On June 28, I will have the pleasure of giving a one-day course on the topic of demo-driven research for the PhD students attending the summer school organized at the University of Zurich.

Here is the teaser abstract:

Research is less about discovering the fantastic, as it is about revealing the obvious. Thus, the most important research challenge is not the fight against nature, but against our own entrenched assumptions.

One way of fighting against our own assumptions is to expose them and get feedback. I advocate the practice of demo-driven research, a way of doing research that puts emphasis on presenting the state of research with any given chance and to any audience willing to listen. Strike that: it’s not just presenting, it’s demoing. It’s demoing the story of your idea. I want to get our hands dirty and make our ideas palpable and exciting enough to spark interest and raise helpful feedback.

You might think it is difficult or even impossible to demo what you do. It’s not, but it does require practice. You might think your subject is dry and not exciting for outsiders. It’s not, but it does require you to adopt a less obvious point of view.

In this course, we will take the time to tackle these points. And along the way, we will discover some more interesting side-effects of this approach.