Well, what a week that was! From 18^th to 26^th September, the Ensemble team ran a festival of arts, science, technology and nature (https://ensembleprojects.org/entangled/). This was very much a culmination of my senior fellowship, looking at the role of digital technology in understanding and managing the natural environment, and drawing on the large body of research we have worked on collectively over the past five years (https://ensembleprojects.org). The festival also built on the insights we have gained around the role of arts and creativity in not just conveying often complex scientific concepts and messages, but also enabling deeper engagement with a range of audiences including the general public, children and those responsible for decision-making in the crucial area of environmental change.

The festival was particularly inspired by the final year of the project when we have been focussing on the complexity of ecosystems and the need for more systems thinking in tackling such complexities – hence the name ‘Entangled’ (in previous years we had worked on on flooding, biodiversity and soils). Too often, we focus on deepening our understanding of the science we know and are comfortable with and that fits with our disciplinary silos; perhaps we need a new science that focuses on what we do not know, the feedbacks and complex interactions between processes – a science that demands transdisciplinary collaboration and which we in Ensemble firmly believe needs the support of new (digital) tools to enable and support this new kind of science.

Entangled by name entangled by nature – the festival was a ‘smorgastbord’ of offerings drawing from the wide range of themes we have worked on during the five years of Ensemble. Our research experience was captured in our: ‘conversations’ (featuring some of the great people we have met and worked with over the project, in the format of chat shows); ‘inspirations’ (our ‘thoughts for the day’ by inspirational people that again we have worked with, intended to stimulate debate throughout the week); and ‘threads’ (capuring the entangled journeys and golden threads from the perspectives of different team members). We had a wide range of educational activities targetting members of the public and seeking to promote a message of transdisciplinarity and the excitement of science within our schools, such as the Biodiversity Logbooks activities. The festival also featured a range of artistic events, including 5 commissioned works of art drawing on core themes that we had extracted from our work. This was a particular favourite part of the festival and it was a real honour to work so closely with our selected artists and to experience and contribute to (in a small way) their creative processes. Do seek them out!

Because of COVID, we made an early decision to go with a festival that was mainly online with some outdoor elements. At first, we were disappointed to make this decision, having been looking forward to welcoming people to a range of public, face-to-face events. In retrospect, this proved to be a very good decision, partly because COVID cases remained stubbornly high during the time of the festival but mainly because of the added benefits of doing things online. I remember our steering committee challenging us to think about our legacy at the last meeting – and what a legacy this turned out to be with us having a permanent record of all the events during the week (even our outdoor events were captured in digital format for posterity). This also extended the reach of the festival with participants joining from alll over the world. Since the festival ended, we have been looking at the reach and impact as measured by online engagement and the numbers of impressive: visits to our website increased from an average of 65 a week to over 850 during the period of the festival; we had 7,382 visits to our twitter profile over the month – an increase of 88%; our top inspirations podcast (by Dr. Lucy Bastin) has 162 views, the arts commission by Sarah Smout has had over 500 views to date, and our online events all had healthy audiences – typically 30-40 people; in our schools work, we engaged with 5 schools across at least 8 classes involving approximately 190 children; finally, we engaged with 577 individuals at our hub, which was located on Morecambe prom during the 2 weekends of the festival. This is far greater reach than traditional ways of communicating research – way beyond the reach of research papers and impacting on far more diverse audiences.

This was an inspiring week for all of us involved in the festival and there is no doubting the source of this inspiration – the wonders of the natural environment and the entanglements between the changing climate, our precious soils, our water systems and the richness of biodiversity for example. Nature is awe inspiring but fragile and a further core message of the festival is we all can and should do all we can to protect our natural environment, whether we are computer scientists or chemists, artists or data analysts, or whether we are young of age or meerly young of heart. We all have a part to play. The festival also left me feeling humbled – humbled by the incredible efforts of all who contributed, from the core Ensemble team to the wonderful web of entangled contacts we have made over the five year journey. A massive thank you to you all! A particular thanks to Claire Dean and Liz Edwards who both contributed so much to the vision and the delivery of this incredible event… you both deserve a good period of rest after all your exertions.

To conclude this short piece, I turn to the word of Donella Meadows from her wonderful book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”[1], a book that the Ensemble team drew inspiration from throughout our work on ecosystems:

“Everything, as they say, is connected to everything else, and not neatly. There is no clearly determinable boundary between the sea and the land, between sociology and anthropology, between an automobile’s exhaust and your nose. There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement—artificial, mental-model boundaries. The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries.”

Everything is entangled – let’s focus so much more on these boundaries!

Prof. Gordon Blair

EPSRC Senior Fellow in Digital Technology and Living with Environmental Change and Co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Data Science (CEEDS)

21st October, 2021

[1] Donella H. Meadows, “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, Edited by Diana Wright, Earthscan, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-84407-726-7

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