Somehow I forgot to mention in yesterday’s robotics post the fact that iRobot Lead Roboticist Brian Yamauchi is a Clarion Workshop alum. Brian, whose website lists many of the project’s he’s working on, once described the value of the Workshop in his line of work as follows:

I was already good at creative thinking, and so were all of my classmates, but the real value was the life experience of being immersed in an environment with people who were passionate about storytelling and science fiction.

Another Workshop alum whose not currently a writer, Mark Nall of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, had a similar positive reaction:

One problem that many people have in technical fields is expressing complex topics to non-technical people. Clarion has helped me quite a bit in this area. With the lunar architecture about to be rolled out, I spend a lot of time speaking with people about why we are returning to the Moon, and what we will do when we get there. The workshop has helped me get through the jargon, and get to the story that people can understand.

Mark was in the news last week doing just that, explaining the rationale for his latest project, updating our maps of the moon in order to have a clearer understanding of its geography.

Mark and Brian actually crossed paths a while back at the Lunar Commerce Executive Roundtable; at the time, neither knew the other had attended Clarion. I guess space is a small world too…