WHERE should it take place?
Choose a venue with a welcoming entrance, appropriate to the topic, and suitable to the target group you want to address. Scientists, experts, and the public should be able to move and talk freely.
Experience has shown that coffee shops, bookstores, bars, botanic gardens, museums, zoos, community centres or even outdoor public spaces and natural habitats provide perfect conditions to run science cafés. Exceptional venues and places, which are not always accessible, contribute to the fact that the science café is something special.
To establish a tradition with people meeting at a particular place such as a visitor center, pub or café it is recommended to stick to a given weekday, time, and week intervals in which the science café takes place.
The venue (design of the room, media equipment, etc.) will inform how to design the setting. It will have an influence on whether small group discussions or lecture formats with larger groups are more appropriate. According to these characteristics, you will position your invited experts in the front, in the middle of a circle or at any other place. Thus, the course is set for how the interaction between participants can and will take place.
The activities and topics you choose to engage participants (WHAT) need to be selected and facilitated keeping the characteristics of the venue in mind (e.g. you may not be able to bring along your own food and drinks if you run your science café in a bar or restaurant).
A few examples for places to go:
Museumsdorf Düppel, the workshop took place in the the open-air area; the discussion in the museum café, where the guests could get food and drinks; Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum, Freie Universität Berlin
A science café for kids in the Biblo, a nearby library specialized for children, Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway
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This project has received funding from the European Union´s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 710780.