Taking Science to Festivals: Engaging the Public Where They Least Expect It

Over the past several years, a team based around the ATLAS Experiment at CERN in Geneva has organised public engagement and education activities, not only at events with an explicit science mandate, such as the Bluedot Festival (at Jodrell Bank, UK), but also at a variety of non-scientific venues. These have included the Montreux Jazz Festival (Montreux, Switzerland), the WOMAD Festival (Charlton Park, UK), Moogfest (Durham, NC, USA), and the Sofia Music Weeks in Bulgaria, with discussions on-going with a major European music festival as well as a festival in the United States. The goal of this effort is to engage new audiences that normally would not be drawn to science events and to investigate our ability to communicate scientific messages to broad, diverse audiences. The results have been impressive, as measured through attendance (for example: the first Physics Pavilion at WOMAD received 4500 visitors over 3 days and over 5500 in 2017), and enthusiasm of the audience and the scientists hosting the activities. We describe the presentation material and format, the hands-on workshops, and other methods employed, as well as lessons learned on how to best optimise audience engagement. The concept can be reproduced for other festival-type environments, and adapted to suit the particular audience demographic and format of the festival.