Today is the first day of my month-long fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, in the College of Fine Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

I am here at the invitation of Golan Levin, director of the studio and, back in the day, a former colleague at Interval Research. The fellowship is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Golan told me I could do anything I wanted, and so I invited Robin Gianattassio-Malle to come work with me on inventing a better way to help people learn and think about the consequences — both risks and benefits — of innovations in science and technology. We want to go beyond the usual binary, “fawning or damning” approach that dominates media coverage today, to actually informing people about these incredibly complicated issues.

I’m really excited about this project. It’s the first time in a long time I am going to have the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and do what I do best: to help people understand complexity in a way that is engaging, helpful and accurate. We are going to have to confront some tough design issues, but between us we have an amazing network to draw from.

Robin and I will be working at the STUDIO with two other fellows — Kyle McDonald and Jacob Tonsky — both of whom are wicked smart and from whom we expect to learn a lot.

We will be building a prototype over the next few weeks, and I will be posting updates about our progress. Yeehaw!