Hello ASCers,

We’re excited for our first SCOPE newsletter as co-presidents! Jirana and I are grateful for the membership’s support in electing us into this role and are really keen to contribute back to the community at a national level.

We hope that you all found the recent symposium valuable. Personally, we both were inspired and impressed by the stories on the presenters’ research, practice and creativity. A huge thank you to the co-convenors who put together the program under Lisa’s direction.

We’d also like to formally thank Lisa who has led the ASC nationally over the last three years. Her contribution has provided the ASC resilience and much-needed stability during a very difficult time. Jirana and I are indebted to her for giving us a much easier starting point for our tenure as co-presidents. Thank you.

Looking toward 2022, the new executive will start regular meetings in late January or early February. Jirana and I are both very keen to capture ideas to develop the strategic direction for the association in a consultative manner. Get your thinking caps on over the break. We will be seeking input from the membership early in the new year.

All the best wishes over the new year period, and good luck with your communications,

Tom & Jirana

ASC’s online symposium this year had a Art and Design stream curated by David Harris and Jo Bailey and convened by David Harris.

The last session of the day (before David hosted ‘science cocktails’, which in a face-to-face situation may well have become their own ‘session’!) was titled ‘Mirofestos’: crowdsourcing ideas from highly-opinionated people. This online workshop used the digital whiteboard tool Miro. This platform is one that design lecturers (which David and Jo both are in their day jobs) have become accustomed to using to bring some of the activities of design studio culture (whiteboarding, critique, provocation/response, capturing visual iteration) online during pandemic ‘zoom teaching’. David and Jo felt that there was an opportunity to deploy this medium as a science communication tool for invested audiences, and wanted to see how it was taken up in the context of an online conference with very little ‘onboarding’ – just jump on and go! 

We used as a prompt a presentation that David gave at ASC2018 (when we were face-to-face in Sydney): his Against the Deficit Model: a Manifesto for Science Communication.

Download a PDF of the 2018 manifesto

The Against the Deficit Model manifesto, © David Harris, giffed by Jo Bailey

This was a deliberately provocative stance on some foundational issues for science communication. David stated:

You will get angry at some of these statements.
That’s ok. But I want you to think about why you are inflamed.
Is it because I’m wrong? Or is it because I’m right?

So what better way to channel that passion than via virtual post-it flame-wars and emoji-battles?!

What did we learn? Engagement was high, and activity was frenetic, as this fast-forward of the Zoom call screenshare shows:

The contributions were on the whole good natured banter even where the topics were on the contentious side. Amongst the scribbles and one-liners was some deep thinking and more expansive and reflexive commentary. We’ve not pulled out themes from the content yet, but it is available for you to browse: Check out the Miro board here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_ljLDIHg=/?invite_link_id=698639598886 

 One of the crowdsourced additional Miro frames on the things scicomm needs more and less of