Spark ideas, inspire change and fuel innovation - sharing research creatively

Posted by Ella Anderson, Fuse Public Involvement and Engagement Manager, Newcastle University

Have you ever wondered how to share your research in a way that engages with new and diverse audiences? Are there ways to share your work in a way that reaches the people it was designed to serve? If the answer is yes, then read on!

Research can spark ideas, inspire change and fuel innovation but all too often it gets buried in academic journals and dense reports that few people read, particularly the communities the research intends to serve. So what if there were more engaging, creative and accessible ways to share your findings? From interactive infographics and animations, to events, theatre and podcasts, Fuse researchers are re-imagining how to communicate their work with wider audiences.

Whether you are looking to captivate the public, influence policy makers or engage fellow experts, this post explores some creative ideas to make your research truly resonate.

• In the first instance, reach out to any people who you have worked with as part of your research including public partners, young people, charities and voluntary organisations. What would they like to see? Actively liaise with and listen to the communities your research is intending to serve - how do they want findings presented?

• Infographics and visual summaries can be a useful way to transform your findings into a simplified visual. Infographics are a graphic representation of information, data or knowledge to present complex content quickly and clearly. Emma Adams has worked with More than Minutes to summarise research about co-located services in a visual and accessible way. Steph Scott worked with Nifty Fox - specialists in visual storytelling - to produce a flipbook drawing on content from the ‘Divided Households’ report relating to children and parental imprisonment. Fuse Deputy Director Amelia Lake, Shelia Visram and team co-produced the Hyper Energy drink leaflet with young people to communicate key findings. Or what about a zine (DIY-style booklet or magazine) like this, ‘Moving Spaces’, co-produced by Caroline Dodd-Reynolds with LGBTQIA+ young people, exploring how physical activity spaces could be more joyful and safe.

• Short engaging videos, animations or explainers can be a great way to summarise research and impact. Using personal case studies or testimonials can make content more relatable to different audiences. For example, AskFuse (our research & evaluation service) collaborated with Newcastle Gateshead Clinical Commissioning Group to produce this video: How a 'Little Orange Book' is giving expert advice to help poorly kids.

• Theatre and performance is an exciting way of communicating research. For example, Cap-A-Pie and researchers including Mandy Cheetham were involved in developing an emotive theatre production called Credit, based on stories and experiences of people living on Universal Credit.

 

• Creative and engaging community events and workshops (with catering if you have budget!) are always a popular option. The more interactive, accessible and collaborative the better. Use the opportunity to close any feedback loops with people, charities, organisations who you have engaged with throughout the research. Show how you listened, what you found out, how findings are applicable to people's lives and work, and what happens next... keeping people in the loop is so important. Be sure to include opportunities for plain language Q&As and conversations, both informal (through breaks) and formal (via panel discussions). At one of Fuse’s International Women’s Day events, there was an optional gong bath for people attending the event. Although a sound bath may not have been directly linked to the research, the event was about creating a welcoming, inclusive and ‘safe space’ for people to come together.

• If you have the budget, consider having an event doodled in real-time. We have had colleagues who have worked with Camille Aubry, Josie Brookes and Nifty Fox who offer this skill. Get in touch with us if you would like any other recommendations when sourcing quotes.

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  Have you thought about gamification of research findings or using interactive digital tools? You can create interactive quizzes or clickable maps to allow people to explore findings in an engaging way, applying insights to local contexts. Simulation tools allow public partners and individuals to visualise the impact of different public health interventions based on research findings. Take a look at Joanne McGrath's online Maze, which provided an interactive resource portraying women’s narratives of multiple exclusion, homelessness and accessing support.

• Storytelling has long been a way to share information. Case studies lend themselves well to this, as human-centric narratives show the research in action. It can demonstrate how a specific person or community has benefitted or will benefit from the findings. Stories are a different way to 'humanise' data or translate findings in a way that is appropriate for the intended audience. For example, Cassey Muir and Ruth McGovern’s co-produced Twinkle Twinkle Arti children’s story book communicated messages about parental substance use in a gentle, age-appropriate manner. The book is available as a physical copy, an electronic copy and also has been made into a CBeebies style story time video.

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  Are there any opportunities for the use of creative methods throughout the project that you could bring together as part of an exhibition in a public space e.g. library, community centre, schools? Documenting the research and experience through photography, crafts or art can be a creative way of capturing interest and making research more understandable. Sarah Martin-Denham’s crochet blanket made up of 2,999 squares representing the number of children excluded every day from schools in England (2021/22 academic year) is a great example of this, and has been on a national tour engaging with 24 organisations - including the Children’s Commissioner Office and multiple councils.
  

• You can share bite-sized research or findings through social media channels using visuals, animations, short videos - or even livestreaming to provide information and engage with people in real-time. Have a hashtag at the ready to encourage people to join the conversation and share perspectives. In a similar vein, there are opportunities to share research and knowledge via 'Ask Me Anything' style forums, for example as seen on Reddit. Yes, this is low cost but it comes with risks as questions are unpredictable! However, it is worth flagging as an option and is a creative, ‘non-traditional’ way to share research and answer questions.

• Blogs, like the award-winning one you are reading right now, are a great way to share your research. Posts can make complex information more accessible to a wider audience. It allows you to present findings in a clear, engaging and informal style, reaching readers outside of academic circles, including policy makers, practitioners and the wider public. For guidance and support in writing your own blog post, contact Fuse Communications Manager, Mark Welford: m.welford@tees.ac.uk.

• Could you take your research findings to places in the local community? Fuse colleagues Balbir Singh (Artistic Director of the Balbir Singh Dance Company) and Paul Chazot displayed art works from their Unmasking Pain project in pop-up displays in GP surgeries and a repurposed shop in a shopping centre. There is now a dedicated space at the Grainger Market, Newcastle-upon-Tyne called the Being Well Place, which is a place to connect and engage with the local community.

• Do you have the option of translating materials/outputs for different audiences, and communities with diverse language needs? Translated summaries and visuals e.g. in multiple languages, work well and ensure inclusivity in dissemination. For example, Nicola Heslehurst worked with local designer, Twentyseven Design to develop English and Welsh infographics relating to pregnancy outcomes.

• And finally what kind of Fuse Public Involvement and Engagement Manager would I be if I wasn’t promoting the wonderful and award-winning public partner-led podcast Public Health Research and Me?! Accessible, informative, flexible and friendly - this is a great way to share quality research with a diverse and international audience. 

There are many more creative ways to share research and remember - there is a no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to sharing your findings. Always take into account your research topic, your findings and above all your target audience.

Why not send us a message today if you have used a creative or innovative way to share your research or findings? We would love to hear from you and find out more ways to promote and share high quality research.

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Following strong interest from Fuse members, we have launched a Community of Practice (CoP) focused on creative research, involvement and dissemination.

The first meeting will take place in the New Year. Places are limited for the first event but please register or get in touch (info@fuse.ac.uk), as there will be plenty more opportunities in future!

A CoP is a network of people who share common interests and goals, creating a space for knowledge exchange, learning, and mutual support.

Going hybrid: The best of both worlds?

Posted by Helen Moore, Associate Professor (Research), Teesside University

Since 2012 my ability to attend in-person and participate in seminars, conferences and workshops has been significantly reduced. This was partially due to a change in my mobility while I was pregnant with twins twice (!) (2012, 2015), and then after my pregnancies, due to the challenges of arranging childcare for four small children. It has become easier as they have got older, but after my second maternity leave, I returned to work but remained the primary carer for four children under the age of four as their father (my husband), was (and still is) a Merchant Navy captain, which involves working away for half of every year.

Make an enquiry about getting professional technical help as soon as you conceive the idea
 – don’t assume it will be prohibitively expensive

During this time, I had always felt very grateful to any event organiser who took the time to release the slides after their events or, as time progressed and technology moved on, to run an additional online version as this enabled me to participate, albeit in a less than perfect fashion, but I viewed it as certainly being better than nothing. I hadn’t really appreciated how many other people were also often unable to attend events in-person, due to other factors in their lives, but this was brought into sharper focus for me with the Covid-19 pandemic when I started reading, and joining in with, conversations on social media around event accessibility that had never been on my radar.

I’m sure everyone remembers that when lockdowns were imposed, initially events were completely cancelled but as time progressed and it became clear this was not going to be a ‘flash in the pan’, the planning stages of events began to include considerations of how best to run them entirely online, with many people having to rapidly learn and develop skills around using technology to engage with the maximum number of participants possible.

Between January-April 2021, I was part of a team that worked on a project commissioned by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) which looked at the impact of Covid-19 on the hot food takeaway planning regulatory environment in North East England. As the project drew to a close the team thought that this, alongside other work we had been involved in, or were aware of, would make an excellent Fuse Research Event, and my colleague Professor Amelia Lake and I decided we would work together to make it happen.

I was keen to explore the possibilities of having a, in my view, truly hybrid event, where participants could choose to attend in person or via a real time remote video stream, and where presenters could choose to be in the room or present via a MS Teams link. I had previously worked with the team from Teesside University’s Aurora House on other projects, and Amelia had worked with them to create the live stream of her inaugural professorial lecture, so we were confident that they possessed the skills, the technology and the will to ensure this could happen.

It took a lot of organisation to get this to work, and having organised many events pre-Covid, it was definitely more work than if we had decided to run a traditional event with in-person attendance only. I spent significant amounts of time thinking about how we could include the remote audience and presenters in the discussion in the most effective way. The entire event was live streamed on the Fuse YouTube channel, with a technician ensuring that the virtual audience saw a mix of angles and information during the session. We used sli.do to allow the remote audience to submit questions during each presentation, and then one of the organising team asked the questions using the same microphone that was used for questions from the room so everyone could hear.

 

We only had one minor hiccup, in that we used my personal Teams account to allow the external speakers to present, and I forgot to decline meetings that were scheduled to run at the same time – and, of course, the other meeting used the chat function, which meant everyone could read their messages! We managed to get a message to the other meeting and they quickly stopped using the chat function!

As usual, we asked for feedback on the event, and the comments were extremely positive, including the fact it was hybrid, with “Ability to attend online”, mentioned in more than one response.

I would absolutely encourage people to think about making the effort to run hybrid events. it widens your audience and opens up different avenues for discussion – posing a question via an online function is, for most people, less scary than standing up and speaking into a microphone! 

My top tips for running a hybrid event

While I was writing this blog, I thought about what my top five tips would be for anyone considering running a hybrid event in the future:

1. Make an enquiry about getting professional technical help as soon as you conceive the idea – don’t assume it will be prohibitively expensive;
2. Ensure you communicate with the presenters and attendees, before and during the event, about how they can interact and engage during the event;
3. Use interactive apps such as sli.do.
4. Avoid using personal accounts for external events, such as Teams or Zoom (or make sure to decline any other meetings scheduled at the same time!)
5. Always ask for feedback to improve future events.

Cancer and the simple pleasure of a good cuppa

Posted by Duika Burges Watson, Lecturer, Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University

Thousands of people will today enjoy catching up over cake and a cuppa for the World's Biggest Coffee Morning, Macmillan Cancer Support's biggest fundraising event. But what if after cancer that cuppa and cake don’t taste right?

“When I had been through the treatment and was supposedly ‘cured’, I had hoped a cup of tea would do what it had always done and give me pleasure. But it didn’t, the tea had a textural product in it so I could swallow it. It wasn’t tea anymore, I felt miserable with it”

So said one of the head and neck cancer survivors who participated in our NIHR Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) funded study, ‘Resources for Living’. Living beyond the life-saving treatment for cancer, all participants in our study had on-going difficulties with food and eating. It’s not the same for everyone, some people return to normal eating, but for those that live long-term with ‘altered eating’ and the unique difficulties they have, it can be miserable.

Since we formed the Altered Eating Research Network at Newcastle University following the end of the study, we’ve come to appreciate just how widespread the problem is of altered eating. Far from limited to cancer survivorship, we have a long list (and one that grows with each successive public engagement event) of conditions and experiences that may result in altered eating. We define ‘altered eating’ as a changed state of any combination of physical, emotional and social interactions with food and eating that has a negative impact on health and wellbeing. It’s a deliberately broad definition that we’ve found useful in charting a new approach to addressing it.

And on public engagement. We are very lucky to have Sam Storey, BBC Food and Farming ‘cook of the year’ finalist, 2018, as one of our team members. His passion for food notwithstanding, Sam has a unique empathy for those that have lost enjoyment in food and a remarkable skill at finding ways to bring that pleasure back. If there was a headline for our research and events it would be that ‘pleasure matters’. With increasing evidence[1] from the neurological sciences, and the advent of a research focus on ‘hedonia’(pleasure) and eudaimonia (satisfaction) in human wellbeing (e.g. the Journal of Happiness Studies) it appears there is a very real reason for the importance of pleasure to wellbeing. Combined with the feedback we get from events and research, we are ploughing ahead with a whole range of ideas of how we can help those that experience a loss of pleasure and find eating a burden.

Over the summer we ran two very successful events in collaboration with the Whitley Bay Film Festival. Two chocolate themed events - a ‘smell-along’ experience of the Spanish movie Like Water for Chocolate, and an ‘eat-along’ experience of Chocolat. They were for general audiences, but at each we introduced the films with information about the research we are doing with Altered Eating. Both events were sell-outs and great successes. You can read a blog about one person’s experience of the first event here. But as with the other events we’ve held in the last year or so (flavour masterclasses for example) we invariably discover something new, meet someone who is affected and distressed by altered eating difficulties.

Cook Sam Storey and Dr Duika Burges Watson: raining chocolate for the film festival

Our first serving during Chocolat was the most delicious hot chocolate timed perfectly to coincide with the moment Vianne Rocher (Juliette Binoche), an expert chocolatier, opens her shop in a conservative and austere rural French village. At 24 minutes in she serves hot chocolate, prepared with a ‘special kind of chilli pepper’, to the disbelieving Armande (Judi Dench), her elderly, eccentric landlady. With the first sniff and taste, Armande is emotionally transformed from bitterness to joy. For most of the movie-goers, the hot chocolate Sam had prepared was indeed a joyful experience. However, in presenting it to one person they told me “no thank you, I don’t like chocolate”. At first, I was perplexed, why pay for a chocolate eat along film if you don’t like chocolate? But then, in our research we’ve experienced this before, participants who didn’t want to participate in ‘eating’ at food play events (or not at first anyway). A reminder that food is more than about eating and that the commensal experience of being together with others matters too.

But chocolate is a little unique in terms of eating pleasures. As Professor Barry Smith, a member of the AE Network and expert in the sensory and hedonic elements of food notes, chocolate is for most, a hugely pleasurable experience that is both about flavour and texture, “the pleasure of anticipation and the reward in eating it match up. The aroma and the taste are the same. And that matters because there are two sorts of pleasure ivolved. When you start eating it, turn it around in your mouth to get the melting quality which strokes the tongue. Receptors in the tongue then respond to this stroking and it's a different feeling from touch. That's why we love a velvety wine or double cream - it's the feeling on our tongues”.

Ah yes, no wonder the tea didn’t ‘taste’ right.


Reference:

1. Kringelbach, M.L., 2015. The pleasure of food: underlying brain mechanisms of eating and other pleasures. Flavour, 4(1), p.20.