Before You Dive Into Arts-Based Knowledge Translation, Consider These Five Risks

It's a noisy world out there. Whatever target audience you're trying to attract to your research, you can assume they're being bombarded by an onslaught of information competing for their attention.

This unfortunate reality is true for policymakers, investors, funders, practitioners, community members, patients, clients, customers, and even colleagues from other academic disciplines.

A new client, an academic establishing a private coaching practice, recently reminded me of how tough it is in today's info-saturated world to make your message stand out?

"How do I cut through the noise?" she wanted to know.

That's the fundamental question we're all grappling with, isn't it? Although pundits have been talking about "the attention economy" since the 1990s, navigating its challenges seems to become more difficult every year. 

Correction: every month. As AI makes it easier and easier to generate content, much of it seemingly for content's sake, it becomes harder and harder to make thoughtful material stand out. 

As traditional media outlets shrink into extinction and social media takes over, the line between professional and pop-culture publication also blurs, and once-separate audiences merge onto giant platforms. There, the ambient noise reaches the level of a rock concert, and it can be heard to even hear yourself speak, let alone gain the ear of the people you want to reach. 

The Promise and Perils of Arts-Based KT

In the face of such daunting developments, more and more research teams are turning to "arts-based knowledge translation" in the hope that creative communication products will draw more attention to their findings. 

For the most part, I see this as a positive trend. For too long, KT strategies have focused solely on Plain Language, an approach that can strip down communication to the point that it becomes simple but lifeless. Much of what makes us human–humor, friendly banter to build rapport, expressions of care and concern–also makes us wordy. 

Fixating on clarity and conciseness as goals can sometimes rob knowledge products of vitality and distance the audience rather than drawing them in.

At the same time, like any trend, arts-based knowledge translation is at risk of becoming a fad. What's the difference? A fad is a trend so popular that people fall into the trap of following it with great enthusiasm but little critical thinking. Think legwarmers in the 1980s. These might have been a great idea for professional dancers, but after Flashdance became a hit movie, young women started adding them to every outfit. (Thankfully, like most fads, this fashion gaffe passed rapidly into oblivion.)

As more and more creative KT projects emerge from the research community, it's encouraging to see human qualities of heart and soul integrated into them. I also notice that some of those projects don't really have what it takes to create a deep connection with the target audience and earn their trust.

The Rhetorical Call to Balance

These compromising flaws show up on my radar because my academic training in literary criticism and rhetoric (the art of persuasion) has sensitized me to the audience's role in interpreting communication products. 

As someone who's studied the inner workings of poetry, narrative, drama, and creative nonfiction, I recognize that the meaning an audience takes from a given text doesn't necessarily align with the intent the author had in mind when they engineered the writing. What goes for written "texts" also applies to visual "texts" (e.g., infographics, paintings, diagrams) and to oral "texts" (e.g., presentations, podcasts). 

Those brave knowledge mobilizers who venture into arts-based KT tend to talk about how personally fulfilling they find it to express research through nontraditional genres and media, such as video, drama, podcasts, blog articles, poetry, and creative facilitation. But we must always remember that the aim of KT isn't personal expression but persuasion. 

Wayne Booth, one of the most influential literary scholars of the mid-twentieth century, understood how key the principle of balance is to persuasive communication. In a seminal article from 1963, he identified the "rhetorical stance" as a balancing act essential to all compelling, non-literary writing.¹

This attitude, he says, "depends on discovering and maintaining in any writing situation a proper balance among the three elements that are at work in any communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character, of the speaker."

When any one of these three elements is overemphasized, Booth argues, the resulting "perversion" of the rhetorical stance alienates the reader. 

For example, when the writer (or communicator) focuses too intently on their thoughts about the subject matter and ignores "the interests and peculiarities of the audience," the result is "the pedant's stance." Think the voice of the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons. A text focused solely on the subject matter comes across as self-involved, a toneless blah-blah droning on and on without acknowledging the audience's presence.

This imbalanced attitude is, of course, what most knowledge translation seeks to redress. But knowledge mobilizers should also be wary of falling into the second "perversion" Booth cautions against: "the entertainer's stance," which Booth describes as " the willingness to sacrifice substance to personality and charm"–or, we might add, to technology and flash.

One of the hazards of venturing into the uncharted territory of arts-based KT is that the enjoyment of working with novel genres and media can be seductive. It can be a lot of fun to master a new tool, such as an app to create stock animation or AI-enabled video editing software. Brainstorming and executing unusual projects involving drama, painting, sculpture, or creative facilitation techniques can also be rewarding in its own right. 

Without some guardrails in place to guard against self-indulgence, it's easy to fall into the trap of creating for the pleasure of creating rather than creating from Booth's balanced perspective, with the subject matter, audience interests, and self-expression held in proper proportion.

Five Risks to Avoid

I don't want to cramp anyone's creative style, but as you venture into this new zone of arts-based KT, watch out for five specific risks that could set your rhetorical stance off-kilter and cause your innovative communication products to backfire.

Risk #1: Oversimplification or distortion

Why has the research community clung for so long to the constraints of just a few communication genres, namely conference presentations and scholarly articles? Because those forms, as lacklustre as they are, have evolved to privilege accuracy and the fulsome exploration of complex ideas.

The farther you stray from the conventional boundaries of scholarly discourse, the more caution is required. Most approaches to knowledge translation represent only a part of the concepts and information conveyed through peer-reviewed presentations and publications. When you're adopting an arts-based approach, that part often becomes a sliver.

With increased selectivity comes increased responsibility for maintaining intellectual integrity. To borrow a term from the literary arts, creative KT requires metonymical thinking. 

A metonymy is a kind of metaphor in which one thing stands for another thing (idea, person, or experience) with which it's become closely associated. A common example is "the crown" standing in for the concept of the monarchy.

Engaging in arts-based KT often requires you to choose one aspect or feature of a body of research and use it to represent the whole. It's critical, then, to get clear on how the partial perspective you're providing relates to the topic as a whole so as to avoid misleading the audience. You don't want an uninformed knowledge user literally thinking that the tiara and the queen are the same thing.

Risk #2: Wonky graphs

Data visualization is a complex endeavour, but user-friendly tools, such as Canva and Visme, can trick us into thinking it's just a matter of picking a template and clicking a few buttons.

When I review presentations and infographics, one of the issues I see most frequently is the misuse of different kinds of graphs, particularly of modern-looking types, such as donut charts.

Many of the graphs that look beautiful in Canva make data hard to interpret if they're not used properly. For example, I recently saw a donut graph used to show different proportions of a population, and it displayed more than five different data categories. The number of categories made the rim of the donut thin and the individual categories hard to view in relation to the whole. In this case, an old-fashioned pie chart would have had less of a "cool factor" but communicated the data story more effectively. 

Risk #3: Inappropriate purpose

Knowledge translation happens as a process, not a singular encounter with one communication product. While various frameworks break the process down into multiple phases, I find it helpful to think in terms of three overarching stages: Engage, Educate, and Inspire.

Given its strong emotional appeal, arts-based KT offers powerful ways to engage stakeholders and to inspire them to change their mind or take action. But given how little intellectual content it typically contains, creative KT may be less useful if your goal is to educate your audience about specific concepts or data points from your research.

Artistic approaches to KT do a stellar job of answering the question every audience begins with: "Why should I care?" They also enable audiences to explore questions that challenge personal beliefs and can transform attitudes.  They're less successful at answering questions about how something works or how to apply new information in a given context.  

Risk #4: Misalignment with audience taste

"Taste" sounds like an outdated word, perhaps, but playing in the realm of creative KT means playing to your audience's artistic preferences. Be careful not to assume you know the kinds of visuals, music, and other media your audience likes. Beware of generational or gender stereotyping, for instance. Not all teenagers like hiphop; not all new moms like pastel colors.

I've been caught in this mistake myself. For instance, while helping a client brainstorm a video game design, I assumed that most of the audience would be young people. However, their audience research showed that many seniors play video games, especially the kind of learning-oriented game the KT project was aiming to build. 

Risk #5: Aesthetically weak execution

Producing creative KT can be a lot of fun. It also requires high aesthetic standards, which you may not be able to meet without help from professional collaborators.

To maximize the impact of arts-based KT, then, consider engaging freelance talent or the services of a creative agency. 

The value of partnering with someone like a professional painter or graphic artist came home to me recently when I heard one researcher describe how their team had used paintings created by an intern as part of their knowledge mobilization efforts. For the audience to experience the intended impact of the painting, the researcher had to walk through each image on the canvas, spelling out the symbolic meaning of each element (a bird, a window, a color choice, and so on). 

I've witnessed this kind of decoding in other explanations of creative KT, and it signals that the artistic execution is falling short of the vision. The main reason for engaging in creative KT is to connect with an audience at an emotional level, to find novel ways of expressing research that go beyond the limitations of rational discourse. If you need to articulate for me what a painting is meant to convey, then the art isn't really working, performing its intended role.

"Humble confidence" is the key to success

In circles where folks talk about the qualities that define a great leader, you'll often hear "humble confidence" touted as a desirable trait. Great arts-based knowledge translation requires those same, seemingly opposite, attributes, except I'd flip the order in which they're usually paired.²

To tackle creative KT like a pro, you need both self-assurance and modesty, courage and critical self-appraisal. You must be bold enough to dream big and undertake new adventures, sometimes without a map. Even so, you must also be willing to face your own limitations, or the limitations of your team, and reach out for professional help when you need it.

After all, the concept of the "lone artist" is a cultural myth. Poets need publishers, playwrights need actors, and painters need curators. Knowledge mobilizers, too, need creative collaborators to push past the boundaries of conventional research communication and discover new possibilities for transforming research into real-world outcomes.

 ¹ Booth, W. (1963). The rhetorical stance. College Composition and Communication, 14 (3), 139-45.

 ² This shouldn't really surprise us since knowledge mobilizers must actively lead their knowledge users and other stakeholders along a path of learning and transformation. If we consider, as many leadership experts do, that the essence of leadership is influence, then it is indeed apt to characterize knowledge mobilizers as knowledge leaders.