Remixing Yale Innovation
Developing key techniques for American agriculture and food production. Using the arts to drive dialogue on climate change. Putting patients at the center of healthcare decisions. Creating new forms of knowledge exchange, from the stage to Hollywood screens.
Each of these stories — and many more — are currently on view as part of Yale Innovation Remixed, a media exhibit at Yale’s Center for Science and Social Science Information (CSSSI). The exhibit, curated by Tsai CITY in collaboration with the team at the CSSSI, uses Tsai CITY programs as jumping-off points to explore Yale innovation across fields and time periods. Tsai CITY defines innovative thinking as “approaching problem-solving with curiosity, creativity, and commitment,” and the exhibit uses this broad view of the innovation process to guide visitors through stories of innovation that range from familiar inventions like the telegraph to lesser-known advances in fields like gastronomy and public health. Collectively, these stories come from across Yale College and Yale’s graduate and professional schools. Fittingly for Yale’s year of 50/150 celebrations, the Yalies highlighted in the exhibit include a diverse lineup of female innovators who have helped reshape their fields, from the founding dean of the Yale School of Nursing— the first university-based school to take an educational, rather than apprenticeship, approach to training nurses — to world-famous sculptor and architect Maya Lin.
Together, Yale Innovation Remixed’s wide-ranging components illuminate a long history of innovation at Yale. Guided by its titular focus on the concept of “remix”— the process of creating something novel by combining ideas or elements in new ways — the exhibit uses a series of themes to place disparate-seeming stories alongside each other. Connecting past and present, the exhibit also ties these stories to examples of innovative projects currently emerging across Yale’s campus. It’s an opportune moment to highlight Yale’s innovation ecosystem: this fall, a new website has launched to help students, faculty, and other community members explore Yale’s diverse entrepreneurship and innovation opportunities. Just as the website aims to provide a roadmap for future innovators, Yale Innovation Remixed showcases a cross-section of trails already blazed at Yale —and points out these trails’ surprising points of intersection. “We wondered,” explains one panel of the exhibit, “how we could learn from the past as we look to the future.”
This media exhibit will be on view at the CSSSI until March 2020. It’s free and open to the public during the CSSSI’s regular hours.