Image and Meaning

Workshop brings scientists and designers to Apple

By Rosalind Reid

If your idea of cooking school is limited to countertop instruction in whisking a hollandaise, you haven’t met Rolando Robledo. Yes, there are many afternoons when Chef Instructor Robledo can be found in the Providence, Rhode Island, kitchens of Johnson & Wales University, dressed in white apron and hat, working with students to craft a perfect sauce.

But many days he’s sitting at his Mac exploring technology-intensive teaching methods, hoping to help diverse learners understand what’s happening inside those sauces — right down to the molecular level.

Which is what brought Robledo to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters in February 2007. With others from diverse fields of science, graphic arts, communication, technology and mathematics (including this writer), the chef had come to roll up his sleeves and search for better ways to use visual representations to communicate scientific concepts and data. Although most of us were meeting for the first time, we emerged with a remarkably unified sense of purpose, and a goal: to continue building an interdisciplinary community of visual practice and solution-sharing that would develop improved techniques for representing science for research, education and communication.

A Hunger for Dialogue and Solutions

The event at Apple was the third in a series of regional workshops growing out of an innovative project launched in 2001 by Felice Frankel, then a science photographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frankel brought leading scientists from a wide range of disciplines together at MIT with graphic designers, writers, animators, critics, cognitive psychologists and others for the groundbreaking Image and Meaning Conference. Among the speakers were biologist E. O. Wilson, science-writing collaborators Philip and Phylis Morrison, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, chemist George Whitesides and writer Susan Sontag.

As they compared visual expressions of research across many fields, the original IM participants discovered that a single scientific concept or phenomenon can often be expressed in remarkably divergent ways. They were surprised to find that many challenges in visual representation are shared by multiple fields. The conference was one of the first to explore the power of visual media, from simple drawings to rich animations and interactive online graphics, in helping the public understand science.

“It was all about beginning a conversation about the importance of visually expressing science, and the fact that there are no guidelines,” Frankel recalls. “Everybody’s sort of doing what they think is right. It was important that we raise awareness of how powerful images are in communicating ideas — and in miscommunicating.”

Participants in the 2001 conference found that discussions involving small, mixed groups were especially useful. People left hungry to meet and continue talking about shared problems and solutions, Frankel said.

Planners added open discussion, social periods and small-group workshop sessions to the second major Image and Meaning event, IM2, held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in June 2005 with funding from the National Science Foundation. Further NSF support helped launch a series of regional workshops around the country. Co-sponsors of the smaller workshops have been Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, host of IM2.1, in North Carolina; the Illinois Institute of Technology, host of IM2.2 in Chicago; and finally Apple, host of IM2.3. Major funding now comes from Harvard University’s Initiative in Innovative Computing, the new home of Image and Meaning and the venue for IM2.4, planned for fall 2007.

Although the workshops have been kept intentionally small, the Image and Meaning community has grown in size, quality and breadth. “There are an extraordinary number of very smart people in science who are seeing the importance of graphical explanation,” Frankel said. “These exercises are not tangential; they are, or should be, an integral part of the scientific process.”

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