Help relaunch the Creative Disturbance podcast platform

Creative Disturbance was an innovative podcast platform created over 10 years ago. It died during the pandemic.

We propose to rejuvenate and relaunch the project in different ways:

1. One of the originalities of the project was its multi-lingual approach. The ArtSciLab involves faculty and students who speak dozens of different languages. We wish to serve as a platform for cross-cultural innovation. There is a deep incentive among the UTD international students to publish for audiences in their home language.
2. Creative Disturbance sought to ignore disciplinary boundaries that make inter-disciplinary collaboration difficult. This remains a deep problem in University Structures worldwide.
3. The pandemic triggered many changes in social behaviors including the ability of older people to use the internet. We propose a goal of cross-generational communication and collaboration. Our lab now has collaborations between 80-year-olds and 18-year-olds.
4. Finally, Creative Disturbance seeks to be productively disorganized and respond quickly to emerging new needs and topics. An example is the Virtual Africa channel which responded to the suggestions of growing numbers of students from Africa in our university. Creative Disturbance will listen loudly to the anxieties and proposals for anyone in our university and beyond whether faculty, staff, students and visitors.

We propose to raise $2,500 to be allocated to pay students who record, edit and publish podcasts. Should additional funds be raised we would allot them to students in different disciplines across campus to interview people in their areas of interest. This would include data analytics, psychology and neuroscience, physics and any other diploma or microcredit on the UTD campus. In addition, we would pay students to be liaisons to our international collaborators in Columbia, China, Europe and Canada.

Our first launch of Creative Disturbance published over 800 podcasts and had over 100,000 downloads. We would like to triple this number and provide publishing opportunities for students to build their portfolios and resumes. With a focus on the families of students, internationally and in the U.S., we think Creative Disturbance could serve as a smart village, an international movement under way to provide social innovation to the smart cities such as Dallas.

The group is led by UTD alumnus and ArtSciLab Manager Evan Acuna. The first team membership will be offered to ArtSciLab members https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/people/ including faculty and students. We would also reach out to the lab alumni 100 strong https://artscilab.utdallas.edu/people/ . Roger Malina would be the supervising faculty member.

We would also offer the opportunity to each donor to record and publish a podcast of their own, subject to ethical review.

You can learn more about artscilab here and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn