Abstract :
[en] High scored research papers are usually out of reach of the global society. The University of Liège specialised in decoding and disseminating the content of top articles to different publics and stakeholders by using unconventional innovative formats. This contribution will present ULiège last creation: a research outcome placemat for restaurants.
Research papers are highly valued among the university community since they are representative of excellence of authors. However, because of their highly technical and specialised content, they are poorly accessible to the society. Moreover, science popularization by journalists and media suffers from several drawbacks: lack of significant information, excessive simplification, overshadow of research process and researchers’ joint working.
This finding led us to develop new initiatives for disseminating the content of publications outside of the authors’ research units. The project is based on two main axes:
1) Deciphering of published articles (vocabulary, evolution of knowledge in the discipline, contribution of authors and research units, research network,…)
2) Disseminating of science
Targets are: the university community (researchers from other groups, PhDs, students), senior high schools students (15-18 years) and the large public.
Attention is paid to the creation of attractive formats for disseminating results as well as the research process. We developed comic strips, animations, quiz, mind maps,…
This contribution will focus on one of these formats: a placemat distributed in restaurants. The different steps of the creation will be detailed: choice of a significant publication, collaboration with researchers, adaptation to the target, selection of images and drawings, examples and analogies, layout, review by a non-expert panel and distribution. The critical analysis of the impact will be presented.
