As we close the chapter of 2024, we can’t help but feel immense gratitude and pride for everything this year has brought us. This year, we moved into an amazing new office, where our team has been growing faster than ever. From new talent and expertise joining us, to adding an adorable office pet, the energy here is unstoppable.

2024 also marked a decade of Scienseed! Our 10-year anniversary party was a beautiful celebration of the journey we’ve taken together—from the early days to the powerhouse team of 25 we are today. Together, we’ve clocked an impressive 1,4 MILLION minutes communicating science. Numbers don’t lie—this has been our most productive and successful year yet, with a record in project sales to prove it.

But it hasn’t all been about work. We’ve shared laughs, tea, and sunshine in our new garden, and taken much-needed breaks to pet our office cat, ensuring we keep that creative spark alive.

As we look ahead to 2025, we carry the momentum of this incredible year with us. Here’s to more growth, more science, and more moments that make this journey so special. Thank you to everyone—past and present—who has made Scienseed what it is. Let’s make 2025 unforgettable!

At Scienseed we pride ourselves on always trying to push things a step further. We’ve worked with a broad range of formats and projects of all shapes but always keeping one thing in mind: purpose. We feel incredibly fortunate to be able to work on projects that drive real change, typically rooted in sustainability and addressing pressing global challenges.

We’ve worked on projects that aimed at raising awareness on the extinction of migratory bird species, like in “The last tweet”, or BERN’s “Not alone” campaign attempting to bring biodiversity back to our cities. Through these initiatives, we’ve become increasingly aware of the environmental challenges facing our world. Today, we’d like to highlight a project that has deepened our understanding of climate action while inspiring us to innovate in new and creative ways.

The Centre per a la Sostenibilitat Territorial approached us with an exciting mission: to help communicate the EUDEMON project, which focuses on resolving and preventing conflicts around environmental and social issues, particularly related to energy. Complex, but boy, do we love a good challenge. “How about a card game?” – we said.

We had previously developed a few other games, such as one for Bioroboost, which aimed to illustrate the concept of standardisation in synthetic biology and explain the structure of genes and DNA modules; or Rafts! The game for the Rafts4Biotech project. The lesson that struck the most? Card games closely reflect on real-life experiences. With this in mind, we started to design a game that could help teach mediators the project’s protocol.

While board games often spark conflict rather than resolve it, we saw this as a creative and engaging way to convey the project’s purpose. So, we eagerly got to work, turning that idea into reality.

EUDEMON is all about teamwork. Everyone brings their own unique skills to the table, whether technical or personal. So, we wanted the game to be about collaboration rather than competition. Each player takes on a role defined by a “Resources” card, which highlights their strengths and personal qualities. These “Resources” cards let players use “Action” cards to involve the “Stakeholders” in meaningful dialogue throughout the process.

The game’s goal is to keep stakeholders engaged in dialogue while using “Dialogue Attributes” cards that unlock with player actions, defining their interventions. However, players also face “Challenge” cards that present obstacles to overcome. Eventually, points are awarded at the end to assess whether players successfully applied the EUDEMON protocol or fell short.

In close collaboration with the EUDEMON team, we’ve worked together to craft an impactful and science-based experience, much like board games, to bring people together for a shared purpose.

We can only look forward to creating more and more games and experiences with science and climate action at their heart. Check out the recent coverage of EUDEMON’s card game in actions by Panorama Comunidad.

Engaging youth in a digital immersive journey to discover the power of enzymes in sustainable manufacturing.

Every generation has had its challenges. Boomers dealt with the aftermath of World War II, Gen X witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and Millennials suffered the economic recession. Now, Gen Zs are up against something bigger. Not just a human threat, but a desperate “call for help” from our planet itself: The environmental crisis.

Unlike wars or political conflicts, this isn’t just about us. It’s about our ecosystem fighting back against centuries of damage, especially because of pollution. And it’s our fault. So, tackling it requires a joint effort to rethink how we live, consume, and coexist, with the younger generation leading the way and previous ones providing the tools.

At Scienseed, we’ve explored an innovative format to engage younger audiences in the fight against climate change. Through EU funded project RadicalZ, we’ve designed a Digital Escape Room to solve puzzles while learning about how enzymes can help create sustainable industrial solutions.

In this game, participants take on the role of scientists, helping industries like detergent and paper manufacturers reduce pollution. They identify the right enzymes to transform toxic byproducts into eco-friendly products. The experience has proven to be successful, and young people have rated it as a very easy-going and exciting way of learning.

We have had previous gamification assignments, but this one might be in our top 5 of toughest yet most fulfilling projects. But you know what the true challenge is? Playing it. Honestly, we’ve tried, and it turns out to be really entertaining and defiant, regardless of your generational background.

The Escape Room is available in English and Spanish, so we really encourage you to try it!

This year we’ll be celebrating 10 years of company adventures in October, and we couldn’t be happier.

This change of decade has brought along many things: we have a new partner, we’ve moved to the best office in the world, welcomed new talent, and, above all, we’ve successfully completed hundreds of projects.

However, if there’s one thing that you can say about some communication agencies, it’s that they’re great at telling others’ stories but not so much their own. We are one of those. That’s why our resolution for this new decade is to share more often what we do and how we do it, and we are going to start catching up with what we’ve been up to these years, so please bear with us if we get a bit emotional. We won’t go back to the beginning of times, but we’ll tell you a bit about how Scienseed was born, a company with an unspellable name and grand ambitions.

From the start, our goal was to communicate science, explain the seemingly inexplicable, and simplify what many find confusing. We knew early on that the agency had to embrace multiple formats: video, web programming, animations… covering all types of narratives! Although we didn’t start off knowing everything, the Scienseed team has never been afraid to take the plunge. So, we began planting the seed of science with what we knew best: ourselves!

Our first project was a motion video showcasing what our agency could do. And thanks to it, we landed our first European Project. From then on, we realized that if we set our minds to it, we could achieve it. “Can you make our website?” Yes, sir. “Can you create brochures for my upcoming conference?” No problem. “Posters to raise visibility for your foundation?” I don’t see why not…

Things really took off, and before we knew it, we found ourselves developing communication plans for universities and research centers, and other companies. And so, the investigation started: objectives, audiences, channels, actions, there you go! But the more we did, the more adventurous we became. Why settle for the communication plans? We might try creative campaigns too. Advertising is a whole new world, one that hasn’t been explored too much by scientists.

So, over the years we learned not just to make these strategies but also to measure their success. We became pros of social media, made a solid professional network, and in the meantime, big projects were knocking on our door.

Our latest big leap was into the world of marketing. We didn’t just want to talk about people’s products; we wanted to help sell them. So, we jumped into this new field, and our conversations at work revolved around topics such as consumer behavior, market trends, and digital analytics for quite a while, until we could develop effective marketing strategies for brands.

As you can see, we’ve tried to embrace every challenge and gained insights from every project, client, and team member. We’ll seize this opportunity to share some of our proudest accomplishments, like enticing people to go to the cinema for a special screening, creating innovative software to maximize Twitter’s performance, or even making a card game to teach environmental conflict mediation.

Do you want to learn more about these projects? Stay tuned for our upcoming blog posts and join us in celebrating this milestone.

Here’s to ten incredible years and many more to come!

OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, debuted in November and has quickly become a viral sensation. Its capabilities seem immense. From producing different styles of writing based on user prompts to writing scientific papers or even passing the exams required to practice medicine, this tool has opened a whole new world of possibilities. And with it, new fears. From venture capitalists to our friends at the bar, people seem to think AI is about to put knowledge writers and communicators, like us, out of a job. But is it, though?

To get a sense of what these tools have to offer, our team has decided to research the ones that are currently available, their aims and capabilities, and to discuss our results as we go. Our goal is to establish which ones are worth a more thorough check and find out how we can use AI to improve the quality of our work. Naturally, given its popularity, we started by investigating the performance of ChatGPT-3.

First, we decided to ask the AI for help writing a blog post, a ubiquitous format that we know inside out. The results were predictable but also surprising. As expected, the delivery was robotic and plain. The texts sounded unnatural, lacking the imagination and emotional undertone that define creative writing and attract readers. But even if it failed to produce engaging copy, some details caught our attention.

Despite the well-known criticisms, ChatGPT cited sources correctly, giving us links to the published papers when requested. It organized complex information hierarchically, pointing out the connections that articulate our understanding of these topics. And it even suggested ways of exploring ideas we hadn’t considered before. It also lied.

When we asked it to provide names of relevant researchers for a given topic, at first, ChatGPT delivered some useful results, but as we tried to refine the search it started lying. It gave us lists of fake names, together with fake titles from some very real universities. Once we pointed out the blatant lies, the AI apologised, but it failed to change its ways. It kept lying. And we are not the only ones witnessing this behaviour.

It felt like working hand in hand with an unbiased, amoral entity, that came with no regrets and some useful features to unlock our minds. It has the potential to write text with the sole purpose of helping us beat writer’s block, it can come up with ideas for a brainstorming session quickly and efficiently. That its writing abilities are limited is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that we can learn how to use this technology to our advantage.

Will ChatGPT revolutionise science communication? We certainly hope so! Just not in the way most people think. Just like we need criteria and knowledge to discern the quality of information we find online through traditional search engines, we’ll also need to evaluate anything produced by an AI model with a critical and trained eye. Yet, it may help us free up important chunks of time, allowing us to indulge the pickiness that lives inside every writer. The AI may give us more time to polish our texts, evaluating every word and every detail, and in the end, producing better writing.

Image by vectorjuice on Freepik

Albert, Sylvia, Red, and Ninja are four little birds that started their migration journey in 2017, but never reached their destination. Like them, around 36 million birds die, victims of illegal practices in Europe every year. Shot, glued, trapped, these wildlife crimes have devastating consequences for birds, but also for biodiversity in general, endangering the survival of many species. That’s why the Bern Convention asked us to create a campaign to raise awareness about this problem, and we got down to work!

Talking about death can be challenging, there were many ideas to discuss. First, we thought about concepts like flight or borders. We also discussed ideas of tradition, as the killing of migratory birds is an ancient practice in some countries. A short movie could be the appropriate format to capture this idea, but time was against us. We kept thinking, and if there was something we agreed on, it was that nobody kills famous birds. We could design a campaign in which birds known by everyone, like Disney’s birds, died. However, the idea was discarded as we have no claim over these characters’ intellectual property.

After many hours of debate, it finally struck us. Since the last words someone says before they die hold great importance socially, and tweeting is what birds do, we chose Twitter as the channel for the campaign: “The Last Tweet” was born. We created four different fictional characters with their own Twitter account: Albert (@albertgoldfinch), Sylvia (@sylviablackcap), Red (@Red_TheRobin) and Ninja (@ninja_dove). In their tweets, they told the story of their migration adventures, until they were killed by illegal hunters. Their last tweet featured a call to action that invited readers to learn their story and sent a clear message: we must end these cruel illegal practices.

Our aim was to use personification to establish an emotional connection between the audience and the birds: they visited monuments, took photos, got drunk, found a partner… They behaved in very human ways. However, this fiction was not at odds with scientific rigour. At first, we selected the bird species most affected by illegal killings — the goldfinch, the blackcap, the robin, and the turtle dove — then, we searched for information about their migration routes. From London to Cádiz, from Norway to Cyprus, from Helsinki to Rome, and from Sudan to Czech Republic, our little friends began their journeys.

The same day we launched the campaign, BirdLife International presented the ‘The Killing 2.0 – A view to kill’ a scientific report exposing the scale and scope of the illegal killing of birds across critical regions. This helped us to amplify awareness of the problem, appearing in national and international media and achieving a considerable reach across social media platforms. We fulfilled our aim: promoting a tangible awareness on the illegal killing of birds.

When we were young —and not so young! —, most of us enjoyed reading comic books and became enthralled by the stories of world-famous characters. But comics aren’t only useful as entertainment. Complex narratives told through a visual, intuitive format are a powerful tool to tell stories. And what is science if not a great story?

This was the first idea that came to mind when we received a very special assignment: to make a comic book about the importance of confidence and trust in food. Our first chance at using this not-so-common format to explain a not-so-simple concept.

As a multidisciplinary and multiformat agency, we get excited every time we have the opportunity to work on a format we’ve never worked on before. But, in the words of a certain comic-book character, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses and before we got down to business, we had to roll up our sleeves and prepare ourselves for the challenge.

Comics are, above all, combinations of images and text, a mix that creates an effective way to explain nuanced topics. Balancing these two dimensions, so they complement each other, is what helps us create emotional engagement. But getting the message across is far more complex than it may seem. To gather some insight into all these details we turned to our bookshelf and the amazing Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics by Scott McCloud[1].

For readers to learn and later remember, we learned that we had to trigger as many senses as possible. Comics require complex mental gymnastics, but contrary to other formats that overwhelm the public with hard-to-follow scientific information, sequential art guides the readers and turns characters into a relatable human element.

Besides accounting for the structure of the story we wanted to tell, to make sound storytelling decisions we had to consider every scene, every panel, and every facial expression. A comic is not written on a whim, because it requires a series of small steps that need careful consideration to communicate meaning to readers.

The first step is picking the moments that matter for our story, cutting those that aren’t relevant. For example, the more panels you use to draw a scene, the more emphasis it will have. Choosing the frame is important too: just like in cinema, there are various angles and perspectives, providing the audience with different information and sensations. Travelling through the panels must be a seamless and intuitive experience, so adjusting the flow is also important. Behind the scenes, “The journeys of shopping” was one of the most complex narratives we’ve ever developed.

This comic had a clear goal: to resolve consumers’ common doubts about choosing food products while promoting trust in food safety authorities. At first glance, this may sound rather abstract. But putting it simply, we had to make a comic about trust, a complex emotional state.

Emotions are the perfect means to help us reach our audience, and graphic novels are an amazing format for this. By designing a story that focuses on characters and using elements such as facial expressions and a careful choice of words, the public engages with the message instead of just receiving it. Readers can empathise with the character’s struggles, learning from their experiences and decisions.

Our story takes place at a supermarket. We’ve all been to one, but this time we visit following our main character, accompanying her on each one of her decisions while she engages in conversation with other shoppers. Trust in the food system is challenged at every corner, but our narrator doesn’t shy away. She appeals directly to the reader by explaining the solutions developed by the food industry.

There’s something magical about working on a new medium for the first time. Adapting comics to science dissemination was an enriching and intense experience. You can read here the outcome of this amazing journey!

And an update: we did it again! Here you can read another comic, this time on the topic of plastic pollution and food safety. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much we did!

[1] Making Comics : Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels. Scott McCloud. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006.