We've given this talk to rooms of 800, and it's the same talk for a room of 30: a gallery, classroom, studio, library, auditorium, or conference keynote slot.
Stephanie + Isaac Budmen are inventors, designers, and educators based in Syracuse, New York. Their work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the London Science Museum, and the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum.
During the pandemic, they grew a distributed network of 8,000 households that produced 3.5 million face shields for hospitals. Under NSF funding, they've led inquiry-based education programs that have reached approximately 13,000 students over the last four years.
Real projects, told with the real prototypes. Every stop is built from cases like these.
They bring real prototypes, including the failed ones, and walk the audience through them out loud. Including the part most people leave out.
It's the thing that, weeks later, the people who attended will be telling their colleagues about.
In March 2020, hospitals were out of face shields. Stephanie and Isaac designed one that could be made anywhere, published it, and grew a distributed network of 8,000 households that produced 3.5 million shields.
On stage they tell the part the headlines skipped: what it takes to trust strangers with your design, and what happens when you do.
That spring, the work was cited at a White House briefing and praised publicly by Joe Biden. Both sides of the aisle, pointing at the same Syracuse studio.
Every stop is shaped around the venue. A few ways it can come together:
Fees vary with travel and what we add to the visit. Just ask.
Little or no speaker fee. Your venue buys copies of Applied Curiosity for attendees, or bundles a book with each ticket, and we build the visit around that. Works especially well for museums, libraries, and nonprofits.
If we're already traveling to your region for another event, we can add a stop nearby at a reduced rate.
Tell us your real budget in the form below, even if it's small. We mean it.
Stephanie and Isaac Budmen are taking their new book Applied Curiosity on a national tour starting in spring 2027, and I'd like to bring them to our community. They are inventors, designers, and educators whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the Met, and the London Science Museum, and whose distributed face-shield network during the pandemic produced 3.5 million shields across 8,000 households. Their event isn't a standard reading: it's a keynote built around real prototypes, including the ones that failed, and the room ends up in conversation with them.
Big halls and small rooms. Big budgets and small ones. We'd rather find a version that fits than not come at all.
436 illustrated pages by Stephanie and Isaac Budmen. Every stop on the tour is built from the method and the projects inside it. In stock and shipping now.
There weren't any food printers on the market.
So we had to invent one.
We'd never printed food before. We should test. We should be careful.
But we couldn't wait. So we just loaded it up and went for it.
We loaded chocolate frosting and hit go. Fully expecting a glitch.
It printed the outlines. Started the infill. This never happens. It worked on the first try.
We held our breath. We leaned in. And…
The printer worked. The structure held. We'd just made a thing that didn't exist an hour ago.
So what happened to the surface? Was it the temperature? The ingredient?
What if we tried pie crust?
This is the moment of every Budmen project: the moment the "failure" becomes the next ten questions.
Life is not a straight line is one of the ten principles in the book. This is what living it actually feels like in the room. By the time we finish telling this story on stage, the audience has stopped performing competence and started wondering what they could try if the failure was the fun part.