Prize
Science engagement has few shared yardsticks. The Falling Walls Engage prize offers one. The Falling Walls Foundation runs it each year, alongside its Science Summit in Berlin. It asks which projects connected publics with research over the past year. A jury of artists, scientists and engagement practitioners reviews entries. The Top 30 cohort is presented at the Berlin event.
Rubric
The published criteria are explicit and weighted. They are set out on the public Falling Walls page.
- Impact, 40 per cent.
- Innovation, 30 per cent.
- Approach, 20 per cent.
- Overall Impression, 10 per cent.
Impact carries the most weight. Artist biography carries the least. The studio writes grant briefs and pitches with that order in mind.
Programme
Science and the People was Dr WELI's public-engagement programme. It was submitted to Falling Walls Engage 2025. It built on work from the year before. That work includes Kangaroo Time, the AAAS Dance Your PhD Global Winner 2024. It also includes the press coverage and events that followed. Those events include the Encontro Anual de Etologia 2024 plenary and ACT National Science Week in 2024 and 2025. At the time, WildWooHoo Studio did not yet exist as a public entity. The programme asked what ongoing science engagement needs to look like.
The full proposal lives on the Canva site Dr WELI built. It documents the methodology, the case studies and the wider thesis.
Open the full project site in a new tab ↗
Practice
The weighting shapes how the studio writes. We name outcomes with numbers, dates and partners. We name the methods that make a piece distinct. We name how communities help build the work. We keep the pitch clear and plain.
The work draws on behavioural ecology, queer creative practice, multilingual delivery and pop-cultural production. The Kangaroo Time video used dance styles drawn from multicultural Canberra. Those styles came from the community cast, not from professional choreography. Later programming follows the same principle. We design with the communities the work represents.
After
Three things happened after the Top 30 listing.
- WildWooHoo Studio was formed. Work that ran under Dr WELI's name became a registered studio. The studio is the ongoing infrastructure the programme argued for.
- Funder-facing copy now follows the rubric order. A grant brief names an Impact outcome first. It then names the Innovation, then the Approach, then the pitch. Artist biography goes last.
- The studio records press circulation and platform analytics the same way each time. Those figures sit inside the relevant article, not in the pitch.