Building Knowledge Together: Citizen Science, Communication, and Trust | 5 - 6 October 2026, Berlin

Building shared knowledge and trust between science and society requires communication formats that go beyond one directional and conventional knowledge dissemination formats. Particularly for complex and interconnected issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, health, agricultural, and food system resilience, citizens increasingly seek opportunities to explore evidence, question assumptions, and develop their own interpretations, thereby requiring stakeholder-oriented approaches to science communication. The Climate Museum Multitouch Table (CM) is an interactive, research based science communication interface designed to support participatory engagement for evidence-based or informed decision-making. Developed at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM), the multitouch table integrates the En ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator of the Climate Interactive and MIT-Sloan with immersive 3D visualizations, enabling diverse publics to experiment with policy levers, explore cascading impacts, and observe real time feedback on global temperature, emissions and ecosystem outcomes.
A prior study of a controlled laboratory experiment at IWM (manuscript submitted for peer review and preprint is available at https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.21634), showed that interactive climate simulations can increase curiosity, engagement, and willingness to learn, particularly by reducing cognitive barriers associated with abstract scientific information. However, their potential improvements in trust in science, agency, and public participation can only be assessed from an authentic, real world environment. This follow-up Climate Museum (CM) empirical study to be conducted from April to September, 2026 in collaboration with the Japainische Palais of the Senckenberg Naturkundemuseum Dresden, publicly deploys the multitouch table (interactive interface) to public spaces. Also to be included is an extended pop-up format in non-museum setting. These settings attract broader audiences, including individuals who rarely attend science museums or academic events, making them ideal contexts for science-society oriented communication research.
Two core goals are served by this empirical research activity, namely (1) to evaluate how diverse publics perceive their levels of risk to climate change of a systems dynamics perspective of proximal and distal events and the need for agency from the combined 3D visualized local impacts of climate risks and factual data to interpret immersive climate simulations, and (2) to examine how interactive systems dynamic tools can contribute to science-society dialogue, trust-building, and participatory knowledge generation. A mixed method data collection combines de-identified interaction logs, multiple choice questions, and qualitative prompts, for detailed analysis of how people navigate climate data, how they reason about model outputs, and how social interactions emerge around the multitouch table. These data would shed light on the conditions under which interactive visualizations support understanding, perceived relevance/risks, and willingness to act on climate-related issues. The findings would support an evidence based understanding of how interactive tools can facilitate shared meaning making around sustainability challenges.
Aligning with the theme “Building knowledge together: citizen science, communication and trust,” it conceptualizes the multitouch table dubbed “Climate Museum” as a science - society interface, where public interaction generates meaningful empirical data on how people understand systemic sustainability. Additionally, it demonstrates how interactive simulations foster dialogue rich communication by enabling visitors to co explore evidence rather than passively receive messages. Last but not the least, it provides a framework for understanding trust building mechanisms within science communication, such as transparency, exploratory freedom, open interpretation, and the co presence of peers and facilitators in public learning spaces.
As a pilot science-society dialogue of a psychological distance theory framework (Scannell & Gifford, 2013; Trope & Liberman, 2010) to evidence-based decision-making processes, we demonstrate how interactive, visually grounded interfaces can transform complex scientific modelling into socially meaningful experiences, supporting the co creation of knowledge and fostering trust between scientific institutions and diverse publics. To a lesser extent, consideration is also given to how museums as trusted cultural institutions together with informal outreach activities of a pop-up nature could function as accessible platforms for collaborative knowledge construction for informed decision-making.
By presenting empirical insights from the first wave of public deployment, our contribution offers a replicable methodological approach for stakeholder-oriented science communication within the PCST community.