Fall 2014-15
PWR 91KS: Design Thinking and Science Communication
Instructor: Kim Savelson
In this course, we will study the iterative process of design thinking that enables everyone, not just designers, to identify problems and creatively answer the question “how do we make it better?” We will specifically study design thinking for science communication, so that students are better able to communicate new science knowledge to the public and to policy makers. Our driving questions will be: how can design thinking, or human-centered design, inform communication strategies to promote public science understanding, and even acceptance for scientific consensus itself? As a student in the course you’ll have the chance to learn the methods and reasoning of design thinking and how this process can be applied to create successful communication events among scientists, science communicators, policy makers and the public.
Students will focus their research projects on real-world science communication situations that present a multidimensional design/communication challenge: energy debates, evolution, climate change, nuclear power, vaccinations, predictive DNA diagnostics, epigenetics.
We will take a ‘real-world problem’ approach in our course; you will be engaged in problem-based learning, in collaborative groups, as you study the rhetoric of scientific discourse around a particular topic and then prototype (create) new communication artifacts designed to persuade and engage a real, specific community (the safety of childhood vaccines is a good example of a troubled area for science communication). You’ll be encouraged to think big in this course—and draw on innovative mindsets—as you go forward researching and then “solving” a communication challenge.
Students will engage in an iterative process that follows design thinking steps:
1. FIND THE PROBLEM: Conduct background research to find a real issue that can be understood in terms of science, technoscience or engineering communication. Study the problem. Includes interviews, and user observation. Some examples of problem areas are noted above, such as vaccination debates, energy debates and climate change.
2. FRAME THE PROBLEM:We will seek to “design the right thing” instead of simply “design the thing right” (you won’t just design what you want to design, you’ll make sure you are using a human-centered approach to design, which means need—audience and user community need—determines how you frame the problem). In this step, students will also begin to choose between distinct modalities of science communication—e.g., science promotion, science education or the prevention of knowledge deprivation.
3. IDEATE/PROTOTYPE/ITERATE: The materialization of this step will depend on rhetorical situation and purpose. Students will explore the problem by making ideasreal, even very early in the process (whether it’s a health communication campaign, a set of method cards, instructional design pamphlet, poster prototype). Questions are also considered and settled in this step concerning the aims of the science communication, such as public understanding of science, public awareness, public engagement and public participation. The science communication designer needs to make explicit choices establishing a coherent relationship between modality (science promotion, science education and prevention of knowledge deprivation), aim and the intended effect of the science communication process (public awareness of science, public understanding of science, public engagement of science and public participation in science).
4. TELL THE STORY: Communicate core ideas in meaningful, interesting ways that make thoughtful appeals to particular audiences based on clear purpose. The “story” is captured in your media/interactive presentation, which you frame for a select audience and setting (based on design decisions made in above steps).
5. LEARN: Gather feedback for the future, specify what needs further attention. Two page self-review.
PWR 194SB: The Rhetoric of Science
Instructor: Shay Brawn
“To understand why science develops as it does one must understand […] the manner in which a particular set of shared values interacts with the particular experiences shared by a community of specialists to ensure that most members of the group will ultimately find one set of arguments rather than another decisive. That process is persuasion […]” Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1969
In this act of situating the development of science within the domain of socially communicated and shared values, Thomas Kuhn sparked a new round in an old debate about the relationship between rhetoric and science. At one extreme, there are some who view the notion of “rhetoric of science” as an oxymoron: science is objective, disinterested, truth seeking; rhetoric is subjective, partisan, manipulative. At another extreme, there some who believe that because science must ultimately resort to language to represent its truths, it has no real basis to claim any privileged, objective access to truth. Between and around these extremes there lie a number of interesting debates about the relationship between language and reality, about how knowledge is produced and communicated, about the social dimensions of empirical analysis. In this class we will read and discuss the work of major participants in some of these ongoing debates, including Thomas S. Kuhn, Charles Bazerman, Bruno Latour, Alan Gross, and Jeanne Fahnestock, among others. Together, we’ll think deeply about the relationship of rhetoric to truth and science to fact, and in the process will gain insight into some of the critical problems that bedevil the public communication of science.
MAJOR ASSIGNMENTS: The major project for this course will be the application of one or more of the theoretical treatments of the rhetoric of science that we study to some concrete domain of scientific practice or communication. For instance, you might analyze the genre of the lab notebook in light of Charles Bazerman’s notion of accountability. Or, perhaps you would look at the use of rhetorical figures, in light of Jeanne Fahnestock’s work, in a particular piece of science communication. On the way to that work, everyone will write short response pieces to the theoretical works, and take turns presenting on the class readings.
