sciencehorizons blog

Thanks to everyone who took part

2007-08-09T09:16:00Z

We would like to say thank you to everyone who took the time to attend sciencehorizons events, discuss the stories and send in their views.

We would also to say an even bigger thank you to all of the people who organised events whether they were in science centres, schools, community centres, pubs, churches or living rooms. We would never have been able to run so many events and involve so many people without your help.

About 3000 people have been involved in the project so there is plenty of work to do analysing and summarising people's views and feeding them back to government.

You can already see the collated results of the facilitated public events and the small group discussions by looking at the view results page.

We are now putting together the final reports of all the events and will put these on the website in September so keep checking back here to see what the main messages are.

First discussions take place

2007-02-21T16:24:00Z

Requests for sciencehorizons packs are coming in now (over 600 sent out so far), discussions are starting to take place (look at the calendar page for the larger ones), and we are pleased to say thanks to Ilkley U3A for being our first group to enter the results of their discussion online.

Magic Buttons

2007-01-29T09:37:00Z

The Guardian and the B B C both covered Thursday's launch of the Sciencehorizons project.

8 floors up at the Royal College of Art, overlooking the Albert Hall (officially the Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences), we had Science Minister Malcolm Wicks and a group of 12 RCA students using our discussion packs for the first time.

The conversation was really rich. I tried to get as many quotes as possible. The group covered organ donation ("If we know we can grow spares, how does that change how we treat our own organs"), Alzheimer's ("Does he have a say in his own treatment?"), health insurance ("Who can't have it, who can't afford it") and RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tags ("If we put all our trust in security technology, we become more fragile").

At one point, the Minister looked to the future and asked where the equivalent of the iPod would be for Alzheimer's. One of the students thoughfully replied, "I hope there isn't one. One button for one problem is dangerous." A useful reminder to resist the temptation to simplify problems involving technology.

In 2007, we want as many people as possible to join in, to get intelligence on people's hopes and fears, to help build a picture of the complexity of some of these future challenges.

sciencehorizons media launch

2007-01-23T16:05:00Z

So after a good few months of writing, drawing, rewriting, and redrawing, the sciencehorizons packs are now ready.

We are holding a launch event on Thursday 25th January with a bunch of Royal College of Art students and Science Minister Malcolm Wicks, to let people know that they can now request packs and start running their own sciencehorizons discussions.

The event is media only (we spent our champagne budget on the packs!) but hopefully you'll see and hear some coverage in the media in the coming days. We'll post some pics and links here soon.

In the meantime, here are the sciencehorizons characters getting stuck into their own discussion!