17 January, 2019
Acknowledgement: This article was originally posted in the blog of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement.
After just under a year and a half working as Public Engagement Project Officer for the ORION Open Science project at the Babraham Institute I was delighted that my proposal for the 2018 Engage Conference was accepted for the poster party!
The ORION Open Science work package I lead at Babraham is about co-creation, bringing new value to existing processes by engaging different people; however, my proposal for Engage was about a public attitudes survey that we have conducted in six European countries. How do these two topics relate? The idea behind the survey is to understand our audience better before embarking on the process of co-creation. The survey gathered information on what the public in six of the ORION Open Science participating countries think about life science research, public involvement, and genome editing to facilitate later project tasks – such as a public dialogue on genome editing that we are conducting this year.
I’d heard a lot about the Engage conference – several colleagues attended last year and shared the first deliverables of ORION Open Science: a co-creation menu that I developed shortly before going on maternity leave. A lot has happened since, so the nurturing and multidisciplinary Engage conference seemed the perfect place to discuss my project’s progress/future plans and get inspired by the plenary session speakers!
To show the kind of inspiration that I got from speakers and contributors, here are some nuggets of wisdom:
“Think beyond intellectual engagement into emotional engagement” - Xerxes Mazda from the National Museum of Scotland reminded us that people might not remember what you told them but they will remember how you made them feel.
“Embedding, training, recognising and rewarding public engagement in our organisations is mandatory” - one of my idols of Public Engagement, Nancy Rothwell from the University of Manchester, reminded us that the work we do is essential and should be praised accordingly.
“There are not hard to reach audiences, only hard to reach institutions” - Darren Henley from the Arts Council England was very clear in saying that if we are not reaching our audience is because we are not trying hard enough.
“Are we skewing a co-creation experience by selecting statistically representative population samples rather than working with representatives of relevant communities?” - a conference delegate challenged me to think during her visit to my poster whether any co-creation experience will be more impactful by selecting community leaders who have certain understanding on the topic of study and who can influence others.
Utrecht University, where I obtained my PhD degree in Cellular Biology, was also present at the conference. They brought a very intriguing public engagement challenge to tease the audience. Below, I share the results of my latest experiment to add to the growing evidence regarding the mysterious contents of the orange cube that the Utrecht University public engagement team brought to Edinburgh.
Figure 1: (left) picture of the orange ‘black box’. (right) X-Ray picture of orange cube. The open white circles are the X-ray machine holders to keep the object of study in place
Our previous kinetic and sound experiments indicated that the cube contents were of solid material. Whilst replicating kinetic experiments, one of the early career public engagement staff in our department accidentally mis-handled the experiment resulting in one of the mysterious objects falling out of the box.
We conclude that: (a) my colleague needs further training into holding objects tightly; (b) the content of the orange black box is… contact emma.martinez@babraham.ac.uk for the answer!
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Babraham Institute scientists, our security department and colleagues in the Impact team for their meaningful contributions to the challenge as well as to the Utrecht University public engagement team for providing materials and inspiring collaborative insights.
17 January 2019