Stephanie and Isaac Budmen are bringing Applied Curiosity on tour in 2026.
If your audience builds things — or wishes they did — we'd like to come. This page is built to be read in ninety seconds. Everything you need to decide, and everything you'd need to forward to a colleague, is below.
Their work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, The Met, Heinz Nixdorf, and the London Science Museum. During the pandemic, they grew a distributed network producing 3.5 million face shields across 8,000 households, which The New Yorker, Wired, and CNN called "a glimpse of the future of crisis response." Under NSF funding, they've led inquiry-based education programs in multiple cities at once, teaching the same method they use in the studio to thousands of learners.
2026Booking Summer & Fall windows12 stops plannedLimited availability
Question 01What is this
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 turn the room into the kind of working session their practice runs on.
Applied Curiosity is the method they've used for over a decade 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 a finished Scarab Vase replica together — applied curiosity in the studio, not on stage
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Question 02What happens in the room
Different from any author talk you've booked this year.
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. It's also the thing your director will recognize, in your internal pitch, as not the talk we usually book.
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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Question 03Would this fit your community
Three formats. Pick the one that fits your hole in the calendar.
Every event is shaped to your audience. These are starting points, not menus — most stops end up as some combination tailored over a single email exchange.
FORMAT A
Public Keynote
60 min · 100–800 people
Story-driven talk built around real prototypes. Best for evening programs, member events, festival slots.
FORMAT B
University Lecture + Exercise
90 min · 30–100 students
Talk plus a hands-on exercise where students apply the first two steps of the method to their own questions.
FORMAT C
Practitioner Workshop
3–4 hours · 15–40 people
Deep dive for staff, fellows, or working teams. The Budmens use real challenges your group is facing as the workshop material.
Don't see the right shape? Format D is "tell us what your community needs." Some of our best stops started as a custom email.
Question 04How to move this forward
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.
So we wrote the internal pitch for you.
⤳ A GIFT FOR YOUR INBOX
Forward this paragraph. We wrote it so you don't have to.
Stephanie and Isaac Budmen are touring their new book Applied Curiosity in 2026, and we're considering bringing them to our community. They aren't typical author-talk speakers — they're working artists and engineers whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the Met, the London Science Museum, and other venues around the world, and whose pandemic response (a distributed network producing 3.5 million face shields across 8,000 households) was covered by The New Yorker, Wired, and CNN. What makes their event different is that they bring real prototypes (including the failed ones), walk the audience through them honestly, and turn the room into a working session rather than a passive talk. Past hosts describe it as the kind of event their community is still talking about months later. They have limited stops remaining for 2026 and I'd like to start a conversation before the windows fill.
Honest pricing
Most stops land between $6,000 and $18,000, depending on travel, format, and whether you'd like a workshop alongside the keynote. We've worked with budgets smaller than that — tell us yours and we'll tell you honestly whether we can make it work.
What we need from you
Projection, a basic PA, and a room. We bring our own mics, our own prototypes, and our own books for the signing. You know your community best — we trust your promotional strategy and follow your lead.
Stephanie & Isaac Budmen In the studio · Syracuse, NY
The people who'll answer your email
Let's find out what your community does with this.
A few years back we asked: what if you could print food?
There weren't any food printers on the market.
So we had to invent one.
Food Printer · First Test
Moment 02 / 07
We figured we should calibrate.
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.
Food Printer · Meringue Test
Moment 03 / 07
It actually worked.
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 —
"That looks like shit."
— What we said when we leaned in
Food Printer · Pie Crust, Take One
Moment 05 / 07
So we celebrated.
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?
Moment 06 / 07 · The Why
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.
