Yeah, we’re just saying the Social Innovation Lab.

We’re organizing this event on November 9th. They have been so helpful. There is an event upstairs and they’re giving us access to the basement. We want to create something really interactive.

I really wanted to say that I was so proud that there was this place in Taiwan, even showing Taipei. I was like, “Yeah. You know, we’ve got a space for free.” For an organization like us feeling the roots, and so welcome, and so easily accessible. I said, “Thank you, guys.” It was like, “No, no, you have to thank Audrey.” Thank you. Amazing.

It will take place in the basement?

Yes.

It is awesome.

I think it’s also symbolically this first gathering that we’re putting up for partners of Minerva. It’s very intimate. It’s like the secret base of the Air Force base. There’s a history of this place as well. It’s meaningful. It’s really in line with what Minerva is.

It’s awesome. The basement is a fairly new area that’s been opened. If there is anything that you want to change, it’s very malleable. Compared to the above the ground buildings, which are more or less fixed now, the basement can be done however we want, because it’s a shared very large space and nothing much else.

Just feel free to let us know and we’ll be happy to make adjustments. The version you are seeing now is by one year of co-creation of all the different incubatees in the Social Innovation Lab, and gathering their common understanding and also their common wish for the basement area. It’s very much still in the define process in design thinking.

It’s so exciting. I’m really excited to see it.

We’re going to go later today.

OK. Anything else I can help with?

Yeah.

Aside from the Social Innovation Lab.

You know about Minerva.

Of course, but for the benefit of our readers, maybe show something.

Sure.

Maybe Capri, about Minerva and also about the whole Taipei chapter.

Yes, definitely. Where to begin? There’s many things about Minerva that are new and different. Each of these elements, I can go deeper in.

Campus. Tell me more about city campus.

Sure. We believe in using the city as a campus. We don’t have a physical campus beyond the residence halls that our students live in together. That’s actually one of the reasons and motivations for me being here this week as well, is to understand more.

We’re meeting with different people this week to ask, what can you uniquely learn from Taipei, and how might we be into design experiences? We very much believe in experiential learning, not just sitting in a lecture hall and being spoken to, but actually engaging and actively working with knowledge.

That’s why we immerse our students in seven cities around the world. That’s how we think about the city more creatively. We’ve been using this phrase of even experiential professors or people that are professors of practice, that we can get insight into different elements.

In the way you might think about a campus having a library, there are public libraries in every city that we go to, so using the civic spaces.

In the same way, you might also think about a Department of Social Sciences, we think of people that are working in those industries that we could connect students to, to learn from, and see how they’re actually in practice doing these things. We have no physical campus, and we try to think about what resources and people exist in the city for us to engage in that way.

That’s cool.

I think what’s cool about it is, we hope that students leave Minerva being able to go to any city in the world, and then approach it in a similar way. How can you think of a city as a place to learn from and unlock in many ways? I like your basement analogy of the unlocking, the discovering, is the mindset that we hope our students gather from the four-year experience.

Now there are 100 students arriving in January 2020, to learn from Taipei. They’ve been to six different cities across the world, from San Francisco, Berlin. You should say them in order because I don’t have them.

They spent their first two semesters in San Francisco, of their first year, then they go to Seoul, South Korea, Hyderabad, India, Berlin, Germany, Buenos Aires, Argentina, London, UK, and then they end in Taipei, before going back to San Francisco.

Right before graduation, they’re coming here to learn from Taipei. I find it very exciting. What can Taipei teach them? What is the particularity of Taipei, at this particular stage in their life?

Your research methodologies are more mature.

Yes.

Like in a “Harry Potter” movie.

We do make lots of references to Harry Porter.

That’s right. Taipei would present the grand prizes I guess.

Is there anything that the city who have worked with you have to make adjustments to, for example, in terms of accommodation, transportation? You mentioned the civic spaces, but they’re already there. Your work is more a curational one.

Yes.

My work is more of a regulatory one. For example, when the MIT Media Lab folks came to Taipei, they asked specifically a place for them to try out their self-driving tricycles that are totally ignoring existing laws and regulations.

These are new creatures. That would be the Social Innovation Lab, actually. That whole Z Lab, they just drove those self-driving tricycles there and they interacted with people near the Jian Gao Flower Market who look at those self-driving tricycles and say, “These are trolleys, and what are you doing with those trolleys, Minister?”

I’m like, “These are not really trolleys,” but if all you have is piles of flowers, everything look like a trolley.

Oh, cool.

It does look like one. [laughs] They’re like, “Instead of driving me to places, can it follow me around so that when I put my flower into it and it’s full, you can summon another one so I don’t…I can shop hands-free.” I’m like, “This requires a lot of change.”

Then the Taipei Tech people just changed the tricycles to fit the people’s needs. For that, we have to make a sandbox saying, “If you do any self-driving, or even drones or whatever, within this Z Lab area, then it’s not to be penalized by city regulation or municipal laws.” It’s basically a free experimental zone.

Usually, from students or graduate students looking for a project, that’s my usual request coming to me. I just want to make sure that whether you have this kind of needs or other kinds of needs.

That’s a great question. It was interesting. Because the students are here in their fourth year, they are working on what we call their capstone project, which is very similar to a thesis. Yes, each of them come with a project in mind that they’re investigating.

I think that would be their unique needs in some ways. What we focus on is connecting them to people that are working in these areas that they can learn from. When I think about a sandbox, and I love that analogy, what we think about often is the people that are working on these things.

In terms of infrastructure, there’s not something that comes to mind. It’s more about the connections and broadening.

Not really Harry Potter stuff?

We need brooms…

It will create a large social impact, but not necessarily for the better. [laughs]

What?! Tell me more about that. What do you mean?

I tried, and it’s novel. [laughs]

We were looking at many student projects when they make this kind of disruptive technologies. Sometimes, especially people working on medical…I was just at a hackathon, the Civil IoT Hackathon. There was a team, very creative. Their basic idea is that you upload all your medical history – we have universal health care – to it.

Their capstone is essentially that it analyzes for you, based on the prescriptions you had, whether air quality would damage your health more than other people, which is a very noble project. They choose a display that is like…Do you know the temperature as listed and temperature as felt? It’s two different Fahrenheit and Celsius numbers.

If you’re particularly fragile, then you feel heat as more hot or things like that. Or, if it’s more humid, then everybody feel heat differently. There’s two different numbers. One is listed, one is felt. They applied the same to air pollution and remind people who are more sensitive to say, “Currently, even though PM 2.5 is at this many micrograms/milligrams, you will feel it as double, the milligrams.”

The different one, yeah.

It’s very alarmist. The difference versus the Celsius/Fahrenheit as felt is that we naturally can correct the biases. If the machine tells me that I’m feeling 80 Celsius, I’m like, “Of course, the machine is wrong.”

For air pollution, we don’t have a built-in sensor, a built-in measurement, so if it creates alarmist messages, under or over-reports, there’s no way to correct that bias.

It perpetuates this bias, and we will maybe hypnotize ourselves so that we actually feel worse than we actually should feel because we look at those numbers. That’s the kind of negative social impact that I was referring to.

Their project is a very worthwhile one. It’s very professional, well calibrated, but the lack of feedback mechanism from the society, that creates a problem. That is just one of the recent cases.

Interesting. It makes me want to share the list of projects that students are working on.

Sure. Do you already have the…?

Capstone, all of their capstone pieces.

Can you email it to me?

I can definitely do that.

That would be great. I think a few of them are super passionate. They come to Minerva for the opportunity to do comparative studies in different cities on a certain topic. I’m sure there are some that are more civic engagement involved or social impact.

January to…

April.

April?

Mm-hmm.

OK, that’s good.

End of March…No.

To end of March.

April.

April.

To April.

No, it’s the break end of March.

There’s a break.

Yeah, I got stuck by the break, because I’m looking at students.

The weather is OK, so it’s OK. It’s a good time to be around.

What we are doing here is, we are the student experience team. Capri leads the global student experience team, and I’m representing the student experience team in Taipei. We are building this network of what we call civic partners, these professors of practice in Taiwan.

I’m so proud that there is someone like you in Taiwan that I would love you to be part of this learning community.

Of course.

The second thing, it means that you share your profile and you’re willing to be contacted for a specific field. We have a big ratio. You won’t get a hundred students emailing you, but…

It’s fine, but only publicly.

Yeah, I know. The students would love this. Also, we have this one event where we meet in person with the local partners and the students meet in person around discussion topics.

That will be…?

January 17 for the moment, to be confirmed. That’s the preliminary date.

Sure, why not?

I came here also to ask you questions about what do you think would be interesting in Taiwan, through what lens to frame Taiwan.

Also, we’re going to have two, three talks over the course of the semester. I’m still curating what the topics should be. Students are arriving at a specific time, which is right after elections. No, they’re coming during elections. They’re coming on 9th…

It’s fine. It’s part of Taiwan.

Exactly. They arrive on the 10th. 11th and 12th is elections.

They can observe people going to voting booth.

Exactly. Afterwards, it’s Chinese New Year.

Hopefully a shorter line this time.

Then after it’s Chinese New Year, so there’s a lot of movement. The first talk comes right before Chinese New Year and after the election. I’m thinking what topics. Aside from inviting you to be one of our key partners, I also wanted to know, when you connect Taiwan to the world, when you talk to the world about Taiwan, what would be interesting for the students.

I’ll have to look at the capstone projects to answer your question.

Another thing is that I wanted to ask you about one topic that I saw students looking at. It’s for example a lot about civic tech. Last time I contacted you, it was about vTaiwan or things like this, participatory democracy.

There is now a BBC, and “New York Times,” and “Economist” about it, coverage.

What other initiatives are there that you are leading or that your group is doing that our students could participate in as well. Not just curating for our students, but for them to participate in what’s happening here.

Don’t they have their own capstone projects? What’s your criteria? Do they have to just align in principle, or does it have to be a component in their capstone project for them to intern like this?

There is both. There is them doing their capstone project and trying to find in the city whatever could add value to their capstone projects.

That’s the resources.

What could they uniquely get from Taiwan to add to their capstone project? Maybe some students will just be on the capstone. They’re not even looking at Taiwan. That might happen too.

No…

Other than their capstone, of course they will be thinking a lot about their capstone, but showing them also things. Sometimes you think there’s no connection with my capstone, actually gives you an insight for your capstone. Cross-disciplinary things or maybe…

Our job is to think about their capstones as well as what Taiwan could teach them.

That’s our main message.

Taiwan can help.

Yes. That’s why I said that first I have to see what their capstones are. In Taiwan, we have this social innovation platform at si.taiwan.gov.tw that’s bilingual and you can very quickly see which cities and which SDGs they are focusing on.

You’re doing Taipei City. Taipei has a voluntary local review, as well as all the social innovators currently focusing on which SDGs. Also, in these SDGs, what are the natural allies both within Taiwan and also part of international networks. There’s more than 400 notes. That’s your experts right here.

Yeah, that’s a great resource. Is that on here too?

Yeah. It’s si…Basically, my website is pdis.tw in my office.

This one.

Great, and then we can find the social innovation platform.

Right. Then if you just add si. — as in si.pdis.tw — then that’s it.

At the beginning. Perfect.

That’s the resource here. The other one that I would mention is that in the special topic, we do a more focused group, specific terms.

For example, this is reducing inequality caused by distance for health and wellbeing, so telemedicine. Think about a nurse in an offshore island with somebody, they’re deciding whether to send with helicopter to the main Taiwan island or not.

Through a design called Presidential Hackathon that identifies through a sandbox for three months, we tried what if we changed the laws so that the local nurses, when paired with high-speed connection with the mainland doctor, can do diagnosis, and to form a partner instead of an untrusting relationship where people are always sent to the main island, we are looking for a more trusting relationship.

Then we changed one law and five regulations and a lot of personnel. Now all the offshore islands and all the indigenous health centers now have broadband. There’s more than 98 percent coverage. All 105 places can actually now connect and do telemedicine. That’s a good capstone project.

We do this because we just use those specific SDG targets and to rally people around those targets. Each presidential head is on team, with the team name, always choose a specific target as their rallying cry and for people to discover this kind of what we call data collaboratives around it.

If your students’ capstone projects can also be SDG indexed, if at a fine-grain level, 169, or at least at the 17 level, we can instantly find you partners. It’s like a library code.

Yes.

A new library code.

The new library code.

I like it.

For the moment, they have not been associated with SDG, but that’s probably something that we could do that would really facilitate that.

Connection, yeah, and also would just be interesting.

Even ask the students to do it to align with their SDGs, and to think about it, for them to think about it.

That shows how they can work with international, already established networks.

It’s a common language.

Yeah, it’s a common language. Across cities, the culture translation is the most friction point. Through SDG, we can at least agree on something, because everybody agrees on 2015, so we can at least agree on something that can form partnerships that are more pro social by nature, instead of more like my city versus your city kind of thing.

Definitely, because they’re global. You do have some really amazing projects. That sounds fantastic.

I thank the taxpayers for supporting my work.

We’re very happy to contribute.

Very cool. I feel like that’s a great follow-up. It’s sharing the projects if there is any one that we think naturally align with SDGs, and then checking out the website to see if there is.

Can I just try to repeat the process to understand? If I get the student’s capstone and even SDG the…

Indexed.

…indexed, how does the pair up happen? I’m guessing it happens.

The first thing is because within the SI, there is many connections to the USR project, the University Social Responsibility, the first thing I’ll do is that I’ll match your input, just like any university proposing their USR projects, which are all required to be indexed down to the what level, the 169 level.

You already have literally hundreds of universities already doing custom projects indexed by SDG for the social good. They are not all in Taipei, but Taipei is very close to every place in western Taiwan through high-speed rails.

Because of that, once we find that their capstone project happens to be exactly the same as the USR of some other university, and they are connectable through high-speed rails or not, we’ll let you know. That’s the most natural part because these are also learning institutions.

The other thing we will do is that we will look at the SI platform to look at the challenges, special topics, as well as just the registry, and to see whether there are some…they are not focusing on exactly the same thing, but they might be part of the resources.

The second ones are not universities.

There is only one university that declares itself as a social enterprise.

Which one is this one?

That’s the 文化 University, because they are a private university. They say, “We’re not selling education. We’re aiming for the global good through the service of our education,” which is something I think that many of us can agree.

Then our students will have even the sort of…Would it be accessible to our students to have this map of I can go see this person in Kaohsiung who is working on this with me. This person in here.

Exactly. Or maybe they’re working now, maybe they’re working a year before. That’s an instant map.

Wow. [laughs]

I love that. That’s something we definitely try to emphasize. The students are not the first ones to think of these challenges. There’s people that have been working on these and to learn from their experience. That would be fantastic.

Don’t force it, because not every capstone project is solving a global problem.

Is going to be relevant. Yeah, that’s the thing, and we don’t want to…

Some of them may not be SDG indexable. When the UNDP is doing SDG, there are things that they consciously left out in the SDG because of regional tensions, because of different cultural interpretations pertaining to religious differences and things like that. These are very worthwhile to work on, even though they’re not universally accepted.

Try not to create a SDGs-only atmosphere.

Yeah. I completely agree.

Wow, so efficiently…

…connection to this city. The SDG or non-SDG capstones I’ll send you, I would love to have your feedback on how to incorporate Taiwan and learn from Taiwan, Taipei.

Taipei, we are just a large municipality. From Taipei to Kaohsiung it’s 96 minutes by high-speed rail from the south-most to the north-most stations. When you have a transportation network like that and universal broadband, we’re just a larger municipality.

We’re in the good, on the right side.

Yeah, the right side, geographically, but very dense.

Of course, I’ll help. The other thing, you said that on the 17th…Do you know whether I’ll be using the full day or just a…?

It will be a two-hour-something.

In the afternoon?

Mm-hmm.

Honestly, I need to…

You don’t know?

We don’t know yet.

I’ll tentatively reserve 10:00 to 14:00, which should be very workable.

In London, we did it over lunchtime.

Right. We’ll follow up to confirm.

Whether you do a morning, afternoon, or a lunch…

It will fall within there.

…it will fall within that.

I will give you this information very, very soon, as soon as possible.

I’m already committed.

Thank you.

Thank you. You’ve already met some of our students digitally. Now you’ll get to meet them in person.

That’s exactly right. I had a class in Madrid where I attended the first week through a telepresence robot.

They give a robot to me, but a 360, like this, so I can turn locally in Taipei without any latency and just feel immersed…

You were there.

…in Medialab-Prado, that’s right. After a couple weeks, I flew there for a week. For them, I’m turning from this silicon body to this carbon body…

…but there’s a personality continuity.

Like, “This is familiar.” [laughs]

“Looks familiar, sounds familiar.”

We would do that a lot.

That’s great. That’s part of our students’…A lot of people know about Minerva through the global travel, but our students take their classes through a platform that we’ve designed. We very much focus as well on access to education, globally, and how technology can be this partner in starting that.

I dream of times where we might have even more futuristic, like probably doing augmented-realty learning or ways that we can merge the physical and digital even more.

With 5G, you don’t need cities anymore. [laughs]

Ooh.

[laughs] You can be in any of those rural, indigenous areas…

Yes.

…and still have the sense of co-presence.

Yes, and that is the game-changer as well. I go back and forth on that because I do think there’s still something that you can’t capture yet, perhaps maybe one day we could, by being in person.

These are the things that are in the indigenous nations, are in the communities that are rural. The city took a lot of that away.

I see what you’re saying.

I totally agree, but… [laughs]

Even more so when you’re more remote. I see what you’re saying. Yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe on that point, I’m curious if there’s any experiences in Taipei that you think would be a shame if our students missed while they were here.

I’ll have to look into it.

We’ll go from there. That is a source.

User-oriented.

I strongly believe in student-initiated learning.

I agree.

Yes, OK. Very good.

Any interesting topics you came across in the past month that really excited you?

I think election is a very good start. This particular election, people will learn the main political landscape in Taiwan in a very good resolution, very clear picture. The previous elections were often dominated by short-term events. This particular election is basically choice of values.

These kind of values defines Taiwan, one side, as part of the greater China, on the other side, as a Pacific island contributing to the Pacific and Indonesian islands, climate research, renewable energy in the world.

Two views are both valid. Once the student is exposed fully to those two views, which all has its merit, then they can then look at what the Taiwan place has to say.

For example, we have in this very small island I think more than 200 mountains that are above 3,000 meters, and with their own distinct indigenous culture, which are never really part of the Austronesian or the greater China narrative.

They have their own spirituality. These are, again, unique to Taiwan. People often see these as a part of one of the two greater narratives. That’s actually something I would recommend, because if you talk to Maori people who often come here, this is their ancestors’ land. All the Austronesian lineage came out of Taiwan culturally and linguistically. That’s, of course, valid.

People who have stayed in Taiwan indigenously for a very long time also have a different interpretation, especially around mountains. The Polynesian culture isn’t naturally about very high mountains. You only find it here. The same for the western part of Taiwan, which is more westernized.

Some kind of outdoor experience like the Taroko Gorge actually can really show how Taiwan is literally being pushed, a lot of tension tectonically. That push is to raise physically five centimeters every year towards them. That is very easily felt if you are in the Taroko Gorge or in any of those places in Taiwan that you just naturally feel the plate tectonics at work.

Such an interesting analogy. One topic about Taiwan for the students that we’ve been talking about is the question of different narratives that we all are and the different identities that we all are even as a person. Here in our origin, where we come from.

Here in Taiwan, sometimes when you come from the outside, you feel, oh it seems very homogeneous, but understanding all the nuances of your narrative. I really like this idea of doing the parallel between who are we as a society in Taiwan, and who are we.

They are at the stage they are going into adulthood, existential crises. This is one of the themes that will be really interesting to explore with the students.

Those two levels are both very important. I just returned from Ethiopia. We are all descendants of Lucy. There is no doubt about that as Homo sapiens. This common ancestry, this trip to the ancestors’ land. This, of course, is always very good in establishing a common humanity, also linking us to the wider animal kingdom and the entire ecosystem, all the SDGs, and there’s that part.

The individuation that you mentioned is also very important, because for a student who create their own capstones, the least they want to hear is that all of this is part of a lineage; they are merely a descendant; and any other person would be able to fulfill that work.

They are much more willing to learn if they hear that even though they are 169 SDGs, your capstone project is the only one in the world at the moment that connects those seven dots together. Because of combination explosion, it’s very easy to be unique once you’re connecting the dots and forming a new constellation out of existing stars.

Because of that, this individuation you’ll find this very much in Taiwan, because in Taiwan, in terms of identity, everybody has to make their own constellation. That part is also very instructive.

Yeah, the mix of both the community and the individuality also is a really interesting topic for them. At this stage, I’ve been to six different cities and it’s true. Our team often emphasize cultural differences and things like this.

I also think that even for this last semester, what brings humans together, there is all this be careful, different tradition, but just what’s common in our humanity is definitely something that I can feel in Taiwan, like to express ourselves.

We can be the transformation place. The next would be atonement, and then return.

Oh, man. That’s great.

Thank you, Audrey, for your time.

This is fantastic. I’m excited to keep in conversation. We’ll share the ideas with the students. We’ll be thinking about them with the SDGs lens, and then well share more details on the 17th of January.

That’s awesome. I’ll send you the transcript. Cheers.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.