When being understandable is not enough
My first attempt as a scientist to make contact with a lay audience was a surprisingly big challenge. During my postdoc, I participated in the Edinburgh Science Festival and stood on stage in front of 150 schoolchildren. I prepared much more intensively than usual for lectures: an exceptionally detailed preliminary conversation with the moderator, a three-dimensional model as visualisation, and many practice runs. At the end of the event, the moderator asked the audience which of the six of us scientists had made the best impression. None of the 300 hands went up for me. Where did I go wrong?
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel once had a moment when the physicist in her broke through
I focused all my energy on the question: How can I explain my science specifically to this target group so that it is understandable? Despite all my efforts and considerations, I probably did not completely fail to be at least somewhat understandable. What I did not realize, however, was that what I was saying was simply not relevant to the audience. For them, it was the unworldly tinkering of a foreign nerd who stirs transparent liquids for days and occasionally shouts “Eureka” when he sees cryptic lines on the computer.
I’m in good company. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel once had a moment when the physicist in her broke through: During a Castor nuclear waste transport, small amounts of radioactive material escaped – at a time when there were particularly intense protests against these transports. Merkel stepped in front of the Tagesschau microphones and explained the accident. Something had gone wrong during the transfer of materials. Dear citizens, you can imagine it like when children in the sandpit use a shovel to fill sand from one bucket into another.
The explanation would have been appropriate if the aim had been to make the process understandable, even to viewers who have nothing to do with technology. But the viewers’ concern was something else: They wanted certainty that something like this would not happen again.
It is good that science is becoming more accessible to the public and that actors are expressing themselves more clearly nowadays. However, for most situations as communicating scientists, this first step in development is not enough: we need to put ourselves even more deeply in the shoes of our audience and add relevance to comprehensibility.
This article was first published in Nachrichten aus der Chemie (issue 01-2025). See here the German original.
If you´re interested in learning about adapting your science communication to an audience, then you might be interested in our workshop Scientific poster presentation: design and pitching.