What happens when you put a room full of computing researchers on the spot and ask them to dream big off the top of their heads?
That’s the premise behind the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC’s) session during the CRA Summit at Mystic Lake Center. On Thursday, July 23rd, members of the CCC Council Executive Committee will host Yes, And: Computing Visioning Improv, a session that trades a polished panel presentation for spontaneous, crowdsourced ideas. The session aims to bring researchers from across various fields together to do some off-the-cuff visioning, imagining in unusual ways what the field could be capable of long-term.
A New Computing Card Game
The format is built around a card game CCC has developed specifically for this kind of creative brainstorming. In small teams, participants will draw from two decks: one featuring computing substrates like quantum computing or biological computing, and one featuring application domains ripe for transformation, from massive undertakings like agriculture to something as mundane as email. The challenge is to combine whatever cards you draw and pitch a compelling vision for how that substrate could address a real problem in the application.
The crowd serves as both audience and judge, evaluating whether each idea is bold enough, worthy of investment, and pointed at the challenges that matter most. And everyone attending is encouraged to participate, not just watch.
Join the CCC Session
This session is about more than just generating interesting — or wacky — ideas. CCC aims to encourage the kind of visionary thinking that doesn’t always fit neatly into a grant proposal, and to create space for researchers across disciplines to actually talk to each other. The card game format is deliberately designed to produce unlikely combinations because those collisions tend to be where we’re most challenged to think out-of-the-box. In this way, the visioning happening during Yes And: Computing Visioning Improv is a direct reflection of CCC’s mission to shape the future of computing research. All CRA Summit attendees are welcome, whether as a participant or an observer.
Read more about the CRA Summit here.
