Immersive experiences are very popular as a tool for science communication. Do they keep their promises?
When I was ten or eleven years old, I visited an exhibition about street children in the Global South with my school. We had previously read the book “Das Tor zum Garten der Zambranos” by Gudrun Pausewang in German class, which is about the friendship between a street boy and the son of a rich family who swap roles. The exhibition perfectly complemented the book reading, as it picked up on many of the themes. The exhibition took visitors to Latin American, Asian and African contexts, complete with reconstructed street scenes and matching artifacts. And visitors experienced the exhibition in uncomfortable improvised slippers made from car tires, as street children often wear.
A quarter of a century later, I still remember this exhibition. But why? My guess: the combination of reading a book, a well-made exhibition and the very tactile car tire slippers was memorable enough to be remembered to this day. An immersive experience of white norther privilege, completely undigital and analog. Today, decades later, immersion is usually thought of as an interweaving of analog and digital experiences. There are numerous specialized providers who are also active in science communication. Immersive virtual reality offers huge potential for communicating science and research. The SciComm portal impact.science therefore sees virtual reality experiences as number 1 of the top 10 science communication trends of 2024. But what exactly are immersive experiences?
Immersion: what?
The Immersive Experience Institute, a kind of think tank from California, provides useful definitions here. Those who want to delve deeper into the question of what constitutes immersive experiences and what their potential and qualities are can find peer-reviewed answers in the Journal of Network and Computer Applications. And those interested in the practical implementation level can, for example, take a look at the Copenhagen-based company Khora, with whom Oikoplus recently collaborated on an EU project submission. The creative team at Khora develops virtual reality and augmented reality for a wide range of applications. The projects in which Khora is involved show how virtual reality is also being used and researched in EU-funded research and innovation projects. For example, in the Horizon Europe project XTREME (Mixed Reality Environment for Immersive Experience of Art and Culture), which was launched in January 2024. In this project, a consortium of 14 partners is researching and developing mixed reality (MR) solutions for experiencing art.
Of course, many applications of virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive technologies are resource-intensive and costly. As a result, their field of application is often of a commercial nature. One example of this is the exhibition “Van Gogh – The Immersive Experience”, which has been successful around the world. But even here, knowledge is conveyed and brought to life.
What are the communicative benefits of immersion?
But do immersive experiences with the support of modern VR and AR technology also lead to measurable communication success? Well, the answer is not quite that simple. Research into this is being conducted selectively: Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz at the University of Missouri, for example, has investigated the effectiveness of VR as a science communication tool. However, for a very specific use case. In an article on LinkedIn, the company Imagineerium, a British provider of technology-supported immersive experiences, writes: “There has not been a great deal of research done on human psychology when exercised in an immersive experience, but some scientists and psychologists are beginning to look into it more as VR grows from strength to strength and immersion is starting to be used in learning experiences.”
It is probably not easy to say whether digital, immersive experiences are a useful communication tool. As is so often the case, it all depends. In any case, they expand the toolbox of science communication. Virtual reality and augmented reality are certainly a useful tool for many a communicative message and many a target group. But not in any case, for everyone, everywhere.
The immersive exhibition I visited as a boy, which was completely analog and which I visited in the late 90s, is a good example of this. I remember the experience of the exhibition, but less about the actual exhibition content. But maybe that was just too long ago.
In this reading list, we want to look at the communication methods think tanks use to bring science into politics.
Professional providers of science communication–whether embedded in research institutions, as companies such as Oikoplus, or think tanks–aim to communicate research results clearly and transparently and make knowledge available for public debate. The target audience for this is diverse. One relevant target group that is usually among the declared addressees of science communication is political decision-makers. In this Reading List, we therefore want to focus on communication methods aimed at policymakers and take a look at think tanks.
Policy oriented think tank work, as stated by Annapoorna Ravichander results in ‘sets of guidelines to help achieve outcomes in a reasonable manner’. They are different from processes and actions. Policies are broad and set a certain direction. While science communication may not have a direct policymaking ambition, it can play a significant role in shaping policy debates, informing decision makers and influencing the development of ideas. And there are methods which can be applied in order to achieve policy influence.
The most central way for science communicators to achieve policy impact, is providing policymakers with expertise and consultation. Science communicators can place researchers as consultants to government agencies, providing input in the policy-making process. There is, however, a challenge in this method. According to Andrea Baertl Helguero, in order to have influence on policy through consulting, think tanks should maintain a strong intellectual transparency and ensure their research is diligent and reliable.
Another crucial method to achieve policy influence is networking. It’s a classic method used by think tanks. As Alejandro Chaufen explains in an article for Forbes, networking allows think tanks to create platforms where ideas can be exchanged and a consensus can be build around policy agendas.
A question of format
An established format for presenting research findings to policymakers are policy briefing papers. A policy brief is a concise, well-researched and informed summary of a particular issue, the policy options for addressing that issue and some recommendations. These briefs are an important tool for presenting research findings and recommendations based on them to a non-scientific audience to support decision-making. Policy briefs allow science communicators to communicate their research and findings in a way that conveys the urgency of the issue and is accessible to people with different levels of knowledge. However, here too, research institutions should ensure transparency and remain independent and transparent when presenting problems, options or proposed solutions.
When policy impact is the declared goal of science communication, this generates a need for anticipatory methods such as foresight and forecasting, which can help inform policy action and increase societal resilience in a sustainable way. Science communicators should take a long-term view of policy change, work over-time and build momentum for the topics and ideas they work with. Mark Halle, for International Institute for Sustainable Development, states that ‘think tanks cannot afford vagueness […]’. They must create outputs, which are clear, targeted, and incorporate a vision of long-term, positive effects.
This text hopefully serves as a good introduction to the question of what can be learned from think tanks when it comes to achieving political impact through science communication. And this leads almost inevitably to the question of how to measure the impact of research in the first place. Fortunately, we have already dealt with this in other Readings Lists, e.g here.
What can we learn from science communication? A reading list based on the experiences of the first five years of Oikoplus.
Relevant target groups may be small.
The success of communication is often measured in reach. Reach is also a hard currency in communication for research and innovation projects. However, science dissemination is often very specific, and it’s small target groups that are particularly relevant for successful project communication. In our Domino-E project, for example, one of the most relevant target groups is the small group of people involved in programming satellite missions for earth observation purposes. This target group is not only small, but it is also not easy to identify the communication channels through which it can be reached. However, the content for this target group is specific enough to be able to assume that the target group will find the relevant content as long as it is easy to find. So we decided to use YouTube as a channel.
Simplifying does not have to mean trivializing.
The closer you zoom in on a topic, the bigger it becomes. Many topics and issues appear straightforward at first glance, and only on closer inspection do their complexity, depth and multi-layered nature become apparent. Nevertheless, it is not wrong to take a superficial look at a topic first and only delve deeper in the second step. For experts who are extremely well-versed in a particular subject area, it is often difficult to allow this superficial view. They are too aware of the aspects that only become apparent on closer inspection. And that’s why the superficial view feels like a simplification to them, and often like a trivialization. It is important to allow simplification. But it should be correct. Our REACT project, which deals with the control of pest insect species, can be summarized easily: Insects are sterilized so that they can mate with wild-type insects in the wild without producing offspring. The insect population shrinks in the medium term due to the lack of offspring. In this way, agriculture is protected from the pest. Technically, this method involves a great deal of effort. Nevertheless, we have tried to explain the project in as simple and understandable terms as possible.
Science communication aims to make research accessible to the general public. This broad public can therefore be found as a target group in the applications and descriptions of many research and innovation projects. However, from a communication perspective, the general public hardly exists. Addressing the public as a whole is damn difficult, or rather: it is impossible. Developing key messages and storytelling approaches automatically involves a selection of target groups. Not everyone finds everything interesting. And if you manage to meet the interests of as many different target groups as possible, that’s already a great communication success. To gain an understanding of how diverse the target groups of our communication in research and innovation projects can be, we have our project partners develop personas in interactive workshops at the start of a project. These are fictitious people who we then use to jointly consider what needs to be done to reach them through our project communication: with which messages, on which channels, when, why, and with what goal in mind? It usually becomes clear quite quickly that the general public is only an auxiliary term that indicates that each project can address many different target groups.
Never underestimate how exciting any topic can be.
How interesting a topic is sometimes isn’t obvious at first glance. No wonder: not every topic can be perceived as equally exciting, and it always depends on how a topic is presented. You could say that it is the job of science communicators like Oikoplus to ensure that a topic arouses the interest of as many people as possible. That is true. But even those who do science communication, first have to find their very own interest in a topic. This does not always happen straight away, which is why it is part of our work to actively seek out approaches to any given topic in which we recognize the potential to tell a story to a specific target group. We therefore force ourselves to be curious and to think empathetically about what the thematic appeal could be for other target groups. Sooner or later, the penny will drop – and then communication will be much easier.
5. Even those who conduct the most exciting research don’t always like to talk about it.
As a journalist, you sometimes have to worm the information you want to convey out of the interviewees. You have to keep asking questions because the interest in conveying information tends to be one-sided. If you’re not doing journalism, but science communication on behalf of science, then this can also happen. This can be surprising, as one would think that the dissemination of information is in the interest of both the scientists and the public and that in the role of the communicator, one only has to do the mediation work. In practice, however, we have often found that researchers sometimes do not always like to talk about their work and that even basic explanations have to be laboriously elicited from them. There is no simple solution to this problem. It is important to build trust, present your communication work as transparently as possible, and create environments in which insights into scientific work are possible. In some cases, this can be a large video shoot in a laboratory with artificial lighting and large camera equipment, and in other cases, it can be a personal one-on-one conversation. In any case, science communication does not happen by itself, even when the most exciting research is communicated.
In science, quality is more important than quantity. In communication, this is sometimes not so clear. When the objectives for project communication are laid down in the applications for research projects, the corresponding KPIs are often set high. After all, a proposal submission should express high ambitions. If it is approved, you then realize that the goals may have been set too high and that publications, press releases, website articles, social media postings, photos, videos, and other project dissemination content can be produced, but that it is not easy to maintain your high-quality standards. High-quality content takes time. In our video series for the REACT project, for example, we try to explain the research project as comprehensively as possible and at the same time as clearly as possible. The first of the explanatory videos can be found here. Producing such videos requires a long and detailed exchange with the researchers involved. This is why dozens of such videos cannot be produced in a project like REACT. This should also be expressed in the objectives at the start of the project.
7. Speed is not everything in communication.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. And also, you have to take time in science communication. In other areas of communication, in journalism, PR, and advertising, speed is often a key quality feature. And there are also moments in science communication when it is important to react quickly. But in general, science communication follows the pace of science. For press relations, for example, this means that you can free yourself a little from the temporal logic of media operations. A research topic does not lose its relevance simply because it is no longer news. If, for example, a research paper was published several weeks ago, it is not pointless from the outset to draw journalists’ attention to the paper. This is a major difference between science communication and some other fields of professional communication work.
You don’t have to fully understand what you are communicating.
At Oikoplus, we often benefit from the fact that we approach the research projects that we support in terms of communication as laypeople. The fact that we are not experts in urban development, archaeology, crop protection, satellite technology, or the energy transition has helped us to ask the right questions in the projects that we implement in these areas. After all, the fact that we don’t immediately understand the methods and innovations of our projects is something we have in common with our target groups. This is not to be understood as a hymn to trivialization. Of course, it helps to familiarize yourself with the topics that are being communicated. But you also don’t have to be afraid to bring your expertise, namely communications expertise, to projects that you initially have no idea about. Don’t be afraid of rocket science. Even rocket scientists are sometimes dependent on communication experts.
Think globally, act globally.
To make an abstract topic accessible, it is often linked to a manageable aspect of people’s everyday lives. This is a common method in journalism. To draw attention to the consequences of global climate change, for example, changes to the ecosystem are described at a local level. This creates relatability. We wrote about this in Reading List #010. So far, so useful. In our communication for European and global research projects, we sometimes lack this local or everyday level. We design communication for international target groups – after all, research is international too. The slogan “think globally, act locally” therefore often becomes “think globally, act globally” for us. In concrete terms, this means that science communication cannot always respond to the needs of different local target groups. This is where translations into dozens of different languages and a lack of mobility alone can lead to failure. Science communication takes place on an international level. As a science communicator, you often have to trust that the topics you are communicating about will find their target groups – not the other way around.
10. Curiosity is the best driver of communication.
If you ask us at Oikoplus what drives us, the answer is easy. It is curiosity. In German, the word for it (Neugier) is derived from the greed (Gier) for something new (Neu). We took a critical look at this in one of our last reading lists. We understand curiosity as the constant interest in new experiences, insights, and perspectives. We see it as a great privilege of science communication that we can constantly learn something new in our work, and it even largely consists of this. We enjoy doing it.
Whatever it is, something in us craves innovation. How else could the constant drive for the new, for the better, have become such the norm? Those who do not merely reproduce in their work, but make it better, are appreciated for it. For breaking new ground, for thinking outside the box, for not standing still, for pioneering, for being creative, for game-changing, for being disruptive. Our language has many beautiful phrases and idioms for innovative thinking.
At Oikoplus, we are constantly challenged to innovate the way we communicate science and research. And the researchers we advise and support are also constantly innovating. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is constantly challenged to reinvent the wheel.
As I read this, I think to myself: Talking about exnovation instead of just innovation doesn’t necessarily protect you from the weird business coach-speak of our time.
In it, Trentmann tells of European traders who set out for China in the 17th century with shiploads of innovations, only to be met with incomprehension there, since the value of things there was linked to their age and proven value.
Innovation as a creed
That old things have a high value, we know until today. From arts and antiques, for example. When it comes to intangible things like social norms, age is not necessarily a suitable indicator of quality or acceptance. If innovation is limited to the pure communication level, phenomena such as green-, pink- or wokewashing sometimes emerge.
And then there is even the rhetorical appeal to innovation, which merely serves to delay overdue ex-novation. It goes something like this: “We trust in technological innovations instead of bans!” You hear that occasionally, for example when it comes to climate change adaptation. Instead of replacing high-emission technologies with low-emission ones by law, i.e., top-down exovation, people wait for innovations to become established without doing much to ensure their success.
This is not to say that technological innovations cannot also make their contribution. But in many cases it is simply not enough to wait for innovation where exnovation has long been necessary. This could already be read in 2010 in the Harvard Business Review with reference to climate change. “Even if energy innovations have a lot of potential, they might not be deployable until it’s too late. History shows that most of the technology breakthroughs need decades to make it to the mass market.”
This and many other examples show that it makes perfect sense to include exnovation as a term in one’s own vocabulary. The term helps to critically scrutinize innovations. After all, there are also bad innovations. Incidentally, there is a nice word in German for the thesis in the first sentence of this text, according to which something in us craves for innovation: Neugier (engl: curiosity). The greed for something new. And no matter how critically one questions the concept of innovation. But don’t worry. At Oikoplus, we still believe that curiosity for innovation has its good sides.
In this Reading List, I approach innovation and the transmission of knowledge with the aim of innovation. Starting with thoughts on innovation in universities and in companies, I conclude with an alternative approach to communicating newness that goes back to Paulo Freire: conscientization.
Innovation as mission
Without reflection, I adopt the language of the funding and legislative bodies, of the management consultancies: Innovation and innovation communication are the be-all and end-all of a thriving location. The urge for renewal, which is etymologically inscribed in the concept of innovation, has taken on new meaning in the climate crisis. We are supposed to be innovative: all of us. Individuals, companies, and the administration. On the role of universities in this changed environment, Maximilian Vogt and Christoph Weber formulate that we can no longer avoid a science without a “New Enlightenment” and without a social mission.
For companies, the question of the role is no less urgent. Somehow, however, it seems to me that companies are assumed to be quite good at social innovation anyway. It is not innovation that needs to be admonished here; rather, it is the culture of innovation. How can innovation be supported in a more targeted way? This is where innovation communication comes into play. Innovation communication is the communication of new ideas, concepts, products, services, and processes that differ from those that already exist. Innovation communication is not only a critical feature for the success of innovation but a condition for innovation itself:
“The lonely innovator is a myth. Solo innovation does not exist. Unlike invention, it’s a team sport. Working in solitude may lead to invention, but not onnovation because it requires communication with others.”
Alex Goryachev, Forbes Council Member
Not surprisingly, Goryachev concludes that innovation is successful when communication is at its peak. That is, when ideas, concepts, products, services, and processes have been shared and assimilated in as diverse a team as possible in such a way that everyone involved in the innovation process is aware that they can bring about change with the innovation. The order situation is undisputed; tips and recommendations for cultivating a culture of innovation are plentiful and in all forms. For example, here, here, or here. Some of them are almost embarrassingly banal.
Boundaries of innovation
A comprehensive and multi-layered treatment of the concept of innovation can be found in Benoit Godin’s book “Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries”. Godin begins his journey on the topic with the ancient Greeks and, starting from there, addresses not only the successes but above all the resistance that innovation has had to experience and overcome time and again. Only excerpts of the book were freely accessible on Google Books, but reading the relevant passages was fun. Godin discusses the roles of faith and the church, as well as the initial difficulties in the collaboration between universities and companies.
Ronald C. Beckett and Paul Hyland also address the limits of innovation and the communication associated with it. In their essay, the two argue that innovation happens above all where there is friction. This friction, once perceived as an obstacle, must be overcome – a communicative challenge. The authors’ response to the challenge seems to me to be too conventional, or not explicit enough. Adapting the structures that host innovation processes. Ok, but is that all?
Innovation communication is at the limit. Or: Conscientization
Conscientisation is a concept developed by Paulo Freire that aims to liberate people through education. People should learn to recognise and understand their own reality in order to then assess how new things can change their lives. This could be read as preparing people to participate in innovation processes. An introduction to the term, which has also found its way into the literature as critical consciousness, can be found on Wikipedia. If you want to better understand the basic framework of Freire’s thinking, watch the 8 minutes 14 seconds of “An Incredible Conversation” with Paulo Freire.
Well done: we have now arrived at post-Marxist thinking for innovation culture and communication.
The use of conscientization-inspired innovation processes has recently increased again after a first peak in the 1980s: Karin Berglund and Johannson argue for a strengthening of rural areas through a culture of innovation based on conscientization among small enterprises. Juan Díasz Bordavene et al. highlight the need to integrate South American farmers into the innovation process through conscientization in order to develop sustainable solutions for the region. Hsu Meng-Jun et al. documented the life-saving acceleration of innovation processes starting from a common and shared knowledge sharing that is in line with critical conscientization.
At the tipping point
Actually, I didn’t want to write a pamphlet here. In the end, it has become one. My point is that, as everyone seems to be tasked with innovation, it is time to rethink approaches to innovation communication that stem from business administration. We should start with the question of who should be involved in the process. And then what language will enable everyone to express themselves adequately? If these are paintings, then they are just as legitimate as visits to the field, conversations, or Lego sessions in which a team playfully exchanges ideas about innovation. Let’s try out new ideas; also in development departments where only supposedly everyone speaks the same language.
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