Category Archives: Skills

Le-tting-go – March 2026

I’ve been in my new job for two months now and I am pleased to report that I am still loving every second of it. Working with students is full of highs and lows – the last few weeks has had its share of both – but is incredibly rewarding. Although I’ve had plenty of experience lecturing and leading workshops, I’ve not had much experience of the one-to-one tutorial work and I’ve been enjoying getting to grips with this part of the job.

Teaching

I am especially enjoying getting to use creative and game-based approaches for my Environmental Hazards module. This includes some of my favourite tools and also things I have worked on in the past but never really had the opportunity to use properly. Firstly, I wanted the students to appreciate how individuals had different vulnerabilities and resilience to hazards – we explored this in the context of children and young people using the Help Callum and Help Sali 360 immersive storytelling videos from the Flood Stories project. Five years on from finishing these, this was the first time I had got to use them!

Stop Disasters is absolute classic of the games for geoscience and disaster risk reduction genres. It is made for school kids really, but framed in the right way it can be useful in higher education too. I’ve already used the flood level in my River Management module to explore the ‘art of the possible’ in flood risk management, and a couple of weeks ago I used the tropical storm level in my Environmental Hazards module to allow students to try out counterfactual thinking. We also played Good Morning, a micro-RPG I wrote last year to explore how downward counterfactuals work. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked and a good feeling to effectively use a tool I had written.

Goodbyes

This month I also got to say a proper goodbye to my former Environment Agency colleagues from the Flood Hydrology Improvements Programme (FHIP). As a dispersed national team, we worked almost entirely remotely and only got together in-person two or three times a year. They chose to meet in York for their first meeting of 2026 so I could join them for dinner. This was such a nice gesture and I was reminded of just how much I miss them all. It still does not feel right that I won’t get to see them all regularly anymore…

NERC EMBRACE with LEGO!

Another highlight from the last month was the workshops for the NERC EMBRACE Enviro project. Led by the wonderful Dr Olalekan Adekola, this pilot project is part of the NERC Opening up the Environment call, and seeks to engage members of the refugee and migrant communities with environmental science and careers. Over three days, two groups undertook two days of free training. This included analysing water quality in the lab, GIS, and science communication.

I was involved in the project in the middle of last year, long before my current role was even advertised. I was included as an external consultant – through my side quest as GeoSkinner – to support the science communication training. These workshops then were also my last act as a freelancer and were based on my LEGO(R) Serious Play(R) inspired Play your Research workshops. I helped the participants find and visualise their science and personal stories of the workshop by building with the LEGO bricks.

These workshops never cease to amaze me. The start is often a mix of some being excited at the prospect of playing with LEGO bricks and others being cynical for the same reason. But, once we get going people are surprised by their own imagination and creativity and the insights that they self-reveal are truly incredible. I reflected on the workshop that not only did the participants discover their own stories, their insights highlighted the power of the workshop and the benefits they got from it. It would have been powerful evaluation data.

New Paper

I have a new paper out! For the last few years I have been part of an International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) working group on science communication, part of the organisation’s HELPING science decade. The paper reflects the collective work of the group – expertly led by Christina Orieschnig and Soham Adla – and provides a summary of science communication in hydrology and tips to make sure it is effective.

Honestly, many have put a lot more working into this than I have but I’m proud to have contributed and to have my name attached. You can read the open access paper in Hydrological Sciences Journal.

Games for Geoscience

In the last few weeks the organising committee of the European Geoscience Union General Assembly has been working hard wrangling nearly 20,000 abstracts into a conference programme. With 14 abstracts, Games for Geoscience fell just below the threshold for a full science session (talks + posters) so instead this year the session will be PICOs.

I’m a little disappointed as the session usually has a good involvement with those attending virtually, and I have found the poster and PICO sessions far less accessible for virtual presenters and attendees than talks. But, I’m still looking forward to another awesome session and of course, the world famous Geoscience Games Night will be back too!

Next month’s newsletter will be devoted to EGU, including the full programme for the Games for Geoscience session and sharing the contributions I’ll be making at the conference – my first as a academic since before the Covid lockdowns!

See you in April!

Chris

Views expressed in this newsletter are mine and do not represent those of my employer. Content and links are provided for informational purposes and do not constitute endorsements. I am not responsible for the content of external sites, which may have changed since this newsletter was produced.

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Building Blocks of Environmental Communication

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I’m not the sort of person who starts a project by doing loads of preparation and extensive planning. My neurodivergent brain much prefers to dive right in, try things out, and figure out what works along the way. I think this is quite common with ADHDers, making us well suited to things that require flexibility and rapid ingenuity but less suited to strategic thinking. It is a double edged sword for an academic. On the one-hand, the heuristic mindset and approach is a blessing for experimenting but can often leave you lacking the theoretical framework in which to place and define your work.

My science communication journey started in 2015 at the first Hull Science Festival. Back then I was running a hacked version of my model of the Humber Estuary that allowed people to change sea level in it. It was the idea of my then boss, Prof Tom Coulthard but it was my job to make and demonstrate it. In the 10+ years since, I have gained a lot of experience in science and environmental communication, trying out lots of ideas and exploring a shed load more. Surely, there’s plenty of knowledge stored in my head that would be useful to share with others?

This was my challenge when I was asked to give a two hour session on Environmental Communication to the Geography students at York St John University (see last month’s Imagination Engine to read more about my Visiting Fellowship there). The students will be undertaking research projects in Slovenia and as part of their coursework they will be creating communication materials to share that research, including posters, short-form videos, and social media posts. My session was to prepare them for this.

A photo of Lake Bled, Slovenia, under clear blue skies. — Lake Bled, Slovenia, just because it is pretty.

What I really appreciated from this experience was that it finally got me to sit down and pull my experiences together into a single narrative – a story told through powerpoint. The question I asked myself was ‘what is it that I do when I design an exhibit? What am I trying to achieve when I put a video together? I compiled together my building blocks for effective environmental communications:

Aim for impact – your communications want to change something, what is it, and how does it work towards it?
Embrace a behavioural model for change – work with the way people’s brains work, learn from psychologists.
Avoid robbing people of agency – empower people, don’t drown them in doom and gloom.
Emphasise positive actions – show examples of others doing good work so they won’t feel like Billy no mates.
Structure an engaging narrative – tell a story, don’t give a scientific report.
Share the ‘Hero’s Journey’ – all good stories have a hero who changes and grows, who it is?
Make it resonate with your audience – make your message relevant to the things your audience cares about.

When I reflect on the building blocks I shared, it was apparent that my approach is still that of a practitioner – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I find ideas and I apply them. It is still my ambition to put my work into relevant theoretical frameworks and critically reflect on the literature in the many fields I have drawn from, including psychology, museology, gaming, and scenography. Maybe one day I will study a Master’s degree in science communication to force me to do it!

If you’d like to learn more about my building blocks of environmental communication then Subscribe to my YouTube channel. I plan to turn the session into a series of resources that I will post there, possibly in the second half of 2025.

This article originally appeared in the April issue of Imagination Engines. To get my content earlier and sent directly to your email, subscribe using the box below.

Views are my own.

The Science Behind Imagination: Strengthening Your Skills

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It is commonly considered that imagination is something some people have and others are born lacking. That it is something that artists, poets, and storytellers are blessed with whilst the rest of us philistines have not been bestowed our fair share. I do not believe this to be true. Instead, I believe we all have an imagination, or what Albert Read would call an imagination muscle, that can be exercised and strengthened.

In fact, my belief is backed up by research. A 2022 paper by Dr Andrea Blomkvist, a researcher in philosophy of cognitive science at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience, University of Glasgow, showed empirical evidence that our imaginations demonstrate the hallmarks of two key qualities of a skill:

1. It can be improved through practice.

2. It can be controlled.

A key piece of evidence given by Blomkvist for imagination being improved by practice comes from mental rotation tasks. People are shown a test object and a number of images that could correspond to the test object having been rotated. They are asked to mentally rotate, i.e. to visualise, the test object and answer which of the images is correct. As participants practiced the visualising, they got better and faster at completing the task.

We control our imaginations by constraining them to reality. An example used by Blomkvist is imagining moving a bedframe up a staircase. To imagine this usefully, you have to imagine the bed and the staircase as the right sizes and also not being able to change shape or size or even vanish altogether. Our imaginations can visualise them doing those things but we can control it to help us achieve our goal. In exercises with children of different ages where they were asked to plan for imagined events, it was found that older children were better able to constrain their imaginations to reality.

There is much in this paper about imagining that reminds me of modelling and dealing with assumptions and uncertainty. Imagination is described as always involving simulation. When we simulate, either numerically or imaginably, we make assumptions, we have biases, and we miss potentially important information. Modellers can develop their imaginations to better understand the limits of their outputs and better communicate where they, and are not, useful.

How will you develop you imagination and your control of it?

This post was originally published in the January 2025 issue of The Imagination Engine. You can get first access to these articles by subscribing to the posts using the box below.