Category Archives: Skills

Building Blocks of Environmental Communications

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

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.

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.