Practicing Digital Science Communication as Accompanying Research Project: Benefits and Limitations for Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Participation

In recent years, publicly funded research and developmentprojects in Germany have increasingly adopted sciencecommunication (SC) as an integral and often mandatorycomponent of research funding programs. While SC enhancespublic understanding, trust, and visibility of science, italso demands interdisciplinary collaboration, combiningscientific, technical, design, and journalistic expertise.Beyond their public impact, SC practices hold internalvalue for interdisciplinary research teams by revealing thecollaborative and reflexive processes behind knowledgeproduction. In this article, we conceptualize SC mediadevelopment as a situated collaborative practice, based oninsights from our accompanying research project within alarge-scale funded program on participatory technologydevelopment. The program’s interdisciplinary anddistributed structure required intensive communicationacross project consortia, positioning SC as a key mechanismfor knowledge negotiation, mediation, and reflection, notonly between research and the public but also withininterdisciplinary projects. We discuss the benefits,limitations, and resource implications of participatory SCin such contexts.