capture what makes us curious? Where does our curiosity cross into confusion, or frustration? Can we place it? Might we experience it in one domain, but not another?

These are the kinds of questions that animate the work of Emily Grossnickle Peterson, Ph.D., director of the Educational Neuroscience Lab at American University.

Years after first meeting, we finally sat down to talk…

If it gets too uncomfortable, do we stop calling it “curiosity” and do we call it something else?

Choose to be Curious · Ep. #236: Images of Curiosity: Visual & Domain-Specific, with Emily Peterson

LISTEN TO CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS #236: IMAGES OF CURIOSITY: VISUAL & DOMAIN-SPECIFIC, WITH EMILY PETERSON

There are so many options for recommending how to build on this conversation, but I’m going to go with guests who were also part of an American University Humanities Lab workgroup on curiosity in which both Emily and I participated. 

Check out these C2BC classics with other workgroup participants:

• Philosophy professor, Perry Zurn: Curiosity is Political, Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge, and Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, with Perry and his twin, Dani Bassett
• Poet David Keplinger: Poetry: Curiosity Emerging and Solitude
• Teacher Noel Bicknell and his students in Neurodiverse Curiosity, with Kristy Johnson.

Check out Dr. Emily Peterson’s Educational Neuroscience Lab. 

Add your pictures to the Images of Curiosity project on SciStarter. 

Listen to my conversation with Caroline Nickerson, citizen-science and SciStarter advisor.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “A Burst of Light” by Delray, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS SHOP IS UNDER (RE)CONSTRUCTION. Back soon!

IMAGES OF CURIOSITY: VISUAL & DOMAIN-SPECIFIC, WITH EMILY PETERSON

Emily Peterson: Something else I think is really interesting is the way that we think about knowledge. So, do we think if it’s something that’s acquired really quickly? Does it come from experts? Or is it something that I construct for myself and might have really these nuances and subjectivity and I need to weigh evidence or I can create knowledge by doing science experiments? The way that we think about knowledge, these what we refer to as epistemic beliefs, have really predictable shifts. And I think those have a really important interaction with what we could possibly be curious about.

(theme music)

Lynn Borton: This is Choose to be Curious, a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about how curiosity shows up in work. 

I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Welcome! Come, choose to be curious with us… 

I don’t often get to be a research guinea pig, but that’s what happened when I paid a visit to Emily Grossnickle Peterson’s Educational Neuroscience Lab at American University [00:01:00] recently.

I was meeting with Emily in anticipation of this conversation and to visit with the graduate and undergraduate students involved in the lab’s research. They put me right to work, trying out the study interface they were developing for a National Science Foundation grant investigating curiosity-driven visual processing during science learning.

Did you know that snails smell through their tentacles? I did not know that, but I learned it, and I’ve discovered I was actually curious about this fact when they sat me down for this trial run through. I won’t spoil the surprise, you know, in case you happen to participate in this research. I’ll just say that I thoroughly enjoyed my peek behind the research curtain, and I’m definitely curious to hear what they learn.

Dr. Peterson is a professor in the School of Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Psychology Department [00:02:00] and in the Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience PhD program at American University. Among other things, she studies intrinsic motivations, such as curiosity and interest, that are critical for sustained inquiry in science and mathematics.

At the heart of her lab’s work is a desire to reduce disparities among people typically underrepresented in STEM fields –so science, technology, engineering, mathematics — by conducting research that contributes to a deeper understanding of how students engage with science and math. She thinks about things like, What neurological and psychological changes take place when students are curious? How does curiosity develop? Why are some individuals more curious than others?

One of my favorite among her many current efforts is a citizen science project. You might [00:03:00]remember my conversation with the folks at SciStarter. This is one of those easy ways for anyone to play a real role in scientific research.

(Listen to that conversation if you want on my website.) 

The project is called Images of Curiosity, and the goal is to collect photos that have sparked curiosity, photos that will eventually find use in education research. 

To participate, you and I look for things that pique our curiosity. We take photos, and we submit the pictures.

That’s it. 

We can do it from anywhere, about anything. 

You can find the Images of Curiosity study on SciStarter, or on my website. I warn you, it can get a little addicting. 

I am delighted to have Emily Grossnickel Peterson join me today. So welcome, Emily.

EP: Thank you, Lynn. I’m delighted to be here.

LB: Oh, it’s really delightful to have you. And thanks for the opportunity to meet with your students and see how the [00:04:00] sausage was made. That was really a special time for me.

EP: Yeah, we’re always happy to have people test out and try out our studies. It’s interesting because I think you were coming to it as a very curious person, and so we’re often trying to get both curious and less curious people to participate as guinea pigs in our studies because they provide often very different perspectives.

LB: Yeah. As we were sitting down to get started on this, we were both reacting, Oh, there’s just so much to talk about, but I want to, I actually want to start with the images of curiosity because I think in some ways that’s like the most accessible thing that you’re doing. 

It’s… first of all, it’s citizen science…It’s about other people proactively going and identifying their own curiosity. But talk to me about the goal. What are you hoping to learn from it?

EP: I have to say I’m really interested in the citizen science around psychology because a lot of the citizen science psychology projects are being a participant in a research study and I wanted to try to develop a [00:05:00] project where just anybody could be involved in the stuff that we do in my lab as doing science. And one thing we spend a huge amount of time on is creating different stimuli. So the things you look at, the questions, the how do snails smell question, those sorts of different things. If we’re studying visual processing, we need lots of images. If we’re studying curiosity, we got questions, we need lots of questions.

And so that sort of brainstorming is a big part of what we do. And so we wanted to involve people in that so that just the general public, from kids up through adults, could get to engage in that type of science creation, so people submit images and many people also submit the question or questions that spark their curiosity about the images.

And we’ve gotten some interesting ones so far, so we’re hoping to… then it’s sort of going to be a multi-step process. And this is how we actually do most of our stimuli creation in the lab is we brainstorm lots of stimuli. And so that’s the first step, this Images of Curiosity project [00:06:00] right now. This phase one is, is brainstorming.

So we’re trying to get as many photographs as we can, and then we’re going to be kind of taking those and culling them down. Some of them may be appropriate for certain projects and some of them may be appropriate for different projects. And so then once we kind of have a more specific goal, so we might have a goal of having people brainstorm questions about images, or compare images — which one of these two sparks more curiosity for you?

So, so I think there’s a lot of things we can do. We could actually look at the properties of images that sparked more curiosity. We could look at the questions people generate about images, the things people are noticing in the images. 

And so there’s going to be another phase where we sort of have people potentially generate some questions or rate different features about the images so that we can then essentially provide this really large database that other scientists that we’re going to use that other scientists could use that the general [00:07:00] public should they want to. I’m really interested in the future — also helping and supporting to develop some databases that people could use for things like undergraduate capstone research projects, or that they could use for science fair type projects. So kind of making this publicly accessible data set of images and questions.

LB: That’s very cool. And it really underscores something that I was really feeling as I was thinking about the body of your work and how much of what you do feeds other things that you’re doing. Your work does not feel siloed to me; it feels like each thing has an application or an iteration or a next generation that seems related to other things that are going on.

So that was very fun for me to kind of see in looking at your work. 

And you’ve talked about it, I guess, as also maybe a place we’re trying to understand whether people are thinking about it from a science perspective or a math perspective or a historical perspective. And that sort of [00:08:00] goes to your interest in this discipline-specific curiosity. 

I was struck by something you said about rather than thinking about curiosity as a personality trait, or just a momentary state — that sort of state trait debate in curiosity — that you were trying to conceptualize it as something that can be discipline-specific. I find that really interesting.

Tell me more about that.

EP: Sure. It’s just goes back to my roots in my graduate training. 

I worked under Dr. Patricia Alexander at university of Maryland, and she had developed this model of domain learning, where we think about… we know so much about the different ways that your knowledge changes from your very first entry as you’re entering school or even pre K into a discipline — a discipline being like math or science or history or art — and that that is going to shift in fairly predictable ways as you develop. And if we think about the long scale [00:09:00] development if we’re thinking about history, somebody just learning history for the first time in kindergarten, first grade, and then eventually to the other end of somebody becoming an historian or learning science and doing these little science experiments as a preschooler, a toddler, and then all the way up through the spectrum of being a scientist who does this every day. 

And we know and we characterize a lot of different aspects of learning in these sort of predictable domain-specific ways. So, for instance, as you’re like… I’m trying to think of a good example of how to talk about this…. If I use…I’ll try to use knowledge as an example… But, so you develop these sort of collections of facts, you develop concepts and deeper understanding all the way up through, then as you’re gaining more expertise, you’re then becoming the creator of knowledge.

And so the way that we think about your knowledge changes, and if, as somebody in [00:10:00]psychology and education, I’ve developed this expertise in knowledge about my discipline in my field, and that knowledge has grown throughout the years, but I don’t have knowledge in the same way about other topics…I don’t have that deep knowledge about history, for example, or mathematics. 

And so I think it’s really important to think about the ways in which curiosity or other motivations may indeed be domain-specific within the domain, and they may develop in predictable ways throughout the domain. 

Something else I think is really interesting is the way that we think about knowledge. So, do we think if it’s something that’s acquired really quickly? Does it come from experts? Or is it something that I construct for myself? And might have really these nuances and subjectivity and I need to weigh evidence or I can create knowledge by doing science experiments. 

The way that we think about knowledge, these– what we refer to as epistemic beliefs — have really predictable shifts. And I think [00:11:00] those have a really important interaction with what we could possibly be curious about sort of the realm of possibility. 

So if I think knowledge… if I’m a young student, just learning history, science, and, and in those disciplines, I’m thinking about, well, my teacher is the authority or Google’s the authority that has answers and I can ask questions and the questions that matter to me are questions that can be answered fairly quickly by an expert, …then, I think, that looks really… that curiosity could look really different than somebody like when I think about waking up in the morning and thinking about is curiosity different from interest? Or what does it look like for someone to be curious about math? And I think about those questions and I think: it might take me years to answer that. I may never know the answer, but I am still wanting to know.

And I think that’s really different than… I mean even for myself … how I was feeling 10 years ago 20 years ago about like. Do I want to have questions that I don’t, that couldn’t be answered? Are those worthwhile questions? 

And so [00:12:00] I think there’s some predictable shifts. And I think we can think about people having different pathways. And I think about myself and my history background — I’m very curious about science, but I didn’t develop that curiosity and that deep knowledge of history. And so I think I just like… my pathway and curiosity for history looks really different than my pathway for psychology and science.

(music)

LB: You’re listening to choose to be curious conversations about curiosity and work and life. I’m your host, Lynn Borton, and my guest today is Emily Grosnickle Peterson. We’re talking about curiosity, not as a trait or state, but as something discipline-specific.

(music)

One of the things that I was struck with is you also have this pretty clear overlay on a lot of your work with an interest on the visual or spatial components, which is not about going to Google and just getting the short answer. It’s very much about being in the space with [00:13:00] whatever is piquing your curiosity, your interest, however, we might parse that. 

And I found myself…I learned something in doing my little research for this about your background in music…and it made me wonder whether there’s a through line there, because music is so much a visual and spatial process. I mean, we think of it as an auditory thing, but it’s — based on my reading, not as a musician, let me just be clear about that — and I just wonder if you see a through line 

EP: Hmm. That’s interesting. You know, I, I think I’m interested in the ways in which curiosity shapes visual processing because vision is, for a few reasons, but visions are well documented sensory modality. We know a lot about, um, How the brain processes visual stimuli. 

It’s also really important for science learning. We do a lot of diagrams and images and things. 

And so your thought is making [00:14:00] me think of two things. One, there is some definite visual processing in music, especially in the ways that you learn to kind of notice patterns and pay attention to anomalies within music, at least when you’re first picking up a piece. Or if you’re sight reading, so playing something you haven’t played before, and you’re just kind of taking a look at the music. 

In that way, I think there’s a lot of visual sensory patterning and kind of noticing and paying attention and wondering, like, where is this going to go? That’s interesting, because I think as you become more expert in the field, I would say that for me, music is almost exclusively auditory, and it’s about, yeah, noticing and hearing those patterns and kind of paying close attention. 

Yeah, I think this really is probably both personal and maybe developmental within this discipline. 

But when I took my first music theory class in undergraduate — I was a music major — and we had to do a bunch of…it was like [00:15:00] activities around sounds. Can you produce from your instrument that are unexpected?

LB: Uh huh.

EP: And so, it was very uncomfortable for me, because I felt comfort in sticking to the script. And so I actually don’t…I think now I have more curiosity about music, about sounds, about the patterns of music. 

But at the time, I was just…  I was kind of just in this sort of like exiting novice trying to progress in this field and I really was uncomfortable with this and this idea that we would play around with things that aren’t written down and make the most unusual sounds that we could make. 

I remember just really despising that class and just feeling so much discomfort, even though like, I mean I went into psychology because it was a field I felt I could ask questions and within that discipline, I felt so comfortable not knowing, but in music, I didn’t… I didn’t enjoy that at all.

Now, I love to hear [00:16:00] stuff that I haven’t heard before, but then I just listened to the same things, the same symphonies on repeat. So it sounds a little silly, but like, it’s definitely taken a turn.

LB: That’s so interesting. And it makes me think about…you wrote this really interesting paper with an undergraduate, right? Is that right? …on what curiosity looks like in math. And there were many things that I found interesting about this paper, but I loved your focus on the distinctions and the interesting interplay between curiosity, confusion, and frustration.

And I think of that with this story that you were just talking about. And you talk there about confusion being this sort of sense of not seeing a path forward and it being sort of painful and, and,…I’m hearing that in this like, wait, music is about order and structure and. And it’s like, you’re just blowing it all up on me.

And then frustration, the [00:17:00] sense of loss of control and helplessness. Like I don’t know what to do with this. And then, you know –help me out here—because my understanding in the paper was that curiosity required both a strong sense of agency and a sense that you could actually do something about it.

So whether it’s in music or, or in math, understanding the interplay of those things seems really important to me. I mean, what did you feel like was the big takeaway from that paper and thinking that through?

EP: Yeah. I mean, that’s really interesting that you’re connecting that, because I think I had a similar feeling about math and it being about order and predictability, and there being right answers and right ways of doing thing in the same way that I felt about music, that there’s the right notes and the right sounds….and like, you’re aiming for this sort of ideal state or ideal perfection of sounds in the same way that [00:18:00] math was all about this order. 

And I think that’s a way… from what we did in the research on this, to write this paper…it seems that that’s a way that most people think about math prior to becoming going in—unless you pursue math as an undergraduate or graduate student—most people think about math as being about numbers. 

And I really think about, again, this like realm of like what is available to be curious about and what’s available to notice and pay attention to that could spark wonder, as opposed to spark confusion or frustration…and I think, if you think about math as being about numbers and about formulas and about finding answers, I think that really restricts the range of things that are possible to be curious about. 

In the same way that like I thought about … yeah, I thought about music as being orders and notes and sound … and I think that just really restricted the range of possibilities [00:19:00] that what I could be curious about and kind of then leads to if you experienced a gap—so we think about curiosity often as being a gap have involving a gap in your knowledge. But I think it also is about: how do you feel about that gap?

And if I think about math as being numbers and formulas and calculations, then that gap is like, well, I need to close it because, and if I can’t, I’m probably confused or maybe I’m frustrated because it’s taking me too long to get the answer.

LB: Yeah, yeah. I remember in the paper on math, you actually explore this idea about how students feel about their interest or curiosity—about that gap—and the importance of teachers helping them to figure out how to frame that. Is that a fair way to describe what you were talking about there?

I mean, it seems like it’s a place where you were making a distinction between interest and curiosity, but also [00:20:00] understanding that, wow, as educators (– that’s the lens you’re approaching all of this from too–), it’s crucial to be able to help students flag their curiosity and understand that some of the discomfort that comes with it might not be a bad thing.

EP: Mm hmm. Mm

LB: And I think that’s an interesting paradox of curiosity, that sometimes curiosity feels bad. We’re told to be curious and go do these things. And sometimes it’s very uncomfortable.

EP: Mm hmm. Yeah…I struggle with this a bit because I think it can be uncomfortable, but if it gets too uncomfortable do we stop calling it curiosity and do we call it something else?

LB: Oh, like what?

EP: Confusion or frustration! And is it that I’m kind of maybe floating in between? Or maybe we’re experiencing simultaneously,… maybe I feel curiosity and frustrated simultaneously, that it’s like, this sort of like, I, I want to know, like, this would be really great to find out. But [00:21:00] also like, I, I want to, I want to just have the answer. Or I want to have an answer or I want to make progress towards any answer.

And that if you’re losing out on that sense of agency, either momentarily or more long-term… This is one thing I have struggled with in terms of defining curiosity: If it doesn’t feel that sort of like (-– I’m here, like mimicking with my hands–) but I don’t know how to do it. That’s sort of like on edge sense of excitement. Is that actually curiosity, or is it something else?

LB: Oh, see, this goes to a big question I have about whether or not we’re using one word to describe very many, very dissimilar feelings, behaviors, attitudes, emotions. Yeah….

EP: Yeah, we’ve been struggling with this as we’re trying to make a new [00:22:00] survey that measured curiosity. Well, what are the synonyms you can use in the survey? If you reframe the question you ask, as opposed to being like, how curious do you feel in science class? Okay, well, what words can I use to replace that? A lot of surveys will use, well, how interested do you feel in X, Y, Z?… uh, in doing something. 

But… are curiosity and interest synonyms? Are they the same thing? 

If I say I feel interested in solving unknown equations… a really cool example recently is: some high schoolers who solved the Pythagorean Theorem…and I was thinking about them in terms of, they probably experienced a lot of interest and curiosity, but they probably had interest in closing this gap, which I think is different than interest in,..

So I was interested in math class in just solving the Pythagorean Theorem. I was someone who was happy to do worksheets and just answer the questions the teacher put on the worksheet and see if I could do it. And that felt interesting to me, but I don’t think I experienced [00:23:00] that curiosity so much. And I may have, but I may have had some moments of curiosity, like, why, why do we do it like that?And. I could ask that question out of curiosity, but I could also ask that question out of confusion or frustration. Why do we do it like that? Which is really different than being like, Huh, why does a squared plus b squared equals c squared? And is it possible that we could use some different methods to try to figure out why this is?

LB: Yeah. 

I’m going to leave it right there! I want to close the conversation with everyone being like, Oh man, I don’t know how to think about this! 

But it’s a great segue to — you know, is curiosity like interest? —  to my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies. So are you game for this?

EP: Of course! Did you know that I studied analogical reasoning in grad school as well?

LB: How did I not know that!? Okay. that’s another conversation. 

Okay. So I have my big jar and I’m pulling out slips of [00:24:00] paper. One for you, one for me and one for our audience. Okay. 

Yours is a dam. How is curiosity like a dam?

Mine is banana and I have one for the audience. 

So do you want to go first or do you want me to go?

EP: Oh, um, how is curiosity like a dam? Um, I guess I’ll go first. I’ll see what I can talk through. 

Yeah, I guess I, I maybe don’t know as much about dams as I wish I did in this situation, but what I…what I, do know is that I think about dams as a building, building, building, and I’m thinking about there being some sort of pressure behind it, um, that’s, A dam’s allowing the supporting of this kind of building of energy in which sort of curiosity has that same kind of heightened, heightened energy and heightened excitement that [00:25:00] can then burst free at any moment.

LB: Nice! Nice. I like that. I like that. Okay. Um, hmm. Banana.

EP: I think you got the hard one…

LB: How is curiosity like a banana? Um, well, uh, you know, a banana is a kind of surprising fruit. It…I don’t know about you, but what I get when I peel a banana is not what I would expect, but from having had the experience of previously peeling a banana.

And I think sometimes curiosity is like that. That you don’t always get what you’re expecting, um, and that sometimes you just have to peel the banana and, uh, and see what you get. So that’s how, I guess how, and I don’t know. 

And audience, yours this trail. How is curiosity like a trail? Let me know, #analogy. 

Well, Emily, this has been great and we definitely have to talk about this analogous processing thing.

Thank [00:26:00] you so much for this!

EP: Thank you, Lynn. This was delightful.

LB: You’ve been listening to Choose to be Curious. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Thank you for joining me today. 

You can find all my shows on my website at choosetobecurious.com. I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on Facebook and Instagram @choosetobecurious, where you can share your trail analogy, #analogy. 

Many thanks to my guest, Emily Grossnickle Peterson. Links to her Educational Neuroscience Lab on my website — as well as links to the Scistarter conversation. 

Thanks, too, to Sean Balick for our theme music, and this is “A Burst of Light” by Delray, via Blue Dot Sessions. 

I find myself thinking a lot about this question of how curiosity and interest overlap — and differ. They’re not interchangeable, but they sure do intersect. [00:27:00]

How would you describe their relationship? 

I hope you’ll join us again next time. Until then, choose to be curious.

(music)

LB: So tell me about this analogous processing.

EP: Yeah, the lab I was in didn’t just study analogies. We studied the umbrella term of relational reasoning. Analogies is one type of relationship. We developed a measure that looked at analogical reasoning, but other types of reasoning. So we included anomalies, so anomalous reasoning; antithetical reasoning; and, ..oh my gosh, it was four A’s. …So, analogy, oh. I would call it “mutual exclusion”, that’s another type of relationship. We called it “antinomous” but I think my advisor made up that term… Thinking about like, what are those different types of possible relationships that we could reason about.[00:28:00]

Inviting Curiosity by Design

“I’ve found that curiosity follows a very simple pattern….It follows this pattern and we can design around it… It starts with an invitation–something out there invites you to be curious.” ~ Cassini Nazir

Can curiosity be meaingfully infused into design processes? Cassini Nazir thinks so.

From curiosity journals to bookmarks and Valentine’s Day celebrations, he’s full of ideas about how to invite curiosity in, by design.

Cassini Nazir teaches interaction design and user experience courses in the College of Visual Arts and Design at University of North Texas. He’s interested in designing ways to welcome curiosity — and to help curiosity and care step up when empathy falters.

That connection between curiosity and care didn’t become really meaningful to me until my wife told me one day, “You’re not as curious about me as you once were” … Over time in our relationships, we often become less curious…We fill in the gaps of, “well, I’m not going to ask her a question. I know what she’s going to say.” But people have a way of surprising us. 

Choose to be Curious · Ep. #235: Inviting Curiosity by Design, with Cassini Nazir

LISTEN TO CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS #235: INVITING CURIOSITY BY DESIGN, WITH CASSINI NAZIR

Check out Cassini Nazir’s Designing Curiosity website.

Enjoy Cassini Nazir’s talk at the Center for BrainHealth.

Read Beyond Empathy: How curiosity promotes greater care. Cassini Nazir and co-author Meah Lin offer 16 ways empathy risks falling short – and 2 emotive capacities that might help: curiosity and care.

Take a look at Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion.

If you enjoyed this episode, try these C2BC Classics: Designing for Curiosity, with Hyunjoo Oh; In Praise of Distraction, with Tyson Lewis(Tyson is Cassini’s colleague at UNT); Narrative Medicine, with Dr. Raya Kheribek; Sounds of Caring, with Yoko Sen & Tammy Beaulieu; and  Architecting Curiosity, with Pim Schachtschabel, Monica Canfield-Lenfest & Anthony Rocco. 

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Purple Light” by Marble Run, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

uh-oh! THE CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS SHOP IS UNDER (RE)CONSTRUCTION.

INVITING CURIOSITY BY DESIGN, WITH CASSINI NAZIR

Cassini Nazir: I’ve found that curiosity follows a very simple pattern….It follows this pattern, we can design around it… It starts with an invitation. Something out there invites you to be curious.

(theme music)

Lynn Borton: This is Choose to be Curious, a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about curiosity shows up. I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Welcome!

Come, choose to be curious with us… 

Is “choose” enough of a welcome mat, enough of a call to action? Do you feel encouraged, empowered?

I’ve been reflecting on that a lot lately since reading and thinking about Cassini Nazir’s work on inviting curiosity. Cassini Nazir teaches Interaction Design and User Experience courses in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. His [00:01:00] research explores how curiosity can be meaningfully infused into design processes.

He’s come to use the language of invitation when he talks about curiosity which, for me, connotes a very intentional set of actions to draw people in, and maybe more than just people. I say “more than just people”, because Cassini has also been looking at empathy. Or maybe more specifically, the limitations of empathy.

In their paper, Beyond Empathy, How Curiosity Promotes Greater Care, Cassini Nazir and co-author Meah Lin offer 16 ways empathy risks falling short — and two emotive capacities that might help. Empathy, they write, can have the effect of shutting off question-asking. Both care and curiosity widen the circle of understanding in ways that [00:02:00] empathy cannot.

It’s this appreciation of curiosity’s scope and duality, inward/outward, micro/ macro, that I find so interesting here. 

So, what is interaction design, and what does it mean to infuse its processes or anything with curiosity? And how might all of us invite curiosity into our work and lives? I’m delighted to have Cassini Nazir join me for that and more…so welcome, Cassini!

CN: Thank you very much. So happy to be here.

LB: Oh, this is very exciting. As I said before we got going, I’ve been following your work for a long time, so it’s fun to finally be in conversation. So, okay, we have to start at the beginning: What is interaction design, for those of us who are not in that space?

CN: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, when we think about design itself —  if you look around the room that you’re in, the car you’re driving, [00:03:00] if you’re listening to this podcast on some kind of exercise device — everything around you has been designed, right? From the clothes that you’re wearing, to the objects that are in the room, to the sort of furnishings and pieces of art that are around you. 

Interaction design is a specific type of design that focuses generally on interfaces. It’s grown more and more to include things that don’t include interfaces — by “interfaces” I mean screens.

A lot of people sort of reduce interaction design to apps or websites, increasingly voice systems as well, but I think of it really as designing experiences. And maybe if we think about it sort of another way, in terms of what are the takeaways, we’re really, in some ways, designing memories. 

What’s the memory we want people to have and retain long after they’ve interacted with the thing that we’ve created?

LB: You know, I think it was the moment that I [00:04:00] heard you say that in a talk of yours recently where I thought, I really have to get this guy on the show, why, why have I been waiting? Because I think this idea of being very intentional about the things that we take away — which is what memory is, right? —  from an experience is really interesting to me.

And it suddenly dawned on me, I think of curiosity that way! Which I think is where you and I have these really interesting intersections and parallels.

CN: Yeah. And, you know, in my research, if you can invite curiosity – and, as you said in your intro, that’s an intentionally spoken word —  and an individual brings that curiosity forward, right? It’s something that they have to summon up themselves. 

You can make things more memorable that way, because they’ve made a connection in their brain to something that’s intrinsic to them. And you’ve just sort of offered it to them, as an invitation of something to try out, to [00:05:00] experiment with, to do again. And, and it’s a powerful way to make interactions more meaningful.

LB: Yeah. Okay, so for context, do you have a working definition of curiosity?

CN: You know, there’s one, from Hans Georg-Voss, which is three words: motivation to explore.

LB: Uh huh.

CN: Which I just love, right? That “motivation” speaks to that inward part of it. “Explore” speaks to sort of the outward part of the world that we’re exploring. 

But I also like Todd Kashdan’s and his colleagues’ definition, which is curiosity is the inclination, desire… I’m forgetting the third word… and sort of the execution of exploring the novel, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous events or situations, as well.

But I think Voss’s definition of motivation to explore is just so well put. [00:06:00]

LB: Yeah. Well, you know, I ask that question of all sorts of people, and I get all sorts of answers — and I don’t really have any skin in the game and about what the right answer is. It’s just always interesting to me how individuals think of it, because it informs the rest of the conversation, right? So…

CN: Yeah. Before you move on from that, you know, it occurs to me that when you ask the question also has meaning,

LB: Yes!

CN: If you look in the Oxford English dictionary, I think there are 31 definitions,  plus or minus — six of which are currently used. So over time, curiosity has lost 25 definitions, at least according to the OED. So, you know, what it means in the present age,.. it’s an ongoing conversation, it’s shifting…

LB: I think that’s actually a really interesting observation. I need to go look at the OED! But I will say, you know, in the eight years that I’ve been having these conversations, it’s moved in that time as well. So I see that [00:07:00] too. Interesting. Oh, that’s cool. 

I really like the work that you’ve been doing in terms of inviting curiosity — and I don’t know if you see it this way — but I see your work in empathy as this, this sort of micro/macro question of curiosity, both inward and outward. And sometimes these conversations go one direction or the other. It’s about sort of inward curiosity or it’s about outward curiosity. But you seem to me to present an opportunity for both, and maybe to be in that stretchy, weird place where you’re trying to accommodate things that are sometimes working in opposition to one another, inward and outward, you know, macro and micro. 

And I wonder if you might reflect on that a little bit. I mean, do you think about it that way?

CN: Yeah, you know, that’s, that’s a wonderful way of putting it. 

So when, when we talk about inviting curiosity, I’ve found that curiosity follows a very [00:08:00]simple pattern. Because it follows this pattern, we can design around it. It starts with an invitation. Something out there invites you to be curious. 

My research has uncovered about 10 different approaches that you can use to invite people to be curious. a challenge, to humor, to novelty, to delay, playfulness. There’s others that are probably out there, but these are sort of 10 first principles. 

So an invitation is made, you (the individual) have to respond. And in some cases, this is where curiosity may end. You may not choose to respond. But if we do, there’s this inflection point where that emotion of surprise begins to be felt. That’s where the opportunity for that reward to occur.

So it’s an invitation response reward pattern that we see. Of course, not everything will be rewarded. Our curiosity isn’t always rewarded. But when we’re designing experiences, we want it to be [00:09:00]positive.

And that’s the choice for that word there. 

I like to think of liminal spaces between sort of the edges and borders of things. And I think curiosity is really that, right? It’s something that we obtain through our senses. Everything we know about the world is through our human senses.

And so our senses are really the edge of the experience we can understand around us. So we leverage those senses that we have in order to understand the world and, you know, whether it’s a strange feeling inside of room — why does my stomach feel this way after I’ve eaten, you know, something that maybe, maybe didn’t sit with me well, or what is that thing or person over there?

I think curiosity almost shortens the distance between the in and the out. And I think that’s hugely powerful when you think of it as a [00:10:00] designer.

That I really want to focus on creating meaningful experience, experiences that matter, experiences that people can reflect on. And maybe if they reflect on it again, they see something slightly different than they did the first time.

Those are the types of things that are difficult to build and often quite rare, but that’s where I like to sort of keep my attention.

LB: So can you give us an example? What’s such an experience that you’ve done?

CN: Yeah. So this semester, my students were working with CVS Health and Signify Health, one of their subsidiaries, looking at how can we build trust during an in home health evaluation?

LB: Oh, interesting.

CN: And curiosity is very much an important part of that. Many of the people that my students spoke with that we interviewed were folks who may not have been able to make it to hospitals in order to get their care. [00:11:00] And you know the idea that a medical professional can come inside your home requires a great deal of trust. In Robert Plutchik’s model, trust is the necessary element for curiosity to begin. And so, you know, for me, that the meaningfulness there is we can build more trust during those early moments and even before sort of the service period begins. Maybe it’s also about bringing curiosity into the space. So that’s one example. 

I worked at another university for 10 years before coming to University of North Carolina, and my partner in crime was an astrophysicist…

LB: Oh, that’s fun!

CN: Designers and artists had to collaborate with scientists and researchers in order to achieve the goal. If either could do it alone, we [00:12:00] wouldn’t continue the project. 

We looked at — and we’re not necessarily the first to do this — but we looked at a large set of fMRI data of individuals, roughly 20 to 90. And we took that data that neuroscientists would use, statistical modeling for tools like R, or spreadsheets and things like that, and we sonified that data. We made it meaningful through sound so that you could hear the data.

LB: So, what did that sound like?

CN: Well, that’s it, right? You could hear differences between sort of parts of the brain that are connected.

LB: Oh, wow.

CN: We sonified how the visual cortex is connected to hearing and that sounds different as you age, right? Numerically, that looks different as well, but it’s just another way to sort of bring about this data. I think you had talked about this, if I’m remembering correctly, in a podcast, [00:13:00] like one of your early podcasts: use the term “strange making”, right? We’re making the data strange,

LB: huh. Uh huh.

CN: That, well, you’re used to looking at something, or, in this case, used to hearing something as well. How can we bring a new perspective on that and make it strange as well?

And that’s one of the things that designers can do. It’s, if designers are doing their job right, they can give you a new perspective that maybe you didn’t have.

LB: Yeah. Yeah. Well… interesting!

So, you have a couple of kind of tips and tricks, ways that people can invite curiosity into their every-day: curiosity journal… do something new. But I also heard you speak about borrowing and lending curiosity, which I loved for so many reasons. You know, Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett talk about curiosity obviously as [00:14:00] something that’s about connection and relationship and it’s something that we do collectively.

So the idea of lending and borrowing and having a curiosity community, which is how I think about these things all the time, really resonates. Or Elizabeth Gilbert, you know, who talks about don’t worry about passion. Isn’t there just something you find just a little bit interesting and like you, you can kind of borrow that or lend it to somebody else. And then maybe you discover that there’s a curiosity there. Maybe not. But it doesn’t cost much. 

Do you have some favorites in your toolbox that you would like to share?

CN: Yeah, I’ll start with the lending and borrowing. It literally started with something physical, which — this isn’t going to make for great radio, but I’m holding up a prototype of a bookmark that has…

LB: We’ll put it on the website.

CN: We can definitely take some photos of this in the back.

The bookmark has single sheets of paper that [00:15:00] one can take out. … And the idea here is that this bookmark could be used in libraries where people lend and borrow the books. And, if one is so inclined to take notes, they could do that. If they are also so inclined, they can keep bookmark sort of the physical component, but the thing that they wrote on — that smaller sheet of paper — that was set in the bookmark, they can leave this behind in the book so that you can literally lend and borrow your curiosity.

LB: Uh huh.

CN: “This made me curious.”

LB: You also mentioned something –and maybe this was in the same talk that you did for the Center for Brain Health — on being curious as in a new courtship. In our relationships, we’re less curious with one another over time. And I love this idea of thinking about returning the relationship to its courtship phase. Tell me more about that, [00:16:00] it’s lovely.

CN: So this ties into the notion of care as well, in that, you know, what we talked earlier about the 31 or so definitions that the Oxford English Dictionary has for curiosity, but if you trace it back to its original roots in English, it comes from our, the Latin word cura, which means to care. 

Cura was a goddess in the Roman cosmology who, by one account, created humans… As well had help from others, the Earth Hummus, by Zeus, and then by another one that I’m forgetting in the story, but because the Earth gave most of the materials — the raw materials — we were called humans because we came from the Hummus, the Earth, you know. If care were more physical of a thing, perhaps we’d be called curans rather than humans, you know, who knows?

LB: Who knows?

CN: But I think [00:17:00] making that connection between curiosity and care didn’t become really meaningful to me until my wife told me one day, you’re not as curious about me as you once were. When you first got to know me, is what she meant, you were just intensely curious. You had this passion…

LB: As one does, right?

CN: Right! And over time in our relationships, we often become less curious. In fact, we do the opposite: we fill in the gaps of, well, I’m not going to ask her a question. I know what she’s going to say, what have you, but people have a way of surprising us. 

I’m working on something for Valentine’s Day, 2025, which has 12 questions — rather than giving your love a dozen roses, here are 12 questions that you can ask them…

LB: Nice.

CN: …and one of those questions is: what surprised you today? You know, we get into a rut of [00:18:00] well, you know this person at work or this thing or what have you? But when we talk about surprise, which is again going back to Plutchik’s model, trust and surprise are the two things that bring curiosity about it. It can open up that space for us to maybe be a little bit more curious about each other.

LB: Yeah, so that’s a great segue to your work on the limitations of empathy, where curiosity and care sort of pick up where empathy leaves off. What got you there? How does empathy fit in the designer process — because I’m assuming that was the entry, the portal for this — and what are the implications for designers and design process?

If this is something you think of as foundational, like, are you poking the bear? I mean, how radical is this? I’m trying to understand!

CN: You know, maybe poking the dragon, [00:19:00] to, to sort of make it larger, you know! 

When design literature, academic design literature, sought to differentiate the field of design from other fields, it really differentiated itself by saying that empathy is an essential part of who we are as a designer.

Your tax accountant, they may have empathy for you, but it’s not built into the processes of doing their accounting. Your mechanic. 

Listeners might be saying, well, what about medical professions? Empathy is built in there as well — but it’s one to one. The doctor that sees you sees one patient, generally speaking.

When designers empathize, it’s one to many. We have to have a capacity to empathize with people, yes, who are like us, because that’s sort of the perspective that’s easy for us to take. But we have to be able to take the perspective of people who are unlike us. [00:20:00] That can be in a variety of perspectives from our age, how tall we are, how physically abled we are, our ability to perceive the world around us; do we have our eyesight, things like that… All of these things are limitations of our empathy, where we may have trouble empathizing with individuals who maybe experiencing the world in different ways than we’ve ever encountered. 

I’ll give you one example. This fall, my students will be working with a company called Glide, this company has created a device for blind individuals. (One of my master’s students is blind.) Imagine, if all of the sensors on the vehicle that sort of tell the vehicle where it is, what are objects around you? Oh, don’t, bump into that. If you took that and you put them into a smaller device at the [00:21:00] end of a cane and could help blind individuals navigate the world around them. Now imagine that as well also had GPS and, you know, you could connect it to maps. So that’s what this wonderful company has done. 

I can close my eyes — we can all do this –and we can pretend to think that, oh, well, this is what it’s like to be blind. But we had an interesting interaction where my student — his name’s Ethan — was testing out the device and we were having him basically make a lap around a circle — around a table, excuse me!  –And as he was, you know, orienting to the device, he was much more daring with the device than I was. I was struggling with, okay, I’m feeling what a blind person feels mentally, so I have to square that with myself.

LB: Uh huh.

CN: I couldn’t empathize. Right?

LB: Yeah.

CN: I couldn’t fully place my feet into his shoes. One of the things that surprised me [00:22:00] was when he came back around to the spot where he started, he said that out loud.

“And here we are! Right where I started.” I don’t know that I would have known, you know, that. They’re embedded things that…

Empathy is perspective-taking, but it’s also imagination. You know, my imagination hasn’t been stretched that far to be able to do that. 

And so, designers talk about empathy and it often starts the design processes. We talk about human centered design, and that’s been a long-standing sort of aspect, because we primarily designed for humans, but can sometimes fool us into thinking, yeah, I understand you. So, I don’t need to ask any more questions. I got you.

LB: Yeah.

CN: And I think that’s one of the challenges — and it really changes when we may empathize more with people who are similar to us people who are dissimilar to us, because [00:23:00] in many ways, there’s a shared understanding of, when we say words, we know what they mean. 

Our empathy changes when we go to society as well. And we may be less understanding to society-as-a-whole. And so, you know, designers — as I said, in contrast to doctors, where there’s a one-on-one situation — we’re designing many things for many people. We really have to confront these limitations and find ways around them. 

Your audience knows that curiosity, it takes persistence. But you know, podcasts like this, designed objects that I hope to create in the future, can, reduce that friction of being curious. That’s really where I want to see my work in the future is to help people to reduce that friction, make it easier to sort of , physically embody curiosity.[00:24:00]

LB: I love it. I love it. 

I have an invitation to a designed activity for you. Are you game for my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies?

CN: I’ve been looking forward to this.

LB: Good. Okay. Okay. All right. So here it is, a literal big jar. I have slips of paper in here. I’m going to take out one for you, one for me, one for the audience. And we’re going to make an analogy to curiosity with whatever is on these slips of paper.

Okay. Mine is square dancing. How is curiosity like square dancing? Yours is an octopus. And I have one for the audience. So do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?

CN: I’m kind of curious to hear how you’re going to connect square dancing.

LB: Me too! Well, okay. So here, to our earlier conversation about it being something we do in partnership, [00:25:00] and borrowing and lending: square dancing is all about borrowing and lending partners. And kind of the joy of this combination of trust and surprise, right? You trust the process, you know the steps, but there’s sort of the surprise of whoever you’re paired up with.

And, and it’s square dancing — which I haven’t done in a long time — but I will say that when I did it, it was most fun when I was fully engaged in body, just like what we were talking about. Right? And I think that’s true of curiosity as well. So that’s how curiosity is like square dancing. 

Okay, how is curiosity like an octopus?

CN: You know, I, I think in many ways, curiosity is about ways to get to things that we may look physically impossible. The octopus can squeeze through tiny, tiny spaces, so long as its [00:26:00] beak can make its way through… and to me, that’s what curiosity is, right? It’s … sometimes it’s an impossibility… seeming impossibility. 

If you and I were to design a shirt, we’d probably design it for a two arm. You know…like an octopus, curiosity sort of forces us to think about maybe more than just this or that, right? It sprouts limbs in order for us to think about other possibilities. Else could we do?

LB: What else? I love it. Oh, that’s great. Okay. And audience, yours is tornado. How is curiosity like a tornado? Let me know. Social media, #analogy. 

Well, Cassini, thank you so much for this. What fun!

CN: This has been wonderful, Lynn. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it so much.

(music)

LB: You’ve [00:27:00] been listening to Choose to be Curious. I’m your host, Lynne Borton. Thanks for joining us here today. 

You can find all my shows on my website at choosetobecurious.com. I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on Facebook and Instagram at @choosetobecurious, where you can share your tornado analogy, #analogy.

Many thanks to my delightful guest, Cassini Nazir. Links to his work on my website. 

Thanks, too, to Sean Ballack for our theme music. And this is “Purple Light” by Marble Run via Blue Dot Sessions. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I invite curiosity in myself or others as much as I really can or want. 

What about you?

I think a lot about how we—I—might do more and where and why I retreat from it. 

In fact, it’s turned into a bit of a theme. I hope you’ll join us again next week when it comes back up in a whole new way. 

Until then, choose to be curious.

Tips for Wanderers

“Neil deGrasse Tyson says, ‘It doesn’t matter where I go, I always, always look up.’ — and those are words to live by.” ~ Andréa Seiger

Summer’s coming. Time to take that curiosity out for a little spin!

Whether you’re traveling far from home or enjoying a little “staycation,” author, tour manager and explorer extraordinaire Andréa Seiger has tips for getting the most of your adventures.

Why visit cemeteries, science associations and bus stops? Can you smell green? What do your knees see? Andréa is a delightful coach for our wandering curiosity muscles.

The more aware you are, the more inclined you are to walk through that open gate. You will know it when you sense it, that when you are engaged and you’re not just being spatially aware and situationally aware… you open up that gate to what’s on the other side.

Choose to be Curious · Ep. #234: Tips for Wanderers, with Andréa SeigerLISTEN TO CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS #234: TIPS FOR WANDERERS, WITH ANDRÉA SEIGER

Andréa Seiger knows of what she speaks. Her book 111 Places in Washington that You Must Not Miss is a surprising and delightfully delicious look into a city many people think they already know. I’ve now got a long list of places I’ve never been that I’m excited to check out this summer….

And even if you won’t be in DC anytime soon, take a page from the kinds of places she highlights — then go discover some stories and adventures of your own!

Find Andréa Seiger on Instragram @urbansafaridc111.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Curio” by Vacant Distillery, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

CHOOSE TO BE CURIOUS SHOP IS UNDER (RE)CONSTRUCTION. Back soon!

TIPS FOR WANDERERS, WITH ANDRÉA SEIGER

Andréa Seiger: Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “It doesn’t matter where I go, I always, always look up.” And those are words to live by.

(theme music)

Lynn Borton: You’re listening to Choose to Be Curious, a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it’s conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life. I’m your host, Lynn Borton, welcome. 

Come, choose to be curious with us!

Until yesterday, I did not know that there was such a thing as destination curiosity scales, or that someone had coined the phrase “destination curiosity.” The author is hoping this concept and scale prove helpful to the tourism industry. But I’m not going to go all research nerdy on you today. 

Today, as summer approaches and we’re all maybe contemplating some adventure or another, I [00:01:00] thought it would be fun to touch base with one of the most curious and adventurous people I know, and see what she can teach the rest of us about getting out and exploring — whether we’re traveling far or just being tourists in our own town. 

Today, It’s Tips for Wanderers.

The most recent text message I got from Andréa Seiger was from Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D. C., where she was hanging out with best-selling author George Saunders. Before that, it was an event in Las Vegas, I think, with a picture of an enormous and extremely elaborate balloon sculpture involving a black cat and emblazoned, Stay Curious. 

I’ve gotten messages from Paris, Qatar, an Amtrak train somewhere in the Rockies, I think. She’s that friend.

Andréa Seiger is principal and founder of Urban Safari. She’s a meeting planner, sports and destination operations manager, and tour manager. [00:02:00] She teaches a continuing education class for au pairs called Finding Stories in Uncommon Places.And she’s author of 111 Places in Washington that You Must Not Miss. A delicious and delightful romp through the city she calls home. 

Andréa once told me her secret superpower is talking to strangers. And it’s so true. I am delighted to have Andréa Seiger join me today. So welcome, Andréa.

AS: Hello! I’m so happy to be here with you.

LB: I’m so tickled to finally do this. Thank you for whatever it was that inspired you to reach out to me three years ago, to invite me to go for a walk. Talk about talking to strangers!

AS: Yeah, your feed crossed mine, and then at some point I discovered that you were in the D. C. area, and I thought, oh. I need to know her! Brassy as I am, let me see what happens if I message her and hopefully she’ll respond. [00:03:00] I did…

LB: You did, and it’s been fun ever since. And I’m excited about this because you and I have gone walking together a couple of times now exploring…and then I was thinking, oh, wouldn’t it be fun to just talk to somebody about taking their curiosity out on the town, which is what you do intuitively, instinctively, personally, and professionally. How did you swing that?

AS: I have to give credit to Mom and Dad.

My parents were road trippers and international travelers, and they would put us in the car and say, let’s go. And we would drive to Mexico every year for Christmas and stay for a month and drive back. And we always stopped….and a lot of times our route was created because of my Dad who would say, Oh, guess what? I found out there’s a brand new cowboy and Indian museum in Oklahoma [00:04:00]city. So we’re going to the border by way of Oklahoma city from Ohio.

I would say a lot of it just came from my parents saying, Oh, Well, what do you know? Look what I found. We’re gonna go check it out. And that’s what we would do. And we would hunt for Indian arrowheads in our backyard, which was where Tecumseh the chief of the Shawnee was born.Never found one, but we were always looking. Dad’s like, see what you can find…

LB: But I love the idea that you should always be looking, you know, because you found other things, right? Maybe you didn’t find arrowheads, but presumably you found other things.

AS: Oh yeah, we found a lot of worms.

LB: You know, it’s interesting. I tell this story often about my Dad with his expression, if you change your point of view, you will see something new. That was like a refrain from my childhood. And I thought of it, actually, on the inside cover of your book about DC, you know, whether at eye level or knee level, there’s always something fascinating to behold.

And I thought, okay, which — I think I [00:05:00] know, but — which of these 111 stories is about knee level? And what a great way of thinking about looking around. I’m like, what are my knees seeing that I’m not seeing from up here? I love that.

AS: The one that just epitomizes that is the magic tree box in Logan Circle, on R Street. It’s this glorious fairy garden on one side, a hobbit garden on the other. It is an actual tree box in front of these people’s house…

He’s an engineer. It’s not just a garden. It has running water. It has smoke in the chimneys and it has LED lights in the houses.

LB: It’s such a fresh take on a city that I think most people think they know.So, what are your tips and tricks for sort of discovering the uncommon stories in the very iconic place? What do you [00:06:00] look for? How do you find them?

AS: A lot of it is just picking a street or picking a neighborhood. The one neighborhood to me that I just find fun, endlessly fascinating, is DuPont Circle. You can find 10,000 stories from the ridiculous to the sublime on a street corner, at a house, in someone’s garden, in a mansion, in DuPont Circle.

And a lot of times, you know, in my explorations of the city, I’ll just say, meh, today I’m feeling northeast.And sometimes I have a destination and sometimes I think, well, I’ll get off at that station or maybe that station. 

And a lot of times I’ll just sit there with my Google map and move my finger around my Google map and say, okay, what’s over there? And go hunting.

LB: So sometimes a destination in mind, but oftentimes not…

AS: Oh, oftentimes not.

LB: And so if you don’t have a [00:07:00] destination in mind, what’s your radar? I mean, what do you have up? What kinds of things are you looking for? Like, what’s a clue that there’s something more there?

AS: Open gates and doors. I will walk through an open gate or an open door in a split second. I’ve had a friend of mine who is a Qatari policeman tell me, what are you doing!? It’s abandoned. I have to see what’s there. I do it.

I’ve done it in Budapest. And another friend is like, where are you going? I want to see what’s in there.

And I do it all the time. 

Color. I’m attracted to color. A lot of it is, I’m fascinated by the colors of nature. How does that brown and that purple and that green and that orange all exist in the same square foot? 

And gates. I love looking at gates and my au pairs think I’m crazy and funny when I say [00:08:00] this: I look at these fancy ornate gates that you see all over DC and all over cities with 18th, 19th century architecture, and I see earrings — that would be the best pair of earrings!

LB: Sure. 

AS: So it’s just random, odd things like that flourishes on buildings, Deco architecture. I’m fascinated by the ornamentation on buildings, frescoes, and stone cut.

LB: You’re just looking for something to catch your eye and then you dig in. Is that what happens?

AS: Yes. And I look up. Neil deGrasse Tyson says, I heard him say this on some interview, “It doesn’t matter where I go If I’m walking out the door of my building If I’m getting out of my car I always, always, always look up.”

LB: Yeah, me, too.

AS: And those are words to live by because I will go perhaps say to [00:09:00] one of the ornate buildings here in DC, the Library of Congress is a goldmine.

Look up and see what I can find or see…or go on kind of a treasure hunt. Ooh, what can I see up there? 

Or the lobby of the Willard Hotel. I will walk in there, and if I’m with Americans or if I’m with people who live in another state, I’ll say, “Spend a couple minutes and find the emblem of your state on the ceiling of this lobby.”

And that’s a fun game to play. And I do that with adults. I don’t do that with kids. I do that with adults!

LB: But why not? Whatever it is that gets you looking, then you see other things, right?It does sort of narrow your focus, because suddenly you’re just looking for your state’s emblem, but inevitably you will also notice other things that are going on.

AS: Oh yeah. You notice ornamentation, you notice shapes. Then I get off on the tangent of I wonder how they did that.[00:10:00] And maybe the stonemason or the gilder had to lie on their back to paint that. Was it messy? Did they get paint in their eyes when they were lying on their backs on a scaffolding trying to paint the ceiling?

And then I get off on all these just random thoughts.

LB: But that’s also, you’re looking for the stories behind it, right? I mean, you say something about this in your book as well, about “come find your own stories,” right?

But a lot of what’s fun about the book and just walking around with you, you’ve taken the time to learn some of the backstory and then kind of make it your own, right?And it connects you to the place, doesn’t it?

AS: It does. It does. And I come from the tourism industry… so we call them back of the house or line employees. These are the waiters, the bus drivers, the chauffeurs, the doorman, the housekeepers. [00:11:00] They’re the ones with the stories. The managers can’t tell you anything. They can tell you the history. They can tell you, oh my, we had a situation and they may or may not tell you what the situation was, but the folks behind the doors, the folks in the, you know, behind the front desk, they’re the ones that have the crazy stories — and all of a sudden I have a nugget. And I have a little something to scribble down and say, I have to come back to that.

LB: So, okay, this is where we have to talk about the superpower of yours, of talking to strangers. Because I can attest to this. I mean, you managed to talk our way onto an active construction site, renovation of the Corcoran Estate Gatehouse or something, as I recall. We’re like up in the building looking at old brickwork and renovations. Man, I was just along for the ride. Like you do this all the [00:12:00] time, right? I mean, how do you do that? How do you do that? 

AS: Oh, that’s my mom. I got that from my mom. We sweet talked our way into the parade of the winners of Rio Carnival in 1979. We didn’t have tickets. We chatted up some cute guy and he says, ladies, would you like to see carnival Brazilian style? And mom and I were like, of course we would. And he walked us right into the band pit.

LB: Oh my gosh.

AS: So we were there with 2,000 drums. So yeah, that’s my mom. I love doing that.

LB: So if someone doesn’t think of themselves as good at talking to strangers, what’s the lotion that gets the motion going in that? How do people step into that? If they’re not raised in it, accustomed to it? Any, any tips on that?

AS: For those of us who [00:13:00] take mass transit, bus stops. Bus stops are a good place because you’re both standing there waiting your two minutes, your forty minutes for the next bus, and everybody gets a little restless, and nowadays with the earphones, people are oblivious.

LB: Right.

AS: It’s a great way to talk to older folks because they’re not all attached to their electronics.It might just start with something about the bus being late. And then you just kind of get tangential and start chit-chatting. And sometimes it’s just as simple as, do you know when the next bus is due here? and going from there. I think one of my favorite talks with strangers was… I was on a bus…and she got on the bus and sat in the seat adjacent to me. And she had a button on her coat that said, I might be old, but I’ve been to all the cool concerts.

LB: That’s an [00:14:00] invitation!

AS: That was an absolute invitation! So I looked at her and she was in her own little zone. And I said, so which concerts have you been to? And she started going through — and this was maybe a, maybe a five minute conversation — She said this, and this, and this. I said, well, I’ve been to some great ones too, and I listed mine, and She says, oh, and I, and when I was a teenager, I went to Woodstock. I said, okay, you win. I said, I’ve been to some really good ones like Tina Turner, but you win.

LB: See what I love about what you’re saying is that everything is an invitation to a conversation.I talk to people for this show every week, right? And yet I’m (as you know) really actually quite introverted. It took me a long time to understand that the world was full of [00:15:00] invitations to conversation — as opposed to me sort of waiting for something really explicit, that there’s sort of an implicit invitation.

AS: There is, there is, and I think sometimes people just don’t know, or are surprised when you strike up a conversation with them. Some people jump right in. I’ve had the most fascinating conversations with strangers who will tell me a little nugget about their life or a little nugget about, Oh, I’m a native Washingtonian, and I’ve lived in this neighborhood my whole life. And that used to be, and this was where we went to get ice cream. And then you get a history lesson.

LB: So you work with au pairs. I think this is actually a really interesting group, right? This is young people in a foreign country with a very specific kind of a job and responsibility. What kind of tips do [00:16:00] you give them for getting outside of the household and being curious about a place and exploring —  tips for wanderers, as you say. What do you suggest to them? What do you offer them? What do you teach them?

AS: You know, I give them lots of prompts, but one of the things, I say, just go to a museum. Don’t wait for people to get going. If someone’s not available to join you, just go.And we talk about smell. I used to take tours to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and I would say to them, when you get off the bus, it will smell green.

LB: Yep.

AS: And the ones who get it don’t even blink and then you get the puzzled looks and then I say, do you know what I mean by that? Think about that for a moment. And a lot of them will [00:17:00] get back on the bus and say, oh I see I smelled it. I smelled it! If you use your senses it triggers stories It triggers memories, especially when it relates to food

LB: Mm.

AS: You know, the smell of mom’s kitchen or the smell of grandma’s kitchen. I can still remember what my grandmother’s kitchen smelled like. 

Or things like graveyards. That is troublesome to people who are from a lot of other countries. They say, why on earth would you go to a graveyard looking for stories? Is it because they’re full of stories?

LB: Like graveyards have this kind of up and down — well, at least in, in this country anyway — kind of this up and down sort of cultural: you go there, you don’t go there. I don’t really know in other places, but they’re full of literally buried stories, but also lots of stories that are written in stone for all to see.

AS: [00:18:00] Exactly. I mean, you go there looking for art, you go there looking for symbolism. You go there and say, Ooh. Wait a minute. That name sounds familiar. 

And with these fancy little gadgets that we have in our hands, we can look up who that person was. And then maybe that leads you down the rabbit hole of another story.

Or, for example, here in Washington, you go to Congressional Cemetery, you go to Oak Hill Cemetery, you go to Mount Olivet. You can go specifically to find the people that you know are there that you’ve heard of that you want to see where they are, or you just go sauntering through and find a pretty stone and say, Hmm, I wonder who that was, or I wonder why there’s a dog as a headstone, or I wonder what does that flower symbolize, or what does that turtle symbolize, and then you go off on all these tangents, of curiosity that are [00:19:00] artistic or historic or personal or whatever they might be.

And then you kind of get hooked to the idea of looking for stories in weird, possibly uncomfortable places like that.

LB: So I actually wanted to stop for a moment anyway there because there are reasons why we want to be careful with our curiosity, right? And there is some judgments and some kind of risk analysis that needs to be in the mix as well, right?

AS: There is, there’s, you have to be aware. I always tell the au pairs, take your headphones out of your, off your head, put your phone away. Use it for nothing, except maybe a camera, and pay attention! And that gives you spatial awareness. It, it just gives you a sense of [00:20:00] sensory awareness of who and what is around you. And that’s also your sonar radar keeps you safe.

LB: Right.

AS: Especially, and frankly, especially for women... And then not only does it keep you safer, but then it makes you overall more aware, which makes you cue in on things on what we were talking about, sound and smell… And then maybe you want to reach down and touch something and see what that leaf smells like. Or you see mint, if you rub the mint and smell your fingers, your fingers smell like mint. 

I think you have to intentionally make yourself aware of your surroundings, not only for your safety, but then that engenders the whole idea of, well, what do you know? I’ve walked by here a thousand times and never noticed that pine cone [00:21:00] finial on that fence!

LB: Yeah.

AS: And there you are… And then you’ve just had a curious moment that you didn’t even realize you needed to have.

LB: I love that too, because I think with each of those experiences, you build the depth of your intuition about what is okay to explore. So your risk analysis shifts as you go and your rewards continue to pile up — hopefully way outweighing whatever downside there is — but you have more information so that I think it makes you…it empowers you, is my guess, in terms of being able to do more of that. The more you do it, the easier it is, the better you are at assessing what might I find here.

AS: Yes. Yes, exactly. And I think the more aware you are, the more inclined you are to walk through that open gate. You will know it when you [00:22:00] sense it, that when you are engaged and you’re not just being spatially aware and situationally aware — Well, first, you know, safety is, is definitely important, especially when you are, you poke around the way I do — But in that effort, you open up that gate to what’s on the other side or, Ooh, there’s, I see the, there’s light at the end. 

You know, I have a friend who has radar for murals. Oh, you see that yellow building two blocks down? There’s a mural there. How do you know? Oh, well, I can see a little bit of, like, purple paint.

LB: A flicker of color!

AS: A flicker of color, and she’s usually right.

LB: Yeah. You know, one trick I learned from the urban sketching universe is you’re looking at the thing and you’re sketching it, and it’s like, turn around, look the other direction. We sort of get going, we’re destination-oriented, [00:23:00] and we walk past things we don’t even see because we’re unidirectional.

And I do this now. Every once in a while, I just sort of randomly turn around in my steps – it drives people crazy in the flow of traffic. But, I see things. I see things. I spot things.

AS: Isn’t that great? That’s a fun exercise in your own neighborhood.

And we did a lot of that when we were doing virtual classes with au pairs. You had to get out of the house to keep from losing your sanity. I’d say go walk around your neighborhood, either take a new walk or take a walk that you always take and see what you find and write it down.

And I give them a list of consider this. And then I make them search for a rainbow —  it can be plastic, it can be, it can be flowers, it can be found object, it can be whatever. Go find this stuff.

LB: I don’t know what my segue is to my Big Jar of Wannabe Analogies, but it’s [00:24:00] time to go through that gate. So are you game for this?

AS: Absolutely.

LB: So here is my literal big jar. I have slips of paper in here; one for you, one for me, one for the audience. We’re going to make an analogy to curiosity with whatever is on these slips of paper.

AS: Okay, bring it on.

LB: Yours is popcorn. How is curiosity like popcorn? Mine is a whip and I have one for the audience. Do you want to go first or you want me to go?

AS: I can go 

LB: Okay. How is curiosity like popcorn?

AS: Curiosity is like popcorn because you add a little heat, or you add a little blown air to it, and Something new pops out in front of you and you can touch it, see it, smell it, eat it…

LB: Speaking of all the senses!

AS: Take in all those senses [00:25:00] and try the, try that popcorn!

LB: I love it.

Hmm. How is curiosity like a whip? Speaking of senses, I mean, one of the things that I associate with a whip is the crack of a whip, the sound that a whip makes. And I think that there’s something about curiosity that has that same sort of whoosh and snap about it. There’s just this, this crack. It’s like suddenly things opening, things exploding, like popcorn. It’s about this sharp crack that’s really distinguishable and, and startling. 

And audience, yours is sprinkler. How is curiosity like a sprinkler? Let us know on social media, #analogy. 

Well, Andréa! This was a lot of fun and I’m like really excited about our next walk.

AS: Let’s go![00:26:00]

(music)

LB: You’ve been listening to Choose to Be Curious.

I’m your host, Lynn Borton. Thanks for joining us here today. You can find all my shows at choosetobecurious.com.

I hope you’ll follow me here, there, and on social media @choosetobecurious, where you can share your sprinkler analogy #analogy. 

Many thanks to my delightful guest and walking buddy, Andréa Seiger. Find her on Instagram @UrbanSafariDC111. Links to Andrea on my website. 

Thanks too, to Sean Ballack for our theme music. And this is “Curio” by Vacant Distillery ,via Blue Dot Sessions. 

So pay attention, look up, talk to people at the bus stop. I hope you’ll join us again next time. Until then, choose to be curious!

(music)

AS: There are a lot of public buildings. that aren’t museums, a lot of them you would never [00:27:00]even realize that you can walk into them. Check them out…A lot of associations and a lot of these, especially science organizations, they give tours. They might have beautiful art in their lobbies…

You don’t need to go to a restaurant that social media tells you to go to. Just pick one that smells good, looks good… 

And look for places that you would find uncommon, that you would never think to walk into. And just walk in. 

And to those who think they need to plan everything they do, just, you know, walk out the door and turn left. See what happens. And you will meet people, you will see stuff that wasn’t on your radar, And you might just have a really great meal, too.