Matthew Partridge graduates in sandwich logistics.

In the last issue I wrote about the difficulty of getting data into an outreach activity. Data is fascinating, but persuading someone to spend their afternoon thinking about it takes something more than pointing at an otherwise quite dull spreadsheet.

At that time I was knee deep in prepping for our large outreach event I was running, the Future Chemistry Hub (part of the 2026 British Science Festival). Well it happened and was an enjoyably huge success.

And it was a success mostly because of all the amazing people that produced amazing outreach about all kinds of amazing chemistry (including chemistry data). But it was also down to my two new best outreach friends: logistics and printing.

The fun part of outreach is the squishy, zzZZt, boing bit. Sometimes literally, because chemistry outreach has a healthy appreciation for slime, electricity and things that go boing. It is the playing, experimenting and chatting that turns an interesting idea into something people want to spend time with.

Naturally, facilitating all this involves spending considerable time thinking about suppliers of triangular sandwiches. Catering for 100 volunteers sounds straightforward until you remember that these are 100 actual people, with dietary requirements and schedules, rather than 100 identical sandwich processing units.

The fun part of outreach is the squishy, zzZZt, boing bit. Sometimes literally, because chemistry outreach has a healthy appreciation for slime, electricity and things that go boing. It is the playing, experimenting and chatting that turns an interesting idea into something people want to spend time with

They also need opportunities to eat the sandwiches. This requires a rota, which requires knowing when everyone is available, which requires reconciling 100 incredibly complicated schedules. When you’ve done all of that you need space for 100 people’s-worth of small triangular sandwiches. Tables are another excellent opportunity for personal logistics development. First you work out how many tables everyone needs for their activities. Then you organise the tables. Then the tables you have turn out to be the wrong size and fewer tables arrive than you need, and you discover that organising tables was merely the introductory exercise for organising more tables.

Don’t even get me started on replacing oblong tables with round tables.

Of course, having tables is only the beginning. You also need to put them somewhere that will allow people to move between them. A demonstration needs space for visitors to stop and join in without becoming a human barricade. Foot traffic makes sense and flows perfectly on diagrams but it very much doesn’t when you have a crowd of teenagers who can only move in a pack for fear for one of them being singled out.

Which brings us to printing. Posters for the activities. Posters for directions.

Signs for toilets. Signs pointing towards the lifts. Signs pointing towards other signs which are signs for the main sign. And decisions about where every single one should go, preferably before someone needs it. You can spend ages designing an informative poster and then undo the entire exercise by placing it where nobody thinks to look (or immediately cover it with a door).

The best signs are the ones people don’t even notice they are using and following... which is a tricky thing to ask people about.