When we first envisioned our first co-creation we never thought it would be like this.
Our objective with the first co-creation was to translate the scientific, convoluted science behind Genigma. It was a challenge also for us. How could we compress such a message in a few minutes, translate it to images & concepts, distribute it to 30 people, so that they could think about it, and give it back to us as new digested ideas?

Purportedly we selected a scientific-related audience, but which 90% of them were working outside the academic/research world. This gives us an invaluable opportunity to understand how we are transmitting our message and how they are receiving it. We scientists most of the time we are “immersed” in our science world and seldom realize the gap between us and the general public, which would make difficult our communication

A crucial catalyst for this to go smoothly was the team of Jocs Al Segon. Oriol, Marta and Adrià, drove the session organizing the activities and always looking forward to make it in a dynamic and motivating way from minute one. So, they set up participants in teams for the whole day and once they understood the scientific message we delivered, then they proposed metaphors to make the message more appealing, visual and simple.

Note, for example, the metaphor of a box with wool balls. This would represent the DNA packed in several territories, ordered and organized within the nucleus. When one of the wool ball is misplaced, the entire structure, organization and functioning of the system is altered, as what happens in cancer. Another nice metaphor would be the “castellers”…

Lots of metaphors we had never thought of before popped up. This feedback also helps to increase our chances of involving lots of people to contribute to Genigma and generate a more eye-catching message, game developing, and so on…

So, once we have the “digested” the output from co-creation 1, is time to move to co-creation 2, where we will focus on a specific public… But more details to come on the next blog entry…

Juan