Training day
Last Wednesday, I interrupted my strike action to attend a training day organised by the Royal Society. It focused on audience engagement and communication, and was run by a very experienced team from the Science Museum.
I was there with Hannah Jones, one of our team members from Newcastle University. It was a day full of interaction that gave us a lot to think about.
One of the first things we discussed was who our audience are. The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is free and open to everyone, and that means that visitors are very diverse, with different interests and needs. There will be pupils and their teachers, families with children of all ages, young couples, older adults… How do we design an exhibit that has something for everyone?
It can be especially challenging to design activities that a whole family could do together. But in our case, I think we have that covered. One of our activities involves an oversized mechanical hand — think of the sort of wooden mannequin hand that artists use, but bigger and floppier. It will have cords representing tendons, and visitors will be invited to set the hand in a certain position, by pulling the appropriate cords.
There will be a lot of cords: if we just add the tendons that flex and extend the fingers, we’ll need 14 cords. And that doesn’t even include the thumb! This is clearly a task that requires cooperation from the entire family. And even the youngest member could be given a cord to hold on to :)
One way to engage our audience is to link our research to a topic that interests them. To illustrate this, the Science Museum team got us to do a fun activity.
We started by drawing two columns on a piece of paper. In one of them we wrote things that relate to our research (e.g. hand, prosthetic, muscle, etc.). In the other, we wrote things our audience are interested in. Our audience in this case was teenagers, which, I confess, is not a group I am very familiar with. We wrote: Facebook, selfie, makeup, each other… (Real teenagers have a lot more interests, I know. But it was right before lunch and I was hungry.)
Then we drew random lines between the two columns, and had to create questions that link the items from the two columns together. The idea is that a personal or provocative question would stimulate discussion with our visitors.
This worked surprisingly well. Linking “prosthetic” and “selfie”, our question was: can you take a selfie with a prosthetic hand? There are quite a few different grip patterns that current prosthetic hands can achieve, but I am pretty sure there is no “selfie grip”…
It is definitely an interesting question, and we could easily link it to one of our interactive activities: can you get the mechanical hand to take a selfie?
