The Natural Surprise & Curiosity Market Stall is an outreach operation that travels to outdoor community markets and is run off the top of an ironing board. It meets people where they are on a casual, unplanned basis, and is easier to access than a museum in a city thousands of kilometers away. A typical market day will see interactions with several dozen highly diverse people: aged 2 to 90; of varying ability, education and cultural background; and many who have little interest in academic science.
"Natural surprises" are delivered through simple demonstrations. Turning surprise into curiosity (a desire to find out why), we carefully controll the audience's curiosity gap over successive demonstrations to keep them engaged. This process provides an opportunity to deliver new narratives and an avenue for conversation with skeptics and the staunchly preopinionated. More significantly, the experience asks people to change how they see the world based on astonishing evidence. Fundamentally changing one's world view in light of evidence is a crucial ability to have, but people might have few opportunities to practice it in their daily lives.
Bubbles
- Big, beautiful bubbles create awe and invite visual engagement of people passing by
- Bubble demonstrations offer some accessible surprises for young children
- For older audiences, bubbles can lead into discussions of light and optics
Magnets and Electricity
- Offers more substantial surprises and puzzles for older audiences
- Can be made relevant to discussions about energy and electricity production
- Allows audiences to construct, test and then reason using new theories
The market stall concept can easily accommodate other content, but when operated by a single person, two topics per market day is the sensible practical limit.
