Science Communication and Creative Editing – desres25.designandcommunication.net

Finding creative ways to communicate scientific topics to the non-scientific community

Introduction

This blogpost shall give an overview over the planned skill to be acquired throughout this semester and list the resources that should be used in order to acquired said skill.

As I plan on building my master’s thesis around the topic of science communication and on how to build bridges between design and science communication in order to better communicate scientific topics to a non-scientific audience, I want to take this semester to focus on creating short-form video content that tackles scientific topics. My goal is to make these videos more than „classic“ explainer videos and have them stand out by learning more about creative editing and VFX for that purpose. The final product should be a series of videos that have both, educational content and visually appealing creative edits.

I have been researching accounts and creators who focus on producing creatively edited videos and selected some editing styles I would like to try out. These styles I would then like to match with scientific topics, which I am also in the process of selecting. I figured –at least for the start – I will be focusing on choosing topics that have some sort of „visual potential“ (meaning that they concern subjects that can also be adapted visually) and can be broken down into short form content relatively easily. Even though that may restrict the exploration of more complex topics, it will help me to get started in this field and to get to know more about how much information is needed in short form content to still convey knowledge without losing too much critical information.

First Content Ideas

Since I was part of last year’s JOANNEUM Arctic Expedition Team and have worked in the science communication and media division of the team, I would like to generally focus on Arctic topics. There are many fascinating topics surrounding the Arctic and Arctic research is more relevant than ever, since it is not only heavily affected by climate change, but the happenings in the Arctic also have a massive impact on, for example, Europe’s climate.

To get started, I put together a list of possible areas to be explored and explained on the video projects. This list, of course, is subject to change and extension and will be updated accordingly.

Topic 1: Greenland

1.1 | The Map of Greenland
Greenland: The Island That Looks Like a Continent / Why all maps are wrong

Sources for info material:

1.2 | The country itself
Population, languages etc., the name „Greenland“

Topic 2: The Arctic

2.1 | Arctic vs. Antarctica
-> Arctic vs. Antarctica (location on the planet, polar bears vs. penguins)

2.2 | The Arctic
-> the name origin
-> which areas/countries are part of the Arctic

2.3 | Arctic Phenomena
-> Weather phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis and the Midnight sun

Topic 3: Glaciers

3.1 | What’s a glacier?
-> What makes a glacier a glacier?
-> how glaciers work

3.2 | Climate change and glaciers
-> Melting glaciers
-> Ice shield, Glacier tongue

Next Steps

In the following days, I would like to further explore the potential of the listed topics and come up with ways to (visually) communicate and them. To get started, I have selected the topic around explaining the different map projections of Greenland, because it is not only a topic that can be well-explained in a short amount of time – it is also fun to play around with visually.

Background: Since it’s not possible to convert a 3D-sphere (such as the earth) into a flat plane, all maps are subject to distortion. Greenland is a pretty fun example of how map distortion completely changes a countries’ proportions – since northern and southern points of the globe are most affected by the falsification.

The next task is to come up with a storyline and subsequently a storyboard for this topic. Simultaneously, I intend to look into the creators more in-depth and look for explainer videos and tutorials to learn more about their approach to creative editing. The next blogpost will therefore be dedicated more to the editors and frameworks needed for creating short form (VFX-heavy) content and what topics surrounding the editing process itself I will need to look into.