Risk Resonance

Risk Resonance is an innovative public engagement programme that aims to bring risk researchers and experts together with local communities and members of the public most affected by particular risks to explore the boundaries between public perception of risk and expert views of risk, increase public involvement in risk research, build stronger relationships between risk experts and the public, and provide unique new insights that will help improve risk communication and ultimately make people healthier, happier, and safer.

The project is a collaboration between IPUR and the Behavioural and Implementation Science Interventions Group at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at NUS. 

We want to better understand how new and creative approaches to public engagement can help increase resilience and “risk know-how” amongst the public. The Risk Resonance programme will attempt to understand how art can be used to achieve these outcomes by working with art students and leading artists to explore an area of risk – for example flooding, a pandemic, tsunami, climate change, artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, obesity, ageing populations.

Through the artworks we will investigate the space between expert knowledge and public perception or feelings about a particular risk. To inform the artist’s work, we will bring together a group of risk experts, local community representatives, and members of the public over a period of around 6-12 months to facilitate conversations about the risk area. This group will come together regularly and get to know each other’s views, experiences, and ideas, and have conversations around the risk topic. Once it is completed, the artwork will be exhibited in a public space to further study how a public dialogue with the artwork itself can change perceptions of an area of risk. All these interactions will be captured so we can better understand and learn from them as well as evaluate the how effective this method of public engagement is in improving the public understanding of risk.

We hope to carry out Risk Resonance projects on a wide variety of risk areas across multiple countries across the Southeast Asia region.