Blue Lab is excited to announce our first place award in the Humanities and Social Sciences category at Princeton's 2025 Keller Center Innovation Forum!
Allison Carruth, the lab's director, and Barron Bixler, the lab's creative director, gave a flash presentation and answered questions from this year's jury about what Blue Lab has accomplished in the four years since it was founded, as well as what motivates the lab's work.
"Blue Lab is pressure-testing the question that inspired our launch by making climate documentaries—and other forms of environmental storytelling and art—that foreground people rather than data and that resist both apocalypse and the easy fix of individual action," Carruth said during the presentation, titled Blue Lab: A Story Incubator and Media Production Studio. "Ultimately, we think such stories help to close the gap between research that addresses urgent problems and the experiences of communities grappling with climate change among other upheavals—communities, as our storytelling explores, who are also rolling up their sleeves and doing the slow work of protecting, repairing or salvaging the places they call home."
Carruth shared details about Blue Lab's slate of marquee projects: three original podcast series, a narrative dispatch series about uncanny coastal places and a feature-length documentary film, currently in production, titled California on the Edge.
After the presentation, Carruth and Bixler shared working clips from the film, as well as select episodes of the podcasts, with the Forum's 400 attendees in the demo hall.
"It was such an honor to be invited to share the lab's work and theory of change, especially in this context of the many incredible innovations happening across campus," said Bixler. "That we took home the first place award on behalf of our team is just incredible. As we look to scale up Blue Lab's work and impact, including field courses Allison and I will teach over summer 2027 in Maine and 2028 in Kenya, the award will provide crucial support for course design and honoraria for guest mentors from the environmental media and art spaces."
Celebrating its 20th year, the Keller Center Innovation Forum program presents an opportunity for Princeton faculty, researchers, postdocs and graduate students to consider and showcase the impact of their research beyond the academy.
Awards are given to the projects that demonstrate potential for commercialization or toward catalyzing societal or cultural change.