Competency

Can I share something? I don't know if you know Becky. Becky Queen of Frocks at [inaudible]. She's in, she was originally in England, and now she's in Paris. She has her Esty shop and her online shop, she's very familiar to you, I think. She's also an astronomer. She does her shop full-time. But then she went to France and she was doing the markets, she had all her stuff lined up and she was like, "I'm not doing very well." And somebody came over and was like, "It's too pretty. It's too nice. It's too lined up. In paris, when you're at a market, people want to rummage through stuff. So you take all of these that you've got out on nice displays and you throw them in a basket and let people rummage through and find it." And I was like.. I do that now. What a cool thing. I think it's the mentality, like an arts market, that's also at a Farmer's market, and there's a vintage market. They do like flipping... It's like a treasure hunt. Yeah, I don't do nice displays. No. Wow. Yeah. Uh, man. That's situational awareness. Yeah, yeah. It totally is.

one thing that came out through several conversations throughout the event is very much that we're in someone else's community or communities that have their own rules, and values and concerns, and geek culture in particular has a long history of trauma, and social isolation, and anxiety and otherwise being marginalized, and these are a bunch of people who, especially the cosplayer, are in a position of being exposed and vulnerable. And so there's definitely a lot of landmines for institutions participating in a Comic-Con when it comes to that kind of cultural environment.

I think the biggest risk to me is that integrating science into that experience, you attempt that push and it fails, and you end up triggering the opposite feeling that you wanted, where if you do it wrong, you go into this community and you try and inject your agenda and they recognize it as you injecting your agenda, and that can backfire. So that's the main area that I have concerns.

So my takeaway for the expo is I would really encourage building up relationships and conversations with the people who participate in the con, the expo vendors, the cosplayers, and really step one is just really listening to what they think is a better, more engaging experience and really trying to imitate those qualities or find people in this community that you can empower to do stuff. I was looking at a lot of the merch and there's this process of taking objects or characters and really cute-ifying them and turning them into anime plushes or that sort of thing, and this is really popular and I'm like, "Why is there not a super adorable plush Mars rover, or satellite or something like that that trades on this enthusiasm for merch and collectibility that clearly is there. So I think the important take away there is looking at what the rest of the expo is all about and trying to capture some of that.