Thanks Paul!

Lisa, good question. In am leading the small research team at Oregon State University's Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning. We are working with Mark to conduct studies on who tunes in to GS, and also what those who do take away from the experience. We do this through feedback forms, short so-called spot interviews, semi-structured deep interviews, observations and follow-up online surveys. We did this at the Eclipse Festival, but also other GS events. The key to our research questions about who participates is to compare the GS participants with those who don't or have not yet.  We use a range of measures around identity, interest, and satisfaction. Initial results are promising and we hope to have the first manuscripts written in the next month or so.

Yes!  The short of it: GS is serving a wide range of audiences, including those who like science, but also those who are not much connected to it. We found that among this audience, or even the festival goers in general, few people were adverse to science, though they had rather complex perspectives on it. A really important initial finding is also that it matters for this audience how science is presented. They appreciate the art-science connection that GS creates, the creative and playful way of the experience. Whether this is now a context-specific expectation or holds no matter where this audience may encounter science is not yet clear. We are currently writing up the first round of results and should have a paper soon.

Thanks, Steve: We had a pretty good representation at the Guerilla Science portion of the Eclipse Festival, including families (yes!). The age range at this festival was wide, and represents to a degree the high ticket price to get in.  But in June we'll collect data at the Figment Festival in Governor's Island (New York, June 23/24), and we will probably see a different audience there, way more family oriented. We are very curious about comparing with the Eclipse.  Ah, and: PLEASE COME VISIT! 

That's a great question, and it's something that we're trying to deconstruct formally.

In terms of the festival events that we're showing in the video, the curactors/event producers who put on the event all have a background in either exhibition development or science festivals AND are music festival afficionados. So, the curators are all people who have a deep intuitive understanding of what the audience would like.

What we'd like to know is how it's possible to create events for an audience where the core Guerilla Science team does not have a deep intuitive understanding of that audience. We're experimenting with that now by running a science-artists residency program, which is going to populate about half the FIGMENT programming for June 23-24th. We'll see how that goes and we'll be writing up the results in a way that we hope others can use.

Yes, festivals are multiple days. Typically of medium size: 10,000 - 20,000 attendees, in general.

In a given year, it's hard to say what proportion of the people who come to the activities come to more than one. There is certainly a proportion of return attendees, but I really don't know what percentage to put on this.

The model does work especially well for semi-captive audiences. I would attribute this primarily to the culture of exploration and an openness to trying new experiences that comes with attending a (music/arts) festival. There is a literature on this that is going to be part of the next paper we write.

While we don't know rigorously if this would work for other venues, we suspect it would based on some experiments in other sorts of venues: Food markets and pop-up urban spaces. This year we are going to Dutchess County Fair, NY to test this.