How can we rethink trust?
Photo © Finn Paul
A recent article in Frontiers shows how misinformation has become part of the everyday landscape in which science now communicates. Expertise now circulates through unpredictable channels, and the task is to help people (scientists included) navigate uncertainty.
That shift is at the heart of our new three-year collaboration with the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA). The Liminal Space has been commissioned to deliver community engagement support for ARIA’s Exploring Climate Cooling programme, which funds ambitious research on climate cooling technologies.
This September we brought together a hundred scientists from around the globe for a two-day creative lab in London, exploring what genuine community engagement feels like in this new information terrain.
“An event unlike any we’ve attended before – so much imagination
and variety in helping us explore complex issues.”
Participants stepped through a sequence of facilitated immersive environments which animated case studies of community engagement in action. They experienced The Dialogue Experiment, a live staged encounter between researchers and the public, where an expert mediator unpacked moments of misunderstanding. They explored fictional research briefs to practise how they might design engagement in the face of uncertainty or local tension. And they worked through practical exercises on misinformation, conflict and co-design.
Photo © Finn Paul
Across the two days, we saw how mindsets shifted when scientists could experiment in embodied, low-stakes ways.
Photo © Finn Paul