Interview with Kees Vink:
- In order to research about my workfield, I decided to have a talk to the Head of Life Sciences in EUC
We talk about the use of design in education, how to reach the non typical audience for science education, and his book.
-One important insight was that learning science is like speaking a language, and the key to reaching an audience without a science background is to facilitate a translation
-Another key point is the importance of humor in teaching science, to make is more accesible and fun for a general audience
The interview is downloadable below:
Inspiration & Research:
-Kurzesagt Channel: an educational youtube channel that uses animations that maintain a high standard of science while being humorous and design-conscious.
Inspiration & Research:
-Goro Fujita: creator of animations in VR.
Educational VR tools that I found, to evaluate what is currently been done in this professional field:
- Google Expeditions
-World of Comenius
Back to Main Project Page
Iterations
I was only able to make one iteration before the current one for the alveoli, due to not having a VR headset at home.
After the first iteration, which was really the start of the learning curve, I was able to re-evaluate to fine tune the animation.
I started by reconsidering my color choices and de-saturating the colors, because I thought it would match the process of breathing better. The original iteration seemed a bit too aggressive.
I also learned how to create a mold using shaped in TiltBrush, which allowed me to get a closer shape to the actual alveoli.
In terms of the educational poster, I took a lot of inspiration from my talk with Kees, as well as from the "In a Nutshell" youtube channel. I wanted to create posters that illustrated relatively complex scientific concepts in an interesting and humorous way to entice curiosity and educate at the same time. The posters would serve as a hook, to provide a certain level of information and to encite people to get interested in the topics.
First, I played around with the idea of replacing parts of systems, such as the gastrointestinal tract, with icons that conveyed their functions. I also started brainstorming with the concept of personification- or giving human atributes to non human objects. I decided this would be a more interesting way of fulfilling my intent.
After conducting my research into different people that were doing similar things to what I was planning on doing, I created a outline for my goals, inspirations, process, and the projects I wanted to accomplish.
Above, you can see my sketches for iconography and personification, and the characters of the different cell types that would give rise to the final poster.
After creating some concepts for the poster, I decided to start thinking of some possible poster compositions.
Since I was taking inspiration from a more cartoon-like style, I wanted to make sure that the parts of the body that I illustrated had interesting characters in dynamic scenes. I hoped this would create the curiosity that would propel people to look into these processes, or at least give them enough information in an interesting manner.
I narrowed down the potential posters to three different physiological processes that I thought could create interesting scenes; the transport of food through the intestine, the action of peptides and acid in the stomach, and the process of bone homeostasis.
My talk with Kees also really inspired me, as getting the perspective of an educator in the life sciences highlighted the importance of drawing to comprehend these processes, as well as the importance of making science a language that is more accessible.
This is also why the movie Inside Out was a great inspiration, as it gave people a way of expressing their emotions through an external tool.
Inspiration & Research:
-Inside Out: a movie that personified the abstract concept of emotions in a succesful manner. The characters also all had a distinct shape and design that allowed for easy differentiation.
This is an article in which the Psychologist behind Inside Out explains aspects of the movie that made it a succesful example of simplification of difficult concepts that allow people to resonate with it.
They talk about how simplification has to stem from a good understanding of the topic itself
They also speak about how simplification can lead to breakthroughs in communication, especially with children. My main audience for the poster is younger, which is why simplification could be effective, but I believe it could also work well with a more mature audience that has little background in science.
At this point, I also had a strong image in my mind of the illustrations of the books I used to read as a child. Although I originally wanted to make a more clean, infographic-inspired poster(such as in the "In a Nutshell" videos), these types of illustrations really stuck with me.
I then decided to emulate the analogue feel that so many of them displayed with textured colors and a very specific style per illustrator. I thought having a more stylized poster would help in creating curiosity and drawing in people, especially with a younger audience, because the clean adobe illustrator style drawings are all over the place now.
Some examples of these are to the side.