Kickstarting scientific engagement with art: An EGU-situ experiment

Science, at its core, is about making sense of the world around us. So it is somewhat ironic that, more often than not, scientific results are presented in ways that leave specialist audiences baffled, and cause the general public to run in the opposite direction. This is worrying because scientific progress relies on effective scientific communication and knowledge exchange.

In recent years, we’ve seen a proliferation of examples illustrating how art (or at least a more creative approach) can help us, scientists, overcome some of the barriers between our science and the outside world. These range from contributions highlighting the “how and why” of creating scientifically accurate and universally accessible graphics (e.g. Crameri et al., 2022s-ink, colormaps?), to projects where scientific content is simply the inspiration behind abstract illustration (e.g. Wadsworth et al., Nat. Geosci. 15). The first puts the focus on the information being presented, whilst the second is aimed more strongly at catching the audience’s attention, as the first critical step in engaging with potential readers for a science piece. Whilst they are fundamentally different, both of these extremes (and all the possible art-science crossovers in between) show us the huge power of visual storytelling for science communication.

In this contribution, we will experiment withshare a series of interesting geoscientific data visualisations accompanied by short explanations created by a scientist and, illustrateding by an artistinteresting geoscientific facts. Our aim was to create pieces that, through their artistic quality, can originate a spark of curiosity in the viewer strong enough to prompt them to pay closer attention for the length of time required for them to interiorise the scientifically accurates  information being presented. We will collect direct feedback from engaging viewers (in this case EGU GA participants). In doing this, we hope to show, and understand better, the ability of art to kickstart that critical two-step process, where curiosity leads to engagement, which is fundamental for effective communication. And, to generate beautiful office wall decorations in the process.

 

Crameri, F., G.E. Shephard, and E.O. Straume (2022, Pre-print), Effective high-quality science graphics from s-Ink.org, EarthArXiv, https://doi.org/10.31223/X51P78

Wadsworth, F.B., Vasseur, J., Anagnostopoulos, I. et al. Estimating pi using geoscience. Nat. Geosci. 15, 246–247 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-00928-z