Explain it like I’m 5.

Making a complex technology clear doesn’t diminish it: it reveals its worth.

My academic training and my career have both taken shape in the arts and in communication. Science is a recent interest: curiosity, not knowledge. It was that curiosity that took me to a scientific symposium on biomedical research in space. In the audience were researchers, doctors, students and representatives of the space agencies.

As one talk followed another, I felt every bit the visitor: listening to biomedicine without the dictionary of science is like walking through a forest without a compass.

A language everyone speaks

One doctor spoke about ageing — about how, in microgravity, astronauts’ bodies age faster. Rather than relying on data alone, he reached for an everyday image: the bones in our legs are only as strong as they are because they keep us upright. Without gravity, he explained (if I understood him correctly), those bones lose the purpose they were shaped for — the same loss of strength that makes so many older people fall, here on Earth.

Then there is the other kind of explanation: the doctor who describes a diagnosis in technical terms, the mechanic who names the fault by its parts. Anyone who has mastered a subject has lived inside it for years. They have the vocabulary and the shortcuts — and, with them, they forget the road that brought them there. They speak as peers speak to peers: precisely, in detail, starting in the middle.

In fields working at the edge of knowledge, that distance is even greater. Medicine, biotechnology, engineering, space, deep tech — and so many others, where every advance brings its own vocabulary, built over years of research. Each one is born far from anything we already know: that is what makes it disruptive, and that is exactly what makes it hard to tell. The newer an idea, the fewer words exist for it.

Twenty years of working in the arts and communication have taught me to make visible what exists only in words, or in the abstract — an idea that has yet to take shape.

There is something else that has always come naturally to me: seeing a subject whole, and dividing it in ways that speak to each audience. At a literary festival, a storyteller’s visit to a village can be told through the place she discovered, through the story she chose to bring, or through those who sat and listened to her. The same visit, told from three different places.

The way in

It is the same with a complex idea: nobody falls in love with an instruction manual. The best way in is rarely the technical specification — it is the problem it solves, the life it changes, or the moment someone realised it was possible. Those who invest, fund or have to decide rarely start there: first they need to understand why it matters, and why it matters now. How it works under the bonnet comes later, and only for those who need the detail.

Communication can come at the end. But it is not a layer laid on top and unveiled with a ‘voilà, here we are!’. Nor is it a matter of translating technical language, or of decoration: it means reading the idea before saying it — deciding what it is, who it is for, and where the way in lies. And it is done best with permission to not know, and to ask about everything, as five-year-olds do.

Then, the image. A good analogy does in one sentence what ten slides cannot do in twenty minutes — just as that doctor did with the weakening bone. And finally, the order: explaining means drawing a path, one step at a time, each resting on the one before. Skip a step, and you lose people along the way.

Clarity is not the opposite of complexity. It is a form of respect — for the idea, and for whoever is listening.

The ideas that are hardest to explain are often the ones that most deserve explaining — and the ones that captivate me most.

Margarida Girão

This text was reviewed, structured and fact-checked with support from Claude (Anthropic). The experience, the writing and the argument are the author’s own.