Please post a comment to the blog by next class (5/2), reflecting on how the science communication strategies and framing recommendations described in the reading inform your design thinking and the messaging for the exhibit experience you are developing.
Optional Reading: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/23674.
Ankita Jha
5/1/2017 22:16:46
A saying from this paper that I found quite interesting was the idea of portraying information in a “vivid” and “narrative storying telling” way. I thought this was interesting because when one thinks of story’s they tend to think of fiction, which is why I believe it is often not paired with when one is trying to portray information on a subject. In my design I would like to incorporate this ideology. Currently we have a video with a voice over playing when visitors are looking at the questions/graph; this video is quite vivid as it shows a woman and then zooms out and in to look at the solar system and the atoms we are made up of. I believe this video encompasses the idea of “story telling” as it depicts a woman and then zooms out to show the environment we live in. Another idea that shapes the design we are creating is the idea that thinking in groups can create a richer outcome due to the sharing of information and differences in backgrounds. Our exhibit contains a large graph and questions that we would like groups to come up to together and engage in. We designed it on a large scale to encourage the sharing of ideas and reflections. Ideally we would like to locate this exhibit on a wall of some kind that way groups can come up to the graph together; we also incorporated the video into our exhibit to encourage part of the group to be engaged, incase the space near the graph is full. In the same light, I enjoyed how this paper discussed, addressing uncertainties within the visitors. I feel as though it is easy to believe that everyone has the same view point as you or would have the same view point as you if informed; however, after a couple visits to the museum, I noticed this is not the case. I met a couple families that had uncertainties about the idea of global warming and I was taken a back by this as on campus this is quite odd. When designing the exhibit my group tend to keep questions, self related, and open ended, to allow for others to express their own opinions without being guided or influenced in anyway. This is important to us as this exhibit serves as a self reflective, meditative exhibit as well as a information exhibit on the environment.
Joyce Chen
5/2/2017 01:52:44
Joyce
5/2/2017 01:53:29
Sorry, I didn't mean to directly reply to Ankita's comment.
Rohith Pillai
5/2/2017 01:24:56
The reading tried to highlight some of the key points to keep in mind while communicating climate science to a wide range of audience members. Our prototype design for the Dr. is in exhibit aims to make people reconnect with their identities as human beings and to feel much closer and connected with their environments. For this we showed them a video to explicate the scale of the world and how we are part of this big collective system. After the video we would ask the visitors to rank the level until which their actions/carbon footprint for example extended to on a bullseye chart. The reading mentioned that “A message that combines elements that appeal to both the analytic and experiential processing systems will best reach and resonate with an audience.” We have tried to increase the level of experiential processing in our prototype by making a very introspective and personal experience to the visitor, in order to digest all the more scientific analytical data that they have just been exposed to from the previous exhibits. This introspective and self-reflective experience will also serve to get rid of the possible emotional numbing that could have happened as mentioned in the reading due to repeated information. We have also tried to make our prototype group friendly and collaborative so that multiple people can see the video and add their thoughts to the bullseye chart as well. The interaction between the people reading and seeing where others have placed themselves seemed to make them interact with other people in the group as well. The reading also mentioned “taking advantage of default effects” and we added that by giving people only a fixed set of distinct scales to place themselves at. Overall we have used a lot of the recommendations giving in the reading for our prototype.
Nicole Pinto
5/2/2017 03:23:28
The article states that climate science information must contain the following characteristics to be fully absorbed by audiences: actively communicated with appropriate language, metaphor, and analogy; combined with narrative storytelling; made vivid through visual imagery and experiential scenarios; balanced with scientific information; and delivered by trusted messengers in group settings. My group, Making Anthropocene Art, wanted our exhibit to be an immersive yet collaborative experience. I think our exhibit is extremely vivid due to the ocean background the fish would swim through along with the actual concept of the fish. The storyline is a strong experiential scenario balanced with scientific information. We need to ensure that the scenarios we write are appropriately phrased to frame the problem as something that is occurring now, rather than a future problem. For example, we could use local frames by having the exhibit be more river-themed than ocean because of Pittsburgh’s rivers. I think that having the audience make an emotional connection with their sea creature would force them to understand how an individual action can affect the life of their beloved creature. I believe that it’s crucial that for our final presentation, we hone in on our message: individual actions affect the ocean and its inhabitants. We will be choosing actions that are easily visually represented, like an oil spill and plastic waste being discarded and landing in the ocean. Our hope is that this will foster communication with groups who are identifying with their sea creature and that they can visually see what the impact is.
Sarika Bajaj
5/2/2017 03:57:20
The biggest takeaway from this reading for me was the concept of “single action bias” where individuals react by making only one related action and then, by doing so, diffuse the responsibility and do not continue with the positive actions. This is actually a phenomenon that we witnessed during our Prototype 1 session – several children would tell us about one incident in which they cleaned up trash (and thus diffused their responsibility off as “they are a good person” about these things). I think in terms of the Making Anthropocene Art exhibit we could try to avoid this bias by (after the simulation storyline goes through) emphasize that by not repeating actions then the issue remains (one won’t cut it). This could even involve a storyline such as: “Mark is a good boy who cares a lot about the environment – he usually picks up trash, doesn’t litter, etc. However, one day he was running late and threw his bottle into the trash instead of the recycling. Let’s see where that bottle goes…” A storyline such as this one would emphasize how important each action is and the importance to always be thinking critically.
Andrew Wang
5/2/2017 08:03:07
This article tries to get the message across that in order for a broad audience to fully incorporate the message of climate science, several key categories must be taken into consideration. Mainly these categories fall under the ability to communicate with narrative storytelling made as vivid as possible and then integrated into society by respected members. Many of the concepts discussed seem simple and like common sense, however, it does mention that sometimes it's good to appeal to emotion as well and create a sense of personal attachment.
Aprameya Mysore
5/2/2017 08:05:45
The reading covers a variety of areas we had to grapple with when developing the prototypes for our 'Dr Is In' section of the exhibit. Through our PMM we had to explore a lot of incongruities in museum visitors' mental models, and understand how we could design our activity in a way that might facilitate a reorganization of these models. One that that was interesting to me upon completing the reading, is I noticed we actually often were observing mental models of other people's mental models. That is to say, people believed that concerted group activity to manage climate change at various scales (neighborhood, city, nation, etc) would either succeed or fail because of other people's general attitudes towards climate change. We heard a lot, especially from millennial visitors, that 'people are apathetic' and 'know but wont do anything about it'. It is interesting to think of how we might succeed to untangle these recursive mental models. Another component of this reading that was very relevant to our prototyping was the concept of Framing. Both in terms of the presentation of our original coloring page relative to adjacent musem content and its content, we noticed some issues with how we were framing our attempt at getting people to collaboratively reorganize their mental models in a 'meditative way'. While we got many families to come color our drawing, we noticed some of the high level commentary about the diagram suggesting 'this is a bummer'. Incorporating the other reflective activity with the coloring, especially in groups, provided a more useful frame for ideas we wanted to present. Showing the impact humans have at variety of scales and feeling a sense of connectedness to that impact in a positive way is a tricky framing issue that we will have to continue to address in further iterations.
Mary Safy
5/2/2017 09:45:33
This reading talked about some aspects of exhibits that we have been trying to incorporate into our own “Making Anthropocene Art” exhibit. For example, the article talked about balancing scientific information with analogies and metaphors to educate visitors in a way that wasn’t daunting. This is particularly useful for “Making Anthropocene Art,” since this part of the exhibit is in the processing area of the museum, so we want visitors to subtly learn about effects of the Anthropocene as they create artwork and are engaged in vivid ocean scenery. We have also tried to make sure that the processing done in this area would be both analytic (ex. reading small facts about ocean acidification) and experiential (ex. by having visitors go through and see the life experience of the sea creature they created.)
Isha Mehra
5/2/2017 10:03:03
This paper felt extremely relevant to the exhibit I'm working on "Stages of Grief" as it also was the process of comparing climate change to psychological processes. One notable concept that we noticed in our own prototype was confirmation bias. We saw this in our own prototype when at first we allowed individuals to see other's views on the environment before deciding their own, but then took away that option in our net version of our prototype. I also felt like the pool of worry was related to our exhibit. After going through our exhibit, many people would reflect about how every though climate change made them feel worried or frustrated, they haven't acted on it or thought about it as much as they would have hoped to. This is related to the pool or worries as individuals can only worry about a finite amount of topics at once and climate change doesn't seem to take priority. Lastly, I felt that our second version of the prototype could help combat the individual responsibility taken away from tragedy of the commons. Although climate change seems to suffer from the issue of tragedy of the commons as everyone contributes, helping visitors realize their individual affiliation helps them tap into the group affiliation and make a larger difference. Seeing their own feeling about envirnment change joining the rest out there makes them feel part of a group, which the article shows can have benefits towards achieving the goals.
Mimi Niou
5/2/2017 18:49:12
The strategies presented in this article about Climate Change seem to be very closely related to our exhibit, especially as our exhibit aims to teach about Confirmation Bias. Specifically, the suggestions for knowing your audience and keeping confirmation bias in mind were particularly relevant, as we must ironically keep in mind how confirmation bias might affect visitors, as we teach them about the concept of confirmation bias, and help them identify where they may have misconceptions due to their personal beliefs. Further, I think that our design already utilizes many of the framing recommendations described in the reading. For example, one of our exhibit objectives is summarized well in the suggestion to “translate scientific data into concrete experience,” as we are trying to help visitors understand and experience confirmation bias in action, beyond the definition of the word. Second, our exhibit is also aiming to utilize group participation and visitor interaction. The roleplays are made for pairs to read, ensuring small groups of interaction, for which prompts and reflection questions initiate discussion. Third, our exhibit definitely “taps into social identities and affiliations,” as our exhibit tries to both have visitors take on the perspective of a third party, and also reflect on their own social identity and personal beliefs. There are a few improvements I thought of that we can make to take advantage of additional science communication strategies presented in this reading. First, I think we should present more scientific content using less scientific vocabulary, for example using the term“wishful thinking” in place of “confirmation bias” to reduce cognitive load, or provide more scientific facts in the dialogues that the visitors would read. Second, I want to change the wording of our prompts and test them with visitors so that they are precisely designed to get responses, as “even the choice of a single word can make the difference between winning and alienating an audience.” Lastly, we should think about how to frame our entire exhibit to more effectively grab the audience’s attention and keep them engaged, perhaps by providing a more interesting and complete context for the roleplays, such as by providing props or a compelling backdrop.
Sean Moore
5/6/2017 15:05:10
This article speaks to many of the concerns we had to consider when our group was building a prototype for our Confirmation Exhibit bias. As the article suggests, it was very helpful for us to consult the museum goers mental models as it gave us insight on gaps of knowledge that would be most advantageous for us as museum educators to fill-in. We found that even people in complete denial of climate change had fairly complex and intricate mental models that explained their relationship with the environment, we did find a lot of gaps nonetheless across the board, explaining the details required for understanding the functional relationship between individual or policy action and anthropocene impact. Considering this, we designed a dialogue regarding fracking that gave arguments detailing the justification for various action-- no matter how silly or showy, thus also explicitly making clear confirmation bias that people face when reasoning about these issues. The important thing that I think this article mentions that relates to confirmation bias is the power of framing. Educating via design is all framing issues in a way that does not clash with cluttering valid beliefs that people hold. We need to present information-- real facts, not alternative facts that rather than clash with people’s pre-existing scaffolded understanding of real-world issues, fills in the gaps and makes them more curious for their own sake. For this reason, when we were building both of our Prototypes we had to think very critically about which snippets of facts accomplishes this goal the best. We decided that and open dialogue about fracking-- with very straight forward characters would dramatize the tendency in everyone to want to fill-out a narrative before listening.
Nikhil Lingireddy
5/8/2017 14:53:17
This article describes the problem of not enough people being concerned about climate change, and how scientists and other communicators need to be aware of the way they convey message so that they can reach the most people. It talks about how different audiences can react differently, and how scientists can categorize people through their mental models. At this point, the article describes confirmation bias of people, where they believe facts consistent with their mental model and ignore ideas that would change their beliefs. These ideas are very relevant to our group, which directly deals with confirmation bias related to the Anthropocene. In our exhibit, we did in fact do research into the visitor’s mental models by coding their personal meaning maps. Using this information we were able to learn more about the underlying ideas that cause people to deny climate change and that were used to encourage their confirmation bias. For example, many would not acknowledge scientific facts and theories but would instead bring up their own preexisting ideas related to religion and God. This was one of the kinds of confirmation bias that we tried to bring to light with our exhibit. The article talks about how mental models can be changed and we have tried to accomplish that by getting visitors to identify their own confirmation bias. We could improve this by making it more explicit and making them realize how it could be a problem related to the Anthropocene as well. We also used the article’s idea of framing by getting the visitors to think about confirmation bias in the frame a conversation between two people that they act out. This also would grab their attention in the way the article describes because the visitors would feel emotionally invested in the characters they act out, which we saw in our testing on multiple occasions. We could improve this frame and investment more by using props that are related to the character the visitors are acting out, or even by using a stand that the visitors could put their faces in to completely immerse themselves while also having fun with their appearance.
Emilio Vargas-Vite
5/9/2017 02:14:00
(Confirmation Bias team member)
Sai Dhulipalla
5/15/2017 20:33:55
Obed Appiah-Agyeman
5/17/2017 02:25:41
After reading this post our presentation, I still see a lot of the concepts having been fleshed out in our exhibit design. Since our portion of the exhibit is at the end, we found that the importance of our exhibit ‘Stages of Grief’ was to primarily focus on the psychological feelings and mindsets of visitors when discussing the Anthroprocene. The biggest notable concept when conducting our prototype was confirmation bias. When we were out gathering responses and participants, our initial prototype had responses, to the question we asked, from other people. Some participants would say, “Yeah I agree with,” whatever word that was somewhat related, or not related at all, to their opinion on climate change. This led us to cover up the responses and allow the participants to really think through the question and formulate their own, unique response. When we then revealed other responses it became more of a comparison/conversation of perception between their response and the other responses rather than just agreeing with what was given to them. Moreover, climate change’s tragedy of commons was also addressed in our exhibit design. With such a massive issue, it is hard for people to feel like they can make a significant impact. In our last prototype, we proposed that once participants respond and explore the questions answers, they are prompted to walk through a hall with information on each stage of grief and action items to help people move through them. In this way we are personalizing the issue to make visitors feel like their impact is worthwhile. Comments are closed.
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