Stephanie and Isaac Budmen are taking Applied Curiosity on a national tour in spring 2027.

A working session disguised as an author talk.

Stephanie and Isaac don't read from the book. They bring the questions that made it, and they turn the room into the kind of working session their practice runs on.

Applied Curiosity is the method they've used for fifteen years to build things that didn't exist yet: touchable replicas of untouchable museum artifacts, interactive sculptures with the world's first recognized cyborg, a pandemic factory grown across 8,000 homes. The book traces how. The tour brings the practice into your room.

The Talk: Stephanie presenting in a planetarium dome, the Buildini printer they invented projected behind her

The Artifact: Introducing the Scarab Vase, a 115-year-old object the audience could touch for the first time

The Method: Isaac walking the room through how they scanned the Scarab Vase in total darkness when every proven approach failed

The Story: The Scarab Vase pattern projected at scale during a recent stop on the tour

The Practice: Evaluating the Scarab Vase artifact together. Applied curiosity in the field, not on stage

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If you've sat through the standard reading-and-Q&A, you already know how it ends: a polite room, a few signed books, nobody changed. Stephanie and Isaac do something else.

They bring real prototypes, including the failed ones, and walk the audience through them out loud. Including the part most people leave out.

A moment from the talk

A few years back we asked: what if you could print food?

Begin the story →

Food Printer · 7 beats · ~2 min

It's the thing that, weeks later, the people who attended will be telling their colleagues about.

Working Session: Stephanie with a visiting student cohort earlier this year. What "interactive talk" actually looks like

The Sculpture: The interactive bust of Neil Harbisson, the world's first recognized cyborg, built in collaboration with Neil for the Smithsonian

The Printer: The Buildini, a 3D printer they designed and shipped, printing one of a series of lamps in the studio

Exhibit A: The chocolate BB. The food printer worked. The logo did not.

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This is for students, educators, artists, engineers, designers, athletes, curators, and anyone engaged in a pursuit that requires adaptability, tenacity, and a bit of innovation.

The main event is a keynote. A story-driven talk built around real prototypes and the questions that produced them, about 60 minutes with time for questions after. We need a stage, a projector, a decent sound system, and seats facing forward. Auditorium, lecture hall, theater, black box, or a conference keynote slot all work. We have done this for 100 people and for 800.

If you are bringing us to campus or into your building anyway, we are usually there for the day. We are glad to add a class visit, a studio critique, a hands-on workshop, or a working session with your staff or fellows. Tell us who else you want us to spend time with and we will build it into the trip.

Without making it another project on your plate.

We know how this usually works. You're interested, but you have to send it to a director, a committee, or a programming chair before you can say yes. The gap between "I'm interested" and "I had time to write the internal pitch" is where most bookings die.