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Transcript from a portion of the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science and Technology to the Public, March 6-8, 2002. Graphic
Science: New Venues for Science Communication Borchelt: Thank you all for coming back for the next session. You'll get the impression from this that all I do is just wander around and go to conferences and find good speakers to come here. Well, I managed to go to another conference and find another good speaker. I went to MIT in June and was at a conference called Image and Meaning, which was all about scientific communication through images: photography and video and computer-derived images, and there was a series of people there who had also been selected to do poster presentations, and I really, really liked one of them. It was one that had this just brilliant design for how do you put science messages in places where people are looking; places like toll booths, places like buses, places like, you know, kiosks or catching the train, and it was really impressive. I'm standing there and I'm thinking, I'm saying aloud to myself and there's someone who's standing there looking at this poster - I should have guessed, looking lovingly at the poster - who I was talking to. I said, "This is really brilliant stuff! I'd really like to get this person to talk at a conference I have coming up in the Fall, and he said, "Well, I'm glad to meet you. I'm Frank Burnet. It's my poster." So, it's one of those fortuitous things that you run into, and I had a great chance to chat with him and talk with him there about some of the unique ways that he's using science messages to reach audiences in very, very nontraditional ways. I encouraged him not only to be a speaker, but to submit a proposal - an abstract - as one of our presenters, and he's here with us today to talk about some of the innovative ways to reach audiences that normally wouldn't be reached. He wears a new hat that's only two weeks old at this point, as a Professor of Science Communication at the University of the West of England, and we're delighted to have a noted, top-of-the-line from my perspective, person who's been using just these incredibly weird ways to reach the Warner Bros. generation. My own feeling is, my staff has to watch two hours of Warner Bros. every week in order to understand the job that they're doing, and, you know, Frank puts me to shame. Frank Burnet, pleased to have you. Burnet: Ah, the microphone is a genuine formality, I'm afraid, because my first departure ever into the communication of science was when I volunteered for The Loudest Voice in Britain award on BBC TV, the Late, Late Breakfast Show, and I won. Interestingly, they wanted me to shout something that a university lecturer, they imagined, might shout, like, "Get out of my lecture theater and never come back, you-!" and instead I shouted (I won't shout it), I shouted, "Eureka! It's a 4-androstene 3,17 jam diol!" which doesn't exist, but it's a steroid in chickens. [laughter] Anyway. So, I was such a huge success my children from then on for about ten years never introduced me as their father, just the man with the loudest voice in Britain, so there you go. If I boom, I boom. But today, it's my great pleasure, and I do feel very privileged to have been asked to come and speak here. Very privileged indeed, I find this conference very stimulating and that it's great to be able to present work, which may not have been seen on this side of the pond too much, and that's a great privilege. Thank you for asking me. New venues for science communication, what I'm going to talk about, it picks up on some of the themes that have been in discussion here today. For example, I will touch, definitely, on dialogue. I'll be touching on audience targeting, definitely, and I have my own particular interest, which is generic venues for communication, and I'll be touching on that, as well. So, who are we? That's me, a little younger. That's Ben Johnson, who's my principal researcher always coming in slightly sideways, and this is Madeleine Ings, who actually keeps us both in order. Graphic science, as an organization, works through an associate principle. We're the small core team. We take on projects. We bring in people to run the projects with us, so we have a rolling group of associates -some roll more than others -- who are associated with the team. Where are we? Well, we're in Bristol, which is there. And just so you can get to know what it's like, it is the most beautiful, interesting, and distinguished city in all England. It's in the west. So where do we work? Well, we work in supermarkets. We devise ways of taking science to people in supermarkets. Now why do that? Well, I've just picked up this new term, "culture scientifique." I rather like it. Although I'm doing it, possibly not, for the attentive. I'm generating "culture scientifiques" for the inattentive, so to speak, and the supermarkets are good venues for that. People are wandering around, there's all this stuff around them, which of course is very science-loaded. For example, there happens to be a picture of a flower stall in the supermarket. What we did was we devised a multiple-choice quiz with a prize at the end. Ten questions, prize at the end, which you did as you went around the supermarket. And above the flower stall, we hung a huge sign which just said, "Are flowers male, female, or male and female?" End, my multiple choice question. And the answer is, "both," quite so. Anyway, so, we did that in the other aisles. For example, here's the one, this is on the Web, but here's one we put the thing on the Web, but here's one: "Tomatoes ripen faster if you put them in a brown paper bag, because: It's dark. It keeps the air out. It keeps the air in. The ripening gas can't escape. You give up." Can I have a concerted shout of a letter of your choice? 1-2-3, go. D. Yeah, right. Now, it's interesting you should all know that so well because of course, the world is full of people who space their tomatoes out on window ledges. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, not a great place for ripening stuff, gas going on. So, we did that kind of thing. This is about the centrality of science to everyday experience. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to point out the fact that people are surrounded by science. They live in a scientific culture. And, that's all we're intending. Before I go any further, I must say, we are not trying to educate people. That's not our purpose. We are simply bringing science out of the closet where it has managed to get itself hidden, and placing it back alongside music and literature and so on, within culture. That's what we see ourselves as doing, relocating it. We're not trying to ensure that absolutely everybody in Britain is ripening their tomatoes correctly. This really doesn't bother me. They can do with their tomatoes whatever they wish. What about tomatoes? This is sort of a tomato-dominated conference. Let's hope they don't throw them. [laughter] Anyway. So, we work in schools. Very interesting leading up to this discussion about the importance of getting people young, this has been very much taken up by the British Government. This year is "Science Year," fast forward to the future - in British schools. And we've been working in schools using one of the techniques that we have developed with designers. Now, one of the things that I never understood about design, because incidentally I'm a biochemist by training, was that designers can target audiences. Designers can identify, get you a particular audience with great accuracy using design motifs and colors. And for that reason, we work with designers when we're given a specific target audience. In this particular case, the target audience is eleven to fourteen year-olds. And we've created two posters for Science Year. One was their launch poster, which simply, it's not a science poster, it simply says, "Catch the Wave." So it was about getting on the wave. Aimed at eleven to fourteen year olds, specifically trying to focus on girls, but also on boys, Manga-style cartoon, you'll notice, it's the one on the - it's the one I could tell you if I knew how to use this machine. It's this one. Manga-style, because that is used if you go to Websites, aimed at this age group, Manga-style's in use, and a color palette which is also used very much in those kinds of magazines and Websites. So this is - it may not be to you, in fact, you'll probably hate it - but it will catch the eye of that group, reasonably effectively. We just produced another poster for them, which actually isn't out and this is a draft so the pics missing, but I've got the real thing out in the hall if you want to see it. It's quite large. This is called an "empty belly" poster; delightful term. It just means that it's there so the school can stick their own message, whatever it is, in the center where it says "text message," and the rest of the poster uses, now, not just colors, uses words. They're in common parlance within that group, like, Neighbours is the most popular soap, Matrix, as you know, a movie, Hearsay is the most popular pop group, Destiny's Child, another pop group, uses these words to draw attention to the graphic and to put science in the context of their culture. So, this is work we're doing with Science Year and these posters are going to every school in the UK - every secondary school. We also work in science centers - and I've had very interesting conversations with people who work in science centers here. Our work in science centers, is actually dialogue-focused. It's looking at a problem, which has been alluded to by an earlier questioner, which is "Okay, so we want to have some dialogue. How do we do this? How do we structure dialogue? And do people have to be prepared in some way for the dialoguing process?" Do you simply send them an invitation and say, "'Come and discuss genetic screening tomorrow," or do you try and brief them? Are you trying to get some deliberation by them before they express their opinion? We were asked to develop tools for use in a science center environment, so science center as visitor attraction, so things that would be fun to use, but which would give people opportunity to explore areas, "hot topics" as we call them, of science and technology, and to do two things. One, is to express their opinion and compare that opinion with everybody else who'd ever used this particular installation, because it's software that remembers people's reactions and responses, but also to get them to explore the dimensions of their opinion. Let me give you an example. So, this is about robots. A brief introductory - three sentences: A computer called Deep Blue can beat the world chess champion. Robots have replaced people in many factories. In the future, robots could do more and more things for us. And then a question: Would you have a robot living in your home? And then an answer 'yes' or 'no', and then feedback--now this is a prototype - it's now run for about a year, so we've got tens of thousands of responses to this but this was when we were in development. Essentially, what the machine does is it tells you everybody else's opinion, whether or not they'd have a robot in their home. It also tell you about people of your age, and if you like, people of your gender's opinion about that question. So, you're expressing your opinion, and you're also comparing your opinion with those of everybody else who's ever used the installation. When you logged in, incidentally, you gave an age range. So, you have two bits of information you're asked to give when you log in; only two: your age - an age range, not you're exact age - and your gender. And then you ask them to look at questions like, "Would you have a robo-date?" 52% said, "Yes." [laughter] Now, there's a reason for this. It's not a technical fault. At this very early stage, a day or two to actually using the thing, lots of young children had used it. So, would you have a robo-date? Would you have a robo- chauffeur? Robo-chauffuer? Show of hands, fancy a robo-chauffer? Yeah, you people are, 45% - we'll go dentist. No? robo-cleaner? Yeah! So, the purpose here is, what's your robot tolerance? In other words, are there things you'd have a robot do for you and others you would not? And we just got people to look at that. We weren't telling them, we're just getting them to look at it. We also worked in pubs. You'd never have guessed. Those of you who've met me over the last few days, you'd never have guessed I ever worked in pubs. [laughter] I'm a complete stranger to pubs. In fact, when I decided to work in pubs I have to be taken into one just to see what it looked like, really. But they turned out to be okay, and they are interesting venues for science communication. I don't know whether this - and this has been done. This has been done in Australia - there is science in the pub, and in Britain, there are a very interesting set of talks and debates in pubs called "cybars." So, and this actually is built on the "café scientifique" principle - we keep going back into French - which - yes, it's French. Anyway, but pubs - this is slightly different. This is called "pub genius," and it's a quiz; not just a science quiz like lots of science questions you happen to ask at a pub, but lots of questions about the science you find around you in pubs. Back to the same theme, the science that supermarket goers have around them; their scientific culture. So, this is about the science you have around you when you're in the pub. And this combines two methodologies. One is a series of questions. Now, pub quizzes are very popular things in the UK, and pubs specialize in them, and so you could just get people to pick up this specific event in this generic venue. You'll notice all the venues, so far, are generic. The supermarket is everywhere. Once you devise something, you don't have to go out and do it all again, you just let it go. You just put it on the web, and anybody who wants to can do a supermarket thingy. The pub quiz, anyone who wants to can do this quiz. You could come and get the questions from me after this, if you like, there all there. So, the idea is to create events which are infectious, which travel, which have their own way of going, which people will pick up and go, "That's good. We've got a social club. We've got nothing to do next Thursday. Why don't we have this idiot's quiz?" So, within the quiz there are eight questions about beer. There are eight questions about wine. There are eight questions about whiskey. There are eight questions about toilets. There are eight questions about fast food. There are eight questions about hangovers, and so on. This one is about wine, just asks about the alcohol limits in wine: What limits wine to an alcohol content to between 11 and 14%? Is it: the yeast die, is it licensing laws? Is it excise use? Is it fussy landlords? And the answer is, 'A.' So, it's a question chosen to underline that making something like wine is a process which involves science, it involves organisms, and that's the question. We don't just have questions, because in a pub you can't just do questions. We also do tricks. Thank you. This is a very simple one. A very simple one, indeed. I gather you have these in the States, they're Alka Seltzer. And you have these, film cans. Take an Alka Seltzer, put it in a film can. Take a little water - they thought I was going to do a rather bigger trick - clip the top, tightly on the film can, [pop!]. Ah, that was a little undramatic, but all great failures tend to be. I've got another,
and hopefully - actually, what you can do to make an appalling mess, is
to put the can upside-down. I hope. The wait's a good thing. [pop!] [laughter]
Ah, yes! So, and of course the question you ask the audience, and the
prize is a bottle of beer, is why? Why? Why does that happen? And I won't,
of course, you know why it happens; that's sodium bi-carbonate, tiny bit
of citric acid in there, carbon dioxide is produced. Film cans are specially
designed to be light tight, and therefore have tight tops - you're off! So, it's a pub event. It's fun, and what we hope people will say at the end of it is, you know, "It was only at the very end I realized this was about science." It was only when someone said this was sponsored by- Pfizer, that I understand - that's imaginary - it wasn't sponsored by Pfizer - but it was only then that people say, "Oh, this is science." Most of the time, they're not aware of that at all. They're just at a pub quiz having a good time with their mates. Now, we're about to work on freeways. Not in the middle you'll be glad to hear, but in the service stations, because boredom is a big feature of travel, on our motorways, certainly, because you don't go - actually, travel is a misnomer on our motorways - it's just sitting in the car, really. [laughter] Where they play this movie of the countryside going by. So, so basically, there's another common element that, I'll pluck it out for you here, is "dwell time." These things, the things we're devising, are all about people having the time. They're in the supermarket going from end to end. They're in the pub for a couple of hours, or in my case, 35 seconds, but anyway, however long they're going to be in the pub. They're on the motorway and they wish they weren't. Dwell times are important. And the dwell time on motorways can be very long, and what we're about to do - we haven't done it yet, we just got funding for this - is to devise a quiz, probably on a multiple-choice basis, sponsorship from service stations that are off freeways, use their forecourts to hand out - I should probably do some tricks because they're always good for gathering kids around us - but then hand out these things for continuing the journey, have a free post number to turn them in to, have a prize sponsored by someone. So, once again, this is done. We're not inventing something. I mean, you know, Esso has been doing this for heaven knows how long. You've got some - I'm sure it happened here in the States, certainly it does - they produce whole packs of material to give to your kids on the journey. We're not coming up with anything new. None of this, it's very important to understand - none of this is new. We are building on things that have existed for an extremely long time that are very valuable to us in the work that we do. We have no way we could say we were incredibly original. We are simply building on what's there. So freeways, I think, will be interesting, and we will be looking to involve the traveling family, particularly. So the target audience there - this is where I begin to talk about targeting - target audience would be the traveling family. We actually do work
in boardrooms a bit, we're now and again asked to advise bodies, like
The Royal Society of London, and this one's called "Listening to
the Public: Dialogue and the Royal Society." Which turns out to be
a bit of a misnomer, because firstly, we're on the phone, Nothing they can't
handle. They've got 700 fellows all over the age of 80, but - We had to break it to them it was going to be a bit tricky. All right. Also, I suppose our work in that area shows up the fact that there's a big interest in this "dialogue" word and the "listening" word in the UK, just as there's been here at this meeting. And on to buses. The buses that brought Rick and I together. That's a bus, just in case you don't know what they look like, and this is what we do on them. I'll tell you a story. When I moved to Bristol, I wanted very much to do something new. Something which would, you know, be exciting, which would give me a good start in Bristol. And, I woke one 3:00 in the morning thinking about poetry on the underground - I know you've some of that. I know there's one in New York and so on - were people have put poems on the underground trains. Very, very popular campaign in the UK, and I decided, why not put science on the underground? And so, I devised, with some Millennium funding, posters - but I didn't put them on the underground. The underground turned out to be incredibly expensive, but also interesting, the underground audience there in the underground is not the audience I was interested in. What I wanted to get to was an audience that is seen in the UK as being hard to reach, in terms of science communication. It's young adults; 15 to 25 year olds. Young adults, surveys show in the UK anyway, don't watch science on TV. They certainly don't go to science-based visitor attractions, and essentially, science is not a major thing in their world. And we decided to try and target young people, using posters which are designed, targeted, at people who like to go, for example, to nightclubs. The Lizard Lounge is a young persons' club in Bristol, and you would have seen these kinds of colors and these kinds of fonts probably here in the U.S. These bright reds, these bright yellows, and this kind of fonting and this kind of banding is very characteristic of this type of advertising. And so, we decided we'd create posters which were aimed specifically at young adults, and we produced a first set, which I was very proud of, I have to say, and my friends thought they were great - unfortunately as I'll show with the evaluation - the bus traveling public were deeply confused by them. [laughter] But we learned quite a lot from this. For those who can't read from where you are, I'll just read out the top one. It's called "Cloning." "Identical twins are clones and have the same genes. Identical twins look the same but behave differently. Cloned Hitlers wouldn't behave the same. They might look like Hitler but behave like Charlie Chaplin." So, the idea is to
point up - it's actually not about explaining or some kind of treatise
about cloning - actually, the idea is to intrigue. The idea is to get
people just to go, "Hey, that's - that's odd." Now I gave the game away - actually, buses are different from the underground, not just in who rides on them, but in terms of viewing things. Now I don't know about you here in the States, but in Britain, the insides of buses are incredibly boring environments. The only things there are is telling how badly your wrist will be slapped if you haven't got a ticket. Or the maximum number of people in the bus is some astronomical number you can't imagine how they got everybody on the bus to begin with. But advertising is of very low quality inside buses in the UK and also tends to be infrequent. So, advertising space inside buses is cheap. Outside buses, of course, is very expensive. Buses are moving billboards, the best form of advertising. Essentially, to buy space in the public on the outside of a bus is a lot trickier. We didn't want to buy space on the outside of a bus, as it happens, because we wanted to target young people who we knew were a very high percent of the audience within buses. So, these were the first posters we generated. As I say, they were wildly admired within the science communication community within the UK, but not widely admired by the target audience. So we tried again. We got some funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry, this time, and we'd learned some lessons by then. First of all, you'll notice we're not using as many words, and there are no clever, clever poemettes of anything here. Chemical Brothers, they'll be someone here or many people here who know what they are or who they are. I feel in the position of that wonderful story about the old Bailey Judge in the 60s and some witness mentioned The Beatles. The judge said, "Excuse me. Who, exactly, are The Beatles?" and the learned counsel said, "I believe they're some kind of pop group, My Lord." Well, this Chemical Brothers, they're some kind of dance group, my lords and ladies. I'm not quite sure what kind of dance group, but they're an electro-pop dance group; very popular in the UK, top-selling album out at the moment. So, Chemical Brothers are a well-known brand in the UK, and well-known word - pair of words. We picked up on it a different way. Showing things which are, physically, very different, but chemically, very similar. So they are related by the fact that they are, chemically, very similar, but they are, physically, very different. That's one level of message within the posters. But the message the Royal Society of Chemistry wanted to get across was the one at the bottom, which you can't really see very well on this, I don't think, and actually it is too small - it is, "A little chemistry makes a big difference." The idea of a little chemistry generating a big difference - a play on words. That was the sole slogan. Now, these were significantly more successful - I show you a little more data at the end about what I mean by successful - they were significantly more successful in reaching the target audience. The use of the catch words helped, and the message seemed to go across, at least in terms of what we were trying to do. And we were trying - once again, it's the same thing - trying to point up centrality. Trying to say, "Why not have some science here on a bus?" We're not saying it is absolutely compulsory that you understand that graphite and diamond are both carbon. Our final commission was the Institute of Physics, and you can see, we've really learned our lesson about words, now. Words are problematic - someone in introducing this very conference said that they quite -they remembered the "physics is phun" slogan with a "ph," but the didn't like it much. I thought, "uh oh, here we go," because we just happened to use that as one of the motifs in this poster. But, this is, once again, the Institute of Physics now in London, who had decided they wanted people to know that it was their 125th year of existence, and they commissioned us to produce these posters for the insides of buses, and now, you'll notice, very, very strong image of a racing car, for example, the word "Fast: thanks to physics." And then, "physics, physics" So wherever your eye goes on this poster, "physics - physics, physics, physics." But, that doesn't mean that people - and this very interesting in terms of Joe Schwarcz talking about the elephant and people getting the message. There were a lot of old people who don't take their glasses onto buses, by the way, who thought that was a cabbage. [laughter] But we're very hard people to discourage, you'll notice. There's one interesting
lesson possibly here which I can share with you, which is with this kind
of, sort of, issue-based campaigning, the one thing to avoid like the
plague in any poster is an identifiable product; something they might
think they can buy. And this commits cardinal sin 'A': notice she's holding
a mobile phone. Now, due to what's known as the "silk cut effect,"
by me anyway, that people just don't work it out. They think, "Well,
I don't understand it, but it's got a mobile phone in it. They must be
trying to sell them." So - And also, we got our only chance to date, because the Institute of Physics are what's know as "jolly rich." None of them are here, are they? No. All right. They're jolly rich, and they were willing to pay for us to put - to have to do something which is called, and I do apologize for this, it is called "a mega rear," [laughter] and this "mega rear" is on the back of bus actually in Trafalgar Square. And we devised this as part of the physics set. The idea is to point up the role of physics in medical imaging. So, these two naked characters - the acceptable bit of skin and the less acceptable bits are x-rays. That went fine in London; "Phull Phrontal," it's called, and thanks to physics, of course, and "physics, physics, physics," but we were commissioned to do it twice. To put this same thing on the back of a bus in Manchester, and they refused. We - for a while - you know, on that basis that this would be fabulous publicity. It would be the first ever censored public understanding of a science project. [laughter] I was deeply disappointed. I had really high hopes. But in the end, they tried editing it, would you believe, making at all blue, which wasn't too brilliant. We negotiated a sort of, some kind of - they put the number plates somewhere else, I think. Anyway, whatever they did - So, that was the work
of science on the buses. Where did it happen? Well, it happened all over
the UK. It happened in Cardif, in Bristol, in Leeds, in London, in Edinburgh,
Belfast, Burmingham and Manchester. So, we ran campaigns- and Cambridge
- and we ran campaigns on different scales. The ones in Manchester and
Burmingham and London and Bristol, Edinburgh and Belfast, were funded
by the government through The Office of Science and Technology. That was
the campaign's in terms of organizing and paying for the space on the
buses. We already had the posters, and of course, we didn't own the copyright
to the posters, but the people who did were absolutely thrilled to have
the government put them up for them, so to speak, one more time. So, that
was how we did it in the UK. We got about 130,000 pounds from the government.
But to mount that kind of campaign, if you count all the costs - costs
about 400,000 pounds, so about $500,000. So, this business about "build-up to dialogue," rather then cold-turkey dialogue, is, I think, an important one. I mean, the devising of dialoguing events, I'd like to think that that's something which will become much more sophisticated. The preparation of people for dialogue, rather than the thrusting of them into supposed arenas where they're meant to immediately express extremely cogent and interesting opinions. So, here's a little bit of a complicated slide, but it's an interesting one. To remind you, the target audience for the poster was the 16 to 25 age group, so along the bottom here we've got all the age groups we looked at. The code is, message in red means that the response to the question, "What's this poster about?" was, "It's something about science being central to everyday life," or words to that effect. The green is content,
in other words, that's a response saying, "It's about physics."
They must have seen it, "physics, physics, physics." Anyway.
"It's about physics," would be green. I think you'll probably notice that for the target age group, you've got these kind of percentages. You have the message, those who have the context, and these who have the theme, and quite a lot of people have their own views. Look at the oldest age group. Yeah. [laughter] Now, this is not because I have some kind of thesis that old people are stupid or anything. The reason that that happens, we think, is because they don't pay a lot of attention to these posters because they're not formatted in ways which would hold or draw or excite their attention. So essentially, this is more to do with attentiveness, it's a word that's been flying around quite a bit, then it is about some innate ability to read the meaning of our posters. So, that's the bus story, and I now get on to the advertising section - well, not quite. Science in the buses actually is now in China. In fact, it's trumbling around in Chun Ching, which I, would own up to having never heard of until we went to China to talk about this project to the Chinese, originally to the Science and Technology Commission of the Beijing government, and then we were refererred on the Chun Ching, a massive city on the banks of the Yanghtze, estimated 30 million population, four times the size of London. They have a pollution problem, and their interest is in, as they were saying to us, "We want to take science to the mass of the masses." Now, I'm not quite sure how you decode that, but I would guess that in China they feel they don't want to go the way of the X-Tiger economies in the Far East. They want to have a skills-based economy, and therefore they need to have many more people retraining in science and technology or beginning to think about working in those kind of areas, at whatever level. And so they're trying to reach people with this kind of message. I put this up partly
because we were in China, but partly because it illustrates another advantage
of working through graphics, which is people go on reprinting your stuff!
The papers like to have pretty pictures, so if you generate pretty pictures,
they'll reprint them. This is the local paper in Bristol, and this is
the third time it's reprinted our posters, because they say, "We're
writing this piece. What can you give us to illustrate it?" We say,
"Oh, we've got some posters." They say, "Fine, send us
down a PDF and were off!" The next step for what is now "Sci-Bus," is a bit of an outrageous ambition, but we're in the middle of trying to do it. We have funding from the European Union to take a campaign, mount a campaign, simultaneously, in all 15 capitals of the European Union during European Science and Technology Week, which is November - it's burned to my brain - 4th to 10th, 2002, so we're coming up quite close really. And the main coordinating began yesterday. I think, I raise it partly to show that's what we're doing next, but also - and the scope, but also to give you an idea of what we're doing right now. So what are we doing right now? Well, now is the audience research phase. We're carrying out focus groups in five of these capitals, and we are looking to see, "Who are these people? What are they like?" And this is partly in terms of graphics, we're taking, actually, color panels to them, and also with different sorts of motifs. For example, we have a mechanical motif, or with a human figure motif, or with a highly abstract motif. We're looking to discover what would capture their attention in this rather difficult environment of the bus. What do they dislike? One thing about our evaluation is, what people like in buses is color. They like the color pulse. What they don't want is loads of text. So, you may find there are some very text-heavy people in Europe - the French tend to be quite text-heavy, so who knows, maybe they'll want lots of text, but certainly in the UK, the amount of text has to be very small; somewhere between 9 and 12 words is the maximum, 9 or 12 words. What are their needs?
What are their interests? What will attract their attention- what do they
want to know about, and are buses the best way to reach them? Those were
our questions in terms of campaign planning. We don't have to go on buses.
We could go, for example, on roadside advertising if we want, or we could
look at some trams. We don't have to stick with buses, but is that the
place to get to them? We pilot materials. We evaluate, and we often redesign. The posters which I showed you are actually the third versions of the posters that we've created. On to something more immediate, even in November, which is the Cheltenham Festival of Science. The UK does this festival thing. It's probably known, Cheltenham is a festival city. It has a festival of music, which goes back to just after the war, a festival of literature, and a festival of jazz. They asked us to come up with a festival of science, and myself and one other person, Kathy Sykes, have now devised a five-day science festival for Cheltenham, which will happen in May this year. The program has just been published, and there are copies of the program outside on the table, I set up with my stuff, which is sort of at the entrance to the poster sessions. It has a number of ingredients. It's got to have appearances by top popularizers of science in the UK. That brings audiences in. So, Lord Winston who did the Human Body, he'll be here, Richard Dawkins, Adam Hart Davis, who does this local heroes program, which is very, very popular in the UK, Simon Sing, who has written the Code Book, but is also a code specialist, and of course, This is Cheltenham - and you're not supposed to know but it's where all the secret listening goes on. Because GCHQ, the big pair of ears for NATO, is in Cheltenham - Collin Blakemoore, one of my childhood heroes because he wrote Mechanics of the Mind, which is one of the great books about the brain, and Steve Jones. So, we've got the names there, but I thought it's be interesting in the context of what we've been discussing, just to show you a bit more, because in the program, and we've found this really easy to get funding for I have to say, we have debates and discussions, both on a large scale and on a small scale. We've got discussions about human cloning, genetic modification of plants, and because we're in a country area, about the future of the countryside. Of course, in the UK, the future of the countryside is an enormous issue, post-PSE, post- Foot in Mouth, post everything that's happened. The future of the countryside is a huge, huge issue. Now remember that in the UK, we live amongst our plants, our crops. There isn't an area where there's crops and then there's us. We live with them in our back garden. So, there's the whole business about the future of the countryside, and, as I say, these are partly quite largely set pieces which are going to be hosted by Milton Bragg, who's very well-known in the UK as a media figure, but also in much less formal settings. There's a Café Scientifique within the festival, for example. The theme is "pleasure,"
and there are going to be events about music, about chocolate, yes, and
about sex. So, essentially, there'll be all aspects on how science bears
on pleasure. The science behind music - we have a number of celebrity
chefs. In fact, that picture at the bottom of the last slide - it I can
get to it, sorry - was Heston Blumenthal, who's Chef of the Year in Britain,
and he uses a lot of science in his cooking. Borchelt: We'll take a couple questions, and while we do, if I can ask the panelists to come down and join us at the table so Frank can introduce you and then begin with the panel discussion, we'll do that from there. Let me grab the mic, and we'll take questions. Question: I thought that was a fascinating, very exciting thing that I find a lot of resonance with in terms of reaching beyond the audience of those who are already engaged in science, and I just wanted to add a, sort of, a component to it that might be a nice complement, if you will, which, in fact, began in Bristol. In '91 there was a Coldston Symposium at which I was given the challenge of talking about finding a way to reach beyond the science centers and beyond the usual outreach programs, and started an idea which I called "Guerilla Science." And in '97, we started producing games - I mean as physical devices, not as virtual or graphics, but I think this is a fantastic - I mean, what you've done is reached much further, but we did it on a very limited scale but it - sell these things into a McDonald's, Burger King's, grocery stores, cruise ships, medical clinics - using very much, and I like your language, the sense of preparing people for a dialogue. It wasn't teaching them science. It was engaging them, though, in things, and I got a lot of feedback that it also was a place where parents engaged with children. We were to some degree, perhaps, looking at a younger audience than what you were, but I think that it engaged older generations, as well, often with the kids. And I think it would be interesting to think about how to, in a sense, combine sort of the tricks you do in the pub, but now scale the up slightly, so that there are actually physical interactions, as well, that may provoke some of the questions and connect to the questions that you then ask. Burnet: I think that's an excellent analysis. I think - if I look at our own portfolio of work, I think we have made some kind of progression along the line from "deficitness" to less "deficitness," over time. And it would be nice to go back to some of the things we devised early and introduce more listening and engagement parts to them then our original devising allowed, or thought of at the time. So, I do agree, and I'm glad you've been Bristol. Borchelt: We seem to have a dead microphone here, so if you would like to ask a question, please one of the two side mics, and we'll take two more questions. Question: What kinds of inspirational words or general directions did you give to your graphic designers in putting together your posters, because there's, you know, many directions that they could have taken. Burnet: Yeah,
I mean, I began with an attitude to designers which was inappropriate.
I began by thinking that I should sit by them and get them to deliver
whatever I could imagine, and or course, that is not a way to work with
graphic designers. So, we gave them a very freehand, simply saying we
want the target audience to be excited. We gave the themes, so, for example,
all that concept behind the Chemical Brothers, that all came from us,
the devising team. It was left entirely up to the designer to come up
with a way of framing all that, and then we had an interactive process
of looking at it. So, we come up with the concept, which actually often
the designer is there, but there's a larger devising team, and then the
designer goes away, and briefed by us, in broad terms, about what word
were going to use and what the depth of messages is, then we build from
there. Question: Did you mention that you had a Web site to review the evaluation from your research? Burnet: Yes, I did, and them I didn't put it on the thing. It's on my card, which you haven't got. Rather than say it very- I will actually - I'll say it very, very slowly. Are you ready: www.uwe.ac.uk/fas/graphicscience. I have it on my card, or I'd love to give them away, because my group always is really, really pleased when I seem to have given away a few cards. Created:
7/13/02
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