Virginia Tech and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History presented the second ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival on April 5—7, 2019. The festival, programmed by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Museum’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, was a three-day celebration of creative exploration and research at the nexus of science, engineering, arts, and design (SEAD).
FSU’s Art Professor Carolyn Henne participated in Bridging Chasms, a new program for ACCelerate in which eight scholars from across the ACC were selected to participate. The Bridging Chasms initiative consists of a series of three-day events that involve “encounters” between the scholars. During an exchange, each participant attempted to explain some essential elements and crucial details of their discipline to their partner, an equally accomplished individual with different disciplinary expertise. The initiative seeks to identify and collect tools and strategies to identify what enables and what impedes understanding across disciplines. Additionally, emergent properties from the conversations themselves were explored.