In response to Lord Drayson’s tweet requesting feedback on Science So What, So Everything – here is my twopenn’ath. I will apologise in advance to the writers of SSW, because as I know only too well from writing Nano&me, (more of later), it is really hard to do this and get it right, so, sorry for the cheap gags!
Calm down!
This campaign, and the site, is supposed to be for people who are not interested in science; certainly, ‘not as interested as they should be’ (!). But reading the site is like being cornered by a REALLY enthusiastic person at a party, who is determined to bludgeon you with why you should love whatever it is they are evangelical about, and you would if only you just realised how really great it is. Very soon you are determined not to like whatever it is they insist will change your life, just to wind them up!
The tone in the ‘About this Site’ section gives it away. ‘Many of us don’t value science as much as we should.’ (Says who, the government? OK I’m gone.) Don’t you know, loser, it’s the key to our prosperity, it drives our economy, …how come you didn’t know that, have you been sitting about watching too much X Factor? So listen carefully, I’ll talk slowly, let’s look again at science, what is it doing for us already… we will introduce you to a range of interesting science stories’ and then you will surely realise what you have missed out on while you have been watching East Enders and going shopping. Even someone like you would enjoy Science if you spent some quality time with this site, and guess what, if you really concentrate you can actually do your own science experiments. Really! How fun is that? Can you resist?
Patronising? Just a tad!
The S Word
The S word, Science, is also what I have against Science so What. The campaign is trying to ‘sell’ Science to people who aren’t really interested in it. Perhaps they didn’t like it at school, because science (or even school) was too hard/boring/not their thing, or maybe they liked it then, but went into something else and forgot about it.
To interest people in something they don’t want to know about needs a much more subtle sales technique than this I’m afraid. It’s like putting vegetables in little kids’ pasta sauce. If you are never going to get them to eat actual broccoli, you whizz it up and mix it up with what they will eat, then presto they have their 5 a day. This isn’t going to happen if you just shout more and more loudly about how great it is, in fact you can pretty much know the opposite will happen.
So by having Science in the name, you can be sure that people who are not interested in science will realise what it’s about and know they don’t need to look at it. They won’t think - ‘Ooh, you know I think, now I’m 20/30/40/80 I will try and learn more about science, this site looks just the thing’! For those people there is the New Scientist, Discovery or the BBC as Andrew Maynard says on his excellent blog on SSW. While you are at it, check out Tim Jones’s strand on the SSW metablog too.
Why do I have to love Science all of a sudden?
Then I started to wonder, why exactly do we have to love Science with a capital S? What’s in it for me, if I’m a housewife in the West Midlands, an accountant in Brighton or, like my sister, a 999 operator in Wiltshire? How do they know I’m not loving hearing about the LHC on the news, or spellbound by Life, or talked a lot with my friends about the geoengineering issues raised by Sunshine on Sunday night. I might be tickled pink by Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab or anything that Brian Cox or Kathy Sykes are on and think very fondly of Tomorrow’s World and wonder why they cancelled it. Why isn’t this enough? Why do I specifically have to have a light bulb moment about Science itself and think ‘Wow, y’know, I used to think that Science was boring, but now I realise it’s part of my daily life and I am amazed.’
So why are they doing it?
Is it because the UK needs more people to work in scientific disciplines to boost our ability to compete? Fair enough, then do recruitment campaigns on specific areas, think laterally about who could do the job and the qualifications they need. Get people moving into science on Corrie and scientists on Top Gear; partner with supermarkets & job centres to publicise job openings, get the Scientists doing their own good work to engage. Stop pushing ‘science’ and push specific jobs, solutions, opportunities, fun bits. And of course make science in schools much more fun. All of these are happening in varying degress I know, but why does my sis have to care, she loves her job?
Perhaps the government cares about my sis and others because they want us all to feel more comfortable with big S, so we don’t go pear-shaped about other technologies like we did with GM? That’s the story for another blog, but Science So What is definitely, definitely not going to do the trick on that one!
But maybe someone might want to involve her in thinking through a vision for science and technology which will work for us all? They might want to understand her values, her big concerns and what sort of world she and her family would like to live in to help inform an S&T strategy? She might be interested in taking part in something which might make a difference to her and her kids. But that’s about serious, innovative listening and interacting not just talking enthusiastically, so Science So What won’t do the job there either.
So if it’s actually about ‘reaching out’ – Science PR in other words – then you need to talk to people in their language not yours. Which I know Sciencewise is trying very hard to do, but it is very tricky, and very difficult for the government machine to do credibly.
What to do next?
So if you want good PR, stop trying to do it yourself and fund initiatives from the people who are closer to the ground and have the trust of the audience you want to reach. Look beyond the trad sci-cafe route, my sis wouldn’t go to one of those if you paid her, look at what people read, watch and listen to. Where do they go and what do they see? Go beyond the trad science story and think about how science intersects with people’s lives, infiltrate their world.
But most importantly do the serious job of trying much harder to get people really involved in how science and technology can shape our future, at least then it will be about their lives, not yours. And please bin the S word where ever possible!
Nano&me – BTW feedback, not a campaign
I just want to clarify a few things about www.nanoandme.org as we haven’t been very clear on what it is there for either and it has come up a couple of times in discussions about SSW.
What’s its purpose?
Nano&me as it exists at the moment was designed solely as a beta feedback site for the few hundred people who had participated in dialogue projects in the UK and had expressed interest in getting more easy to understand, impartial information. We were going to ask them if this was what they had in mind and see what else they wanted.
However, it became obvious a little late in its development, that because of data protection legislation, the contact details of these people could not be kept, so we had very few people to feedback to! (I know, don’t, lessons have been learnt!).
So despite what it has been saying on our website, in the end there was no budget for ‘PR’ for the site, and so it was decided to ask the science community and others to circulate it as widely as they could to get the feedback we needed.
Ultimately we hope to make it the hub of information and debate about all things nano for the public and other stakeholders. We could host debates on all sorts of issues which are relevant to real people – food, robots, product safety etc. These would obviously be promoted widely to send people to the site and link with partners and live events. We would hope to have a comprehensive product listing on there, to give impartial information on real products, and more detail on safety and regulatory issues.
So it’s not so much a failed campaign as a toe in the water to find out how to communicate so that people find it useful and interesting. I think it’s actually quite visionary of Sciencewise to give us a grant for this purpose, pity about the data protection though!
Who is it for?
Its audiences are primarily the general public who might have heard something about nano and been either interested or concerned and want to know more; SME’s thinking about using nano in their products and wanting more information on safety and regulation, and media who may need a ‘primer’ for an article or programme on nano and need an impartial, informed source.
It has been designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of people, (including my sister!) and illustrate how nano appears in every day life at the moment.
We could have done a cheap publicity campaign to raise awareness of the site, but having a number of years experience in PR, I did not want to do this without a fairly sophisticated and thought-through process behind it, which wasn’t possible for budgetary reasons.
The site is not about inflaming the debate for the purpose of chasing clicks, and it would be wrong to be judged on that. It is about being a useful resource for audiences at the point of their need and interest.
That’s it though – no more Nano&me from January
It is not a campaign, though we hope it can be a focus for engagement and involvement of the public in the direction of nanotechnologies and a hub and resource for others, eg scientists, companies and ngos to use as the basis for some of their own engagement programmes.
We have had very positive feedback on it, particularly from the science community (eg Dr Andrew Maynard’s blog, So you’re curious about nanotechnology and the report on the consultation will be out shortly and will be part of a separate blog.
Nano&me hosting finishes in January and we have no funding for it to continue. So if you think it’s useful and should go live and become this hub that we envisage, especially if you have cash, do let me know!
Great piece Hilary – thanks. And I do believe you actually fit the profile of the sort of people Lord Drayson is looking to for feedback – certainly “sis” does
Sad news about the prospects of Nano&Me btw – hopefully someone will pull their finger out and provide it with the funding and support it deserves. In my review on http://2020science.org I almost wrote “this is a million dollar website – I hope the funders realize that” – it seems they don’t!
Thanks again Andrew for kind words.
Report on Nano&me coming soon, so then start the trek for funding. Fingers crossed, and you can be sure I will be quoting you!
It’s only when funding to arts groups is threatened that you start to hear the economic benefits they bring to communities – the restaurants and coffee shops that benefit, the stores in the neighbourhood that get increased business when people attend a gallery, a theatre event, or live music performance. We tend to focus on economic benefits when things are in jeopardy, and so I agree with you that talking about the economic driver science represents reeks a bit of desperation.
I was lucky enough to have a wonderful science teacher in grades seven and eightwho got us involved in experiments of various sorts. We made cottage cheese from milk and, because he was Polish, we decided to greet him in a different language for every science class (we weren’t just eggheads, we were a very homogeneous group of little WASPs).
But in high school I wasn’t so lucky, and it didn’t matter how often my father told me that chemistry was just cooking, basically, I was bored by going through the motions of repeating experiments that had been done by thousands of other students just to demonstrate a certain amount of proficiency in handling a Bunsen burner. Why should I care to determine the melting point of mothballs?
I don’t know what the science curriculum is like these days, but I do know that if its relevance isn’t communicated when kids are still in school, it’s highly unlikely they’re going to become interested later on. Ironically, the truth of my dad’s dictum on chemistry became clear to me decades later after numerous salt-less salad dressing attempts and someone finally explained to me that the oil and vinegar would never cohere without salt, since it was an emulsifier.
Yes, tricky the measurement thing, so many good projects killed before birth because of fixation on half cock measurement.
But also tricky to know how to allocate scarce cash in straightened times, or in fact any times.
I hated science too, not sure how it is these days, my 8 year old is still fixated on the fact that next year he gets to use the bunsen burner.
Re the salt in the salad dressing, didn’t know that, thanks for the chemistry lesson!!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Andrew Maynard, Steven Hill. Steven Hill said: Just got round to reading this excellent piece on Science:so what? from @hilarysutcliffe http://is.gd/5DblJ [...]
[...] came across this excellent post by Hilary Sutcliffe through Twitter about how science is like the veg in the pasta sauce – her underlying point [...]