We should talk about science failures too, you know!
About halfway through my first semester of graduate
school I started compiling ideas for what I wanted to do for my final capstone
project. Even though I wouldn’t be working on it for another year, I wanted to
make sure I had an awesome idea. And I was excited about working on a capstone
project!
For months I thought that I would likely do my
capstone project on something related to science misinformation. I had done a four-minute
presentation on how to spot misinformation on TikTok, and thoroughly enjoyed
learning about misinformation and how to spot it. Many of my ideas revolved around
misinformation: a misinformation workshop, a misinformation literature review,
a misinformation content analysis, and on and on.
I would go on to focus some of my assignments in my
spring semester courses around misinformation, thinking that my capstone
project would be related to misinformation. But here I am in April, having just
registered for my capstone project course, and my project is not in fact
about misinformation.
While speaking with faculty members in March of this
year about my top ideas for my project, I received some very insightful
feedback and advice that completely changed what I wanted to do for my final
project. I decided that I wanted to focus on science communication in crisis,
an idea that I had wrote down this past November, when I had started
reading “Bringing
Colombia Home” and had been working on an assignment for my Law and Ethics
course.
There are many reasons I decided on this project idea:
it was applicable to my job aspirations, it was an exciting and interesting topic
to me, and it had some great practical implications for the field of science
communication.
Now, dear reader, you may be wondering what science
communication in crisis is. While by no means a professional or academic
definition, I define it as how we communicate science to a diverse audience
when science fails. Pretty broad, yes. But so is science and all the ways it
can fail!
As for why I think it is important and you should too,
well there are many reasons! First, for science communicators, we can learn so
much from science failures to enhance our practice of science communication. Second,
with the news and social media becoming ever more prominent in our lives, so
too does the coverage of science and science failures. COVID-19 showed us
examples of both good and bad science communication during the pandemic. In the
past year, we’ve seen science fail in cases like the OceanGate Titan
submersible, which lead to the deaths of five people, and the widespread coverage about Boeing
this year, where the company appears to have slowed output for some of its
models according to a Reuters
report. Third, learning how to better communicate science failures can help
us maintain the public’s trust in science.
As a whole, this idea of science communication in
crisis and learning how to communicate failures in science is an excellent practical
example (in my opinion at least) of what science communication as a practice
is. When we talk about how science failures happened, we have to explain
complex scientific and technological topics to our audience, who likely don’t
have technical knowledge in that field. We also need to ensure we have a proper
strategy when we communicate science failures, or else our messages will fall
flat. Both of these ideas are key tenants to science communication (and communication
in general) and analyzing them in the context of science failures allows us to
find new, practical considerations for science communicators.
With my capstone project, I will be focusing on a specific
science and technology industry – aerospace – and analyze and compare two cases
of science failures in this industry to see what we can learn about science
communication messages. The aerospace industry is constantly being covered in
the news and on social media which provides a great number of cases to pick
from to analyze. I will specifically be looking at the space sector of aerospace,
analyzing one case from SpaceX
and one case from Orbital
Science.
The idea of comparing cases came to fruition when I met with my faculty mentor as we discussed finalizing what my specific project would be (at the time it was a general idea of science communication in crisis in the aerospace industry). I had shown him the below video from SpaceX, a compilation of their own failures of their orbital rocket boosters, and I had mentioned how I thought that SpaceX may have a different approach to communicating their failures. I would argue that a YouTube compilation of your rocket exploding is not the typical way to talk about how it failed. And so, the idea to compare how two different companies communicated science failures was born.
My hope is that from my case analysis I can propose
new, or support existing, tips and considerations for the practice of science communication.
I look forward to this project because of the importance of it and applications
it has for the science communication field, and I hope others in science
communication will look into this subfield as well.
And as for this blog, I hope to keep active on it,
posting about my progress on my capstone project and exploring some of my other
science communication interests, like science misinformation and science
stories! So, I hope you, dear reader, will check in occasionally to see what I’ve
been up to.
Until next time!
Ally Talks Science
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