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Abstract

Durng an interesting and inspiring workshop from Paulien Poelarends we have learned about the different ways a person can present himself, but also about the differences in settings, expectations and knowledge level of the public. In the end we came up with five points to work on during our presentations as a group.

Intro

Paulien Poelarends did her master thesis on last year’s iGEM team and their way of communicating with the public. She observed them during a discovery festival and a symposium (meeting of young mind 2011) and analysed the conversations she recorded. This gave her 5 constructs that occurred often and she therefore focused on. This would be “just normal”, having good will, a solver of global problems, careful and knowledgeable.
As an iGEM team we thought that this workshop can be useful for us and is an introspective approach to our human outreach. This workshop can help us to communicate better with the general public and help us to represent us in a more professional way.

Workshop

The expectations of the workshop were quite high because a lot of team-members noticed before, that they were not good at communicating science with for example their parents. In addition the team was curious about her interpretation of last year’s human practice efforts. This was because we can learn a lot from this and maybe even improve our human practice effort, especially the science cafe.
There were a few moments during the workshop that needed to be pointed out which would be to think about our own behaviour and how we want to present ourselves. In addition it was interesting to analyse some of the text fragments she used for her thesis. In the text fragments we analysed were some considerable observations which told us a lot about the different ways you present yourself and what can go wrong.
During the workshop there were several learning moments for our team. It became clear that you have to be conscious of your public, their expectations and their knowledge and need to adjust the way you present yourself and your project according to that. In this way people will be interested more easily and knowledge will be transferred quicker and more efficient. At a discovery festival for example people expect to be entertained, a scientific talk containing just facts will therefore be less interesting then a good story. While at a thesis presentation people will be more interested in details of the thesis.
After the presentation and the workshop we put up some points that in our eyes were important for a good presentation on a whiteboard. Each teammember was then given four arrows to be put at the topic they tought needed some extra attention. The most highlighted topics were then discussed.
The last thing we did during the workshop was to think of different points of improvement and how we can work on them. To do so we wrote down several points on a whiteboard and every team member was able to mark the points he thought to be most important. This highlighted 5 different points we then discussed.

Conclusion/discussion

In the end we came up with five points:
⁃ Responsibility: We want to show (non-)scientists that we do not fiddle around and approach research responsibly.
⁃ Receiver: We want to inform people on a level that is adjusted to their knowledge and interest.
⁃ Context/perception: We need to be aware of the difference in context and perceptions at different occasions.
⁃ Expectations: Find out what the public expects of a presentation and adjust the stoy we are telling accordingly.
⁃ Usefulness: We want to show that we add something new to the already existing knowledge and that our work is useful.

These points can be accomplished by doing some research on the events were we will present, this way we can find out how knowledgeable the main public is what they expect and in which context we will be presenting. Adjusting our presentation succesfully to these conditions will be something that will come with experience. Therefore it is also important to practice our presentation for different groups in different settings. Showing that we are responsible and are doing something useful can be accomplished by highlighting our safety measures and by showing the possible (future) implications and aplications of our research.