After several days at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2012 annual meeting, I can definitely support the design help desk project at the University of Washington (UW). From the Feb. 22, 2012 news item by Hannah Hickey on physorg.com,
A group of University of Washington researchers has launched a unique experiment matching science students with those in design. The new Design Help Desk, similar to a writing help desk, offers scientists a chance to meet with someone who can help them create more effective figures, tables and graphs.
“In modern publications, up to half of the space can be taken up by figures,” said principal investigator Marco Rolandi, a UW assistant professor of materials science and engineering. His group studies materials at the nanometer scale, and much of the data is ultimately contained in microscope images.
“As a new faculty member, I was spending a lot of time teaching my students how to make figures for publications, even though I myself didn’t have any formal training,” Rolandi said.
It was a case of the blind leading the blind, he said. Rolandi sought out collaborators on campus, and eventually funding from the National Science Foundation, to create support that until now didn’t exist – and to study how well it works.
The research project (Design Help Desk) has two principal investigators, Rolandi and Karen Cheng, from Hickey’s Feb. 21, 2012 news release on the University of Washington website,
“We are becoming a more visual culture,” says Karen Cheng, a UW associate professor of design (who also completed a bachelor’s in chemical engineering). Still, most science visuals “could use significant improvement from a visual point of view,” she said. “It’s just not a field where design has been part of the training.”
This hasn’t always been the case. In Galileo’s time, scientists were also trained in art. These days, scientists often produce a graph using Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint’s default settings – which might look fine to them, but may have fundamental design problems. [emphasis mine]
Meanwhile, even journals are focusing on the importance of figures, often asking authors to improve them before publication.
“It’s not just about looking pretty. It’s about conveying complex information in a clear way,” Cheng said.
The point about science and art being more closely intertwined in the past was made Gunalan Nadarajan (Vice Provost at the Maryland Institute College of Art) at the AAAS 2012 annual meeting (my Feb. 20, 2012 posting). Nadarajan mentioned a new project being developed, Network for Science Engineering Art and Design. It’s so new they don’t yet have a website.
This is not being done in the wild. Scientists and designers are not set loose upon each other (from the UW news release),
Clients who arrive for a session at the Design Help Desk are first greeted by postdoctoral researcher Yeechi Chen, who earned her doctorate in physics at the UW and has completed a UW certificate course in natural science illustration. Chen can act as an intermediary between the scientist and the designer, and reassure new clients that scientists are involved in the project.
During the half-hour session, the scientist client and design consultant are alone in the room. The designer first asks the scientist about his or her goals – timeline, stage in the design process, publication venue, and main points to convey. The designers typically use pen and paper to sketch out their ideas.
The session is videotaped for use in the group’s study, if the client agrees. One camera records the face-to-face interaction, while a second camera on the ceiling records the sketching and hand movements.
Interestingly (to me anyway), the Design Help Desk appears on a UW webpage dedicated to Visual Communication in {Nano} Science. The page offers a very minimalist image, a description of the project and the team, and offers links to resources, e.g., A Brief Guide to Designing Effective Figures for the Scientific Paper ((behind a paywall)) which was published in August 2011 in Advanced Materials.