Increasing awareness on geophysical environment: a multi-sensory experience of rainfall

Rainfall is very commonly experienced by most people, often seen as a constraint. Anyway, usually people are not really paying attention to it, being too busy with their daily life. As rainfall and hydrology scientists, we aim to reach out to the general public to increase knowledge in an area of widespread misinformation. More importantly, we aim to enhance curiosity and awareness of people in their geophysical environment. In order to contribute to this much needed efforts, we designed and implemented a series of multisensory experiences centered on rainfall with three purpose in mind: i) Actively engage people on geoscience topics by pushing them to pay attention to their environment ; ii) Create a simple and pleasant moment for people enabling to focus on geophysical environment. iii) Create some new knowledge on rainfall for them. With regards to the latter point, the involvement of one’s senses is a great tool to facilitate memorization.

The experiences are simple and do not require any material, apart from an available mind and some rainfall. Three examples are feeling the drops and their sizes on the hand or face while walking; listening to the rain falling on something (tent, umbrella, sheet of metal…); looking at the rain falling near a lamppost at night. Each experience has a simple take home message. The first one is related to the various sizes of drops, the second one to the temporal variability of rainfall, while the third one enables to notice the temporal variability of both rainfall and wind. 

The process is designed as follows. A short description of the suggested experience is given to people. Once they have implemented them, they are asked to fill a rather open/free form to report their sensations and findings. After they are given some explanations on the take home messages we originally had in mind, which does not necessarily match their own feeling. If they are interested in doing it again, they are invited to provide new sets of feedback. 

In a first step, the whole process was tested with 10-15 people with various backgrounds and who have no expertise in rainfall. Results of this preliminary implementation will be presented in this poster. They are used to tune the process, i.e. the experiences, the short description and also the explanations of the take home message. In future investigations, it will be implemented with a larger number of people to obtain more quantitative and robust results.