Breaking Silos

The American Center, New Delhi commissioned and hosted Breaking Silos, a two-and-a-half-hour applied improvisation workshop bringing together climate scientists and researchers, environmental policy communicators, and social media influencers and digital content creators working on air quality.

Delhi–NCR faces one of the most severe air pollution crises in the world. Scientific expertise on air quality in the city is strong, but a gap persists between the researchers producing that knowledge and the people shaping how the public talks about it online. The American Center invited Kaivalya Plays to design a session that could put both groups in the same room and give them something to do together.

The workshop was built around structured improvisation games. I Love It! was used for collaborative solution-building, requiring participants to accept and extend each other's proposals rather than critique them. Story Spine gave them a frame for narrative clarity. Improv Interviews let them test messages aloud and hear immediately where an argument lost its listener. Throughout, participants worked directly with AQI data and with air pollution narratives already circulating in public.

Participants left with communication strategies they had tested on a live audience rather than drafted in isolation, and with new cross-disciplinary connections between scientists and communicators. Several have since cited the workshop as a model for future climate communication work.