Deepen and consolidate the science and society dialogue for diverse audiences – DIALOGUER4

The Dialoguer 4 project aims to support researchers in the scientific mediation of their projects towards the general public and school audiences.

It follows on from three previous scientific mediation projects funded by the ANR, whose objectives were to develop meetings between middle school students and researchers, public lectures, and innovative video formats while training research teams in scientific mediation.

Dialoguer 4 consolidates these actions by developing a personalized support protocol tailored to the needs and desires of the laboratories. Our goal is then to enhance the skills of researchers in scientific mediation and to promote exchanges and innovation through meetings between project leaders and creative design methods such as hackathons.
To address the various issues of research team availability and the variety of topics covered, Dialoguer 4 offers a variety of actions towards the general public. "Middle school student-researcher meetings" and lectures continue to be popular with both laboratories and our various audiences and provide an interesting entry point into scientific mediation. We aim to use this project to deepen these already-known formats towards new audiences who are distant from science discovery activities due to social, geographical, or medical reasons. In partnership with local associations, we will notably experiment with formats adapted to audiences with sensory impairments.

Finally, Dialoguer 4 addresses two innovative formats for the valorization and scientific mediation by creating short and vertical videos to present identified projects and experimenting with the creation of small video games based on laboratory research topics. The purpose of video shooting is to create accessible and flexible mediation and communication tools, easy to use for laboratories and reusable in exhibition contexts or demonstration stands. These short formats also correspond to the habits of younger generations, introduced notably by social networks. The creation of video games, on the other hand, corresponds to a playful approach to scientific content, promoting engagement and curiosity among audiences. The ability of video game media to concretize the abstract and popularize scientific concepts appears to us as an interesting asset for addressing new audiences.

Listening to the needs of the laboratories, Dialoguer 4 combines formats that have already proven themselves and experiments with new playful approaches to develop the science-society dialogue towards new audiences distant from scientific content.