by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | Visual stories for visitors
I can be quite smug about it, I think. Science is a tyrant, wielding intimidating texts and tables. But the two fields I love, – ecology and geology – source their knowledge from a reality you can easily reveal. If one’s task is opening up science, that’s a bonus.
The ground under our feet has been laid down over millions of years. That’s easy to explain. And ecology: who doesn’t sense that all plants and animals are connected? What could be more enjoyable than visiting the product of geology and ecology – the landscape? Yet I can’t help but worry about the preservation of special and fragile geology, ecology or heritage. For how is it that cyclists ride past it, schoolchildren find it boring and voters overlook it?
Apparently, it is not visible enough. The language and images used by professionals, once beyond the borders of academia, just can’t cut it.
What do you need, to grasp geology or ecology?
Nothing more than a few clues. A dash of knowledge. Preferably administered on the spot by a human guide.
“Do you see that the salt marsh is higher than the polder behind the dike?”
“Did you notice there are no godwits near trees?”
Yes, they do see that. Nice. Right now all you have to do is to come up with an explanation for that height difference or that bird behavior. And in terms that your audience understands. If only you could put a geologist next to every phenomenon.
To simplify, but not too much
The next best way to see an area is through a paper or digital guidebook, with photos, illustrations, maps and text. An atlas, an app, a travel guide. (Whether the thing is paper or digital doesn’t really matter, it seems to me. But something that you click away in an instant is a message you forget in an instant).
Either way, digital or analog, you want to unlock scientific knowledge in an easy, visual way. You want to simplify, but not too much. Reality is complex and readers may have little time, but they certainly don’t want to waste it on information or stories that don’t teach them anything.
This way, this “opening up science” of mine will still be quite a job. Good thing the reward is so great: once people see geology or ecology, they keep seeing it everywhere.
That’s riches.
Talking geology at a party
Fun anecdote: one of the professors who collaborated on the Canon of the Dutch Landscape gave me a great reason to do my job. He said “thanks for your work, now I can just explain what I do at a party”. This also indicates that the scientists themselves find a short version of their work very useful.
Atlas of the Netherlands in the Holocene, block diagrams of braiding, meandering and anastosomal river.
Block charts and maps can look very friendly. How simple can visualizing science be? When do you go from accessibility to “telling too little”?
Canon of the Dutch Landscape, a folding sheet of 16 faces, created with 20 professors and specialists, each of whom could write a book about it.
The content is tightly bound: each plane of the folding sheet has an introduction, a description of a phenomenon, and some location text of where that phenomenon occurs. The block diagrams visualise the phenomenon.
I still think this “leaflet” is a good example of how information can be transferred from pure text to photo, map, illustration and timeline.
There is a separate section for human additions to the landscape, on top of sand, clay and peat.
‘Het ontstaan van Zeeland’ (the origins of Zeeland) lets you browse from the past to the present, getting a good look at how Zeeland became dry land, washed over again and eventually slowly became diked.
Online you would do this with a slider, such as topotijdreis.nl, but browsing by hand naturally gives you a fine object.
There is also such a thing as scientific posters, for use at conferences. For a few geomorphologists, I made a dozen, prioritizing the visual. After all, the landscape itself is visual.
It can also be a lot more abstract: the port of Rotterdam (tilted), from the “Climate as an Opportunity” project. The sea level is rising and the Netherlands must be designed accordingly. Blue shading = water storage.
by Klaas | 13 Jun, 2023 | XXL information
Making the world a better place. How do you contribute, as a scientist? You research a problem and discover a solution. You write everything down precisely in a report, with hefty tables and lots of footnotes. That gives you satisfaction and lots of
citations.
But no audience.
Communications people want something very different. Those looking for juicy headlines with good images and short text. Infographics that do 1 thing at a time. Material to fill a mailing, a homepage or a tweet, and that’s how you reach supporters.
Careful scientists clash with communications people. Where I go, one of either group is always unhappy.
What if you saw all information as one thing? One unit, from raw data to conclusion. Not a separate report, nor a mailing, but “a thing” for effectively spreading an idea, a substantiated idea, which as yet has no particular form. In designer language, this is called medium-free thinking.
I see two questions:
1 What should we do to spread our idea?
2 What should we tell people to establish our authority?
The answer to question 1 is “something that works” (reaches the reader), the answer to question 2 is “something that is right” (convinces the reader). Those two things have to come together. The golden mean, of course, is “something you can easily send that is derived from something that is totally right. You send out a mailing or investor summary, you post an article on LinkedIn, and you tweet the best infographics. Always with a link to the full report.
Research > report > infographics
How does such a thing work. Two examples: the Access to Medicine Index and Superlist reports.
0) The study. A hefty document that will not be sent out, except to some reviewers.
1) The plank (old printing term for “all the pages in a row”). What topics should be covered in what order in a concise version of the report?
2) What parts of it should be ready to use or send separately?
3) What findings or insights were gained from the research?
4) How do you make the findings fit for 1 tweet, 1 powerpoint slide or 1 video?
5) Are there any findings that you can broadcast on specific occasions?
6) Within the report: what is the distinction between raw data, filtered data, its interpretation by our experts and their opinion about it?
7) Your tables and research data, do they have a public-friendly version? And is the web version different from the print version?
This already looks quite a bit like a communications strategy, or something else with -strategy behind it.
Chicken or egg?
You strategize and have meetings for a very long time, and only then start making things. I’ll tell you: the pages made will force you to adjust the strategy again. A much better option is to start making stuff right away. simultaneously, strategy forms, simply because everything you create raises questions. Does this work? Who exactly is it for? What exactly does it say?
The same goes for textual content: if you write that first and then create the assets, this written text will not fit will not work. With me, writing and design go hand in hand. Really much more efficient.
Most importantly?
You can show your report when you are on stage and everyone is watching.
(See photo in header: Jayashree Iyer with the 2018 Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark at the World Economic Forum in Davos)
Questionmark Foundation collects data on supermarkets. What are supermarkets doing to move toward a sustainable food system? Little, it turns out, but something. And it will surprise you which supermarkets contribute the most. (www.thequestionmark.org)
Superlist reports kick off with 1 spread with a summary and that single key infographic. The rest follows.
Each subtopic has its own chapter that again begins with a summary and a figure. All of these components are also available separately as social media stuff.
For Access to Medicine Foundation (which measures what Big Pharma is doing for access to medicine in poor countries) I made a huge pile of reports, slides and stuff for the media between 2012 and 2022.
Also with the Access to Medicine Index, the report starts with an Executive Summary, which contains everything + 1 central figure: The Index.
Did I say everything had to be short? Well, this is short for investors and decision makers. Any shorter and they won’t trust it and won’t read it. Of this typical page (called the report card) we have built increasingly sophisticated versions over the years. Of course, this data is also on web. However, on screen, it’s hard to get an overview and see details at the same time. On web, you can compare and filter the data by company and by item, though.
Radial diagrams in Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark 2018. Exotic.
The briefest message, visual chic, with the Executive Director.
True story: ‘Klaas, can you design this page first so we can write?’ See, that makes sense. Writing first yields things that don’t fit, designing first gives the writers information about each component on the page: the length of the introduction, the size of the captions to the figure.
Pretty full, but nice and full, lots of info.
There is a separate version for investors: thin, yet with everything an investor wants to know. (Investors interested in the Access to Medicine Index represent $18 trillion in assets)
Image for newsletter header.
Each report contains between 50 and 300 figures, which can be prepared as a selection, with customized text, for web and socials.
Maps are also always needed: where is it, how many countries?
Reports on subtopics have different covers and format. The report on the right most closely resembles a scholarly article, which starts right on the cover.
Compact information can become super-high density. It looks like “wow, they know a lot,” but also like “gee, do I have to read all this? Depends on the readership if this works well.
Perhaps this is finest: 1 observation, explained and accompanied by a figure. Want to know more? Read more on the website or in the report.
