May 21, 2019
Help by design: Art assists science at UW Design Help Desk
Sometimes when science gets a little stuck, art can come to the rescue.
It’s true of the University of Washington’s Design Help Desk, which gives free guidance to faculty, students and staff on the more artistic aspects of presenting research or reports — figures, diagrams, posters and the like.
The UW Design Help Desk was created by Karen Cheng, a professor of visual communication design in the UW School of Art + Art History + Design, together with Marco Rolandi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering who is now with the University of California, Santa Cruz. Its ongoing support comes from the School or Art’s Division of Design.
The top illustration shows a synthetic polymer that enables an antibody to partially bypass capture in endocytosis and endosomal tracking. In the revised version below, after the author’s visit to the UW Design Help Desk, the synthetic polymer is emphasized with color while unnecessary details are simplified. The cellular boundaries also were simplified, and components and processes labeled more directly.Lab of Prof. Suzie Pun, UW Dept. of Bioengineering
Designers — in this case UW design students — helping science-types seemed a good idea from the start, but now a new paper demonstrates its common-sense effectiveness: “The Design Help Desk: A Collaborative Approach to Design Education for Scientists and Engineers” was published May 1 in the journal Plos One.
Cheng and Rolandi are co-authors of the small study, along with UW College of Education graduate Kieran O’Mahony and UW design alumni Jonathan Cook and Jason Petz. Many other talents went into the work, Cheng noted, including illustrator and UW design alumna Fanny Luor and former faculty member Tad Hirsch, now at Northeastern University. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The paper stems from the experiences of 12 UW graduate students in science or engineering who participated in half-hour one-on-one sessions with design students at the help desk. The interactions were captured by video and annotated with a program called “Monologger” created by Hirsch and Cook to enable moment-to-moment analysis of the interactions. The resulting films also were reviewed closely by a four-member working group of individuals trained in interaction analysis techniques.
The researchers write that close study shows that the pairings and guidance “consistently produced a momentary disequilibrium in the scientist’s thought process,” but that the feeling led in time to one of “agency … and conceptual change in the scientist’s understanding of visual design.”
The participants were also sent a post-session satisfaction survey with questions about their user experience, to which eight replied. When asked if the Design Help Desk had been helpful, or if the consultant had been well-informed, the eight responding chose either the “agree” or “strongly agree option.” One of the eight selected a neutral response when asked if the consultant had “established a rapport” with them.
Karen Cheng
One participant summed up her experience saying: “I really liked how the consultant first tried to understand our project and then gave us helpful advice on how to organize the layout of the poster.” Another called the Help Desk advice “straightforward, to the point, and very helpful.”
The researchers write: “Visual design, learning sciences, and nanotechnology may be strange bedfellows; yet, as this paper highlights, peer interaction between a designer and a scientist is an effective method for helping scientists acquire visual design skills.”
The graphics that were the subject of Design Help Desk assistance were made better by the guidance, the researchers write. “Six demonstrated clear improvements to the visual design — for example, simplification of overly complex illustrations, or reorganization into simpler compositions is typical of this kind of transformation.” The students ended up publishing the improved designs in posters, a public presentation and an academic paper.
Cheng added: “Essentially, this study shows that unique collaborations between designers and scientists at the Design Help Desk did indeed lead to learning and acquisition of design skills.”
The success of these Design Help Desk encounters, they write, “supports the notion that an interaction between STEM and the arts promotes not only better science, but indeed, better learning.”
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For more information, contact Cheng at 206-310-5339 or kcheng@uw.edu.
- NSF award number 1008568
