Welcome to the first post in my blog series about the Sparks project! You can see all the posts by viewing the Sparks category.
Sparks is a 3-year project about RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation). The idea behind RRI is that scientific researchers have a responsibility towards society, and that society (and ‘ordinary’ people) also have a responsibility to get involved in deciding the directions that research should take, as well as providing their own resources such as knowledge, effort and information.
So the main aim of Sparks is to raise awareness among European citizens that they can get involved with scientific research too, they don’t need to be scientists to do it!
The tagline for Sparks is “Beyond the Lab: the DIY Science Revolution”, because it’s mostly about ‘ordinary’ people doing science outside the traditional setting of an industrial laboratory.
There are two facets to the project. The first is a touring exhibition, or rather 4 identical exhibitions, which are travelling around Europe, visiting 28 host countries and spending two months at a time in each location. The second facet is the activities that are organised in that location during the exhibition visit, to have more engagement by members of the public.
At the moment, one of the exhibitions is installed in Esplora and will be there until the end of August, and there are indeed some activities such as these Science Espresso events where you have the opportunity to engage with scientists and give them your input.
I spent some time browsing the exhibition and I very much enjoyed learning about the featured projects.
The exhibition is divided into 4 sections; three themes plus an art installation. The themes are “DIY Biologists”, “Health Hackers”, and “Citizen Scientists”, and guess what, you could be a biologist/hacker/scientist too!
I left the exhibition feeling encouraged and inspired to be a citizen scientist.
Here’s a list of citizen science projects in Malta that you can join in with (or, hey, start your own!).