Dream Fellowship: The dynamic art of narrative for infrastructure policy

We live in a connected world. For instance, it is not sufficient to consider a model for our transport systems separated from discussions on energy, overall emissions, economic considerations and indeed from the people that might use it. This means that our decision-makers have an extraordinary challenge to agree on designs for components of critical infrastructure, even if they themselves are of the highest scientific calibre. Additionally, the general public demand more and more transparency of decisions. To meet this demand, engineers and scientists have to frame their ideas so that politicians, business-leaders and the general public can understand the motives and solutions to any problem. There are thus two interlinked areas to consider from a systems point of view: the science of policy-making and the process of policy-making. Policy-making cannot be separated from 'people'. Without a proper assessment of the effect on people, including the policy-maker themselves, predictions from models will often fail to be taken up despite being apparently quite sensible. In many cases whether a particular strategy is taken up or not will depend upon final discussions that may come down to a simple narrative description. Provide the 'right' narrative and the rest will fall into place. The overall aim of this proposal is to creatively stimulate the use of language, art, and social behaviour to engineer the use of science in policy-making.

The aim of this proposal is to support new mechanisms for science-based policy making and therefore the whole community will benefit. On the one hand, I aim to bring together different sections of the scientific community in order that we can produce comprehensive models of the interaction of the various systems that come together to create the interactions that we see in our globally connected world. While on the other hand, I aim to see how these comprehensive models can be made comprehensible to policy makers and the general public via new methods of verbal and visual narrative description. Therefore this project will have a positive impact on all policy makers concerned with global policies.

The target audience will be policy makers in civil authorities but some emphasis will also be placed on how similar methods can be used to enhance long term, sustainable strategic decisions made by business and therefore there will be value added knock on effects for the UK business community.