How design can make science captivating
Turning complex systems into enjoyable experiences is a challenge facing many industries. And most have realized design could help solve it. There are occurrences of solutions all over design: navigation patterns in UX design, data visualization in visual design, affordances in industrial design, or emergent gameplay in game design. But there is a space which hasn’t yet fully turned to design to help solve this issue: science.
Science is probably our most complex system. And making science more accessible, understandable and enjoyable could have a huge impact on all of our lives.
So how do we communicate science’s complex concepts and ideas to broad audiences? How do we get people to care about science? Let’s look at it from the point of view of design.
Asking why
It takes two to share science. So our first step is to understand our audience and its motivations. Why are people reading, listening, or watching science related content? Why are non-scientists interested in science in the first place?
A group of researchers asked 2590 adults in the US in 2021: people pursue an interest in science first to spark their imagination and sense of wonder, and second to gain new knowledge or skills. These answers should guide us. Curiosity and the desire for knowledge are our best ways to get to our audience. When provoked, they are great sources of motivation.
So what is stopping people from getting engaged with science? From the same study, four barriers emerged: logistics “I don’t have time”, value proposition “this is boring”, belonging “I don’t feel welcome”, and identity “I can’t relate” (in italics these are my words). Once again, we can learn from these answers. To communicate science to broad audiences we need to make sure to not waste people’s time, to not be boring, to make everyone’s comfortable, and to communicate ideas from diverse points of view.
Overall we need to remember that however complex ideas are, we are communicating them to other humans.
Telling stories
As a species, storytelling is one of our most powerful tool. Stories transform information into meaning, allowing us to carry knowledge from one brain to another easily. Telling stories is the most humane way we have to share information, between individuals and at a globale scale.
But telling stories might seem counterintuitive when sharing science. Science is based on facts, not on stories. Science is based on deductive reasoning: if you know the rule, you can apply it to any situation and predict what will happen. While storytelling is based on inductive reasoning: if that happened to the hero, it could happen to anyone. Science allows us to predict while stories invite us to generalize. But if they are opposed in their methods, they actually pursue the same goal: science and stories are two different ways to confer meaning to reality. And we need both to make sense of our world.
Stories have one thing that science doesn’t: they appeal to our humanity. Over thousands of years, storytellers have refined techniques to create emotional connections with their audiences. They use metaphors, recount lived experiences, feed us details, bring things to our human scale, and so on. Humans have been using stories to share emerging thoughts, radical hypothesis, revolutionary concepts, and fringe theories. Stories have the incredible power to transform new ideas into familiar ones. And science is full of new ideas waiting to be shared.
Sharing experiences
Design and storytelling have a lot in common: they both appeal to our humanity and share the same ability to make new things feel familiar. Design has the power to make us feel emotions through images, objects, spaces, sounds or interfaces. Design brings stories to life by giving them materiality.
However, giving shapes to ideas transforms how we perceive them. Design creates new ways of thinking about these ideas, new mental structures, new patterns that help us navigate our world. But ideas exist mostly though their representation. So “design creates meaning as much as it communicates it.” In other words, by giving shapes to ideas, design gives them meaning.
In that sense, design goes far beyond simplification — a common criticism when discussing science communication — and toward a role of interpretation of science.
Design also carries a message of accessibility: when seeing an infographic on social media or an animated video on Youtube, the audience understands at first glance that the content is made for them, unlike a research paper for example. Before diving into the content the audience knows that it is being addressed. In other words, to get people curious “we need to be providing content in the format that it is being consumed in.” Accessibility enables curiosity.
Connecting emotionally
The process of turning an idea into a story into a shared experience has one purpose: to create an emotional connection with the audience. For the audience that emotional connection triggers 3 responses.
- First an affective response: emotions allow the audience to connect with the story, to feel like they are part of it: the audience relates to the content through emotions.
- Second a cognitive response: emotions are the best tool we have to remember things. We forget easily what we learn, but we remember what we feel. Stories and experiences are far easier to remember than facts. By linking short and concrete pieces of knowledge to emotions we improve their memorization.
- And finally an active response: emotions have the power to change how we see the world, how we think and how we behave. Emotions help us think and help us change.
To be transformative, science communication needs emotions.
Overall, to make science captivating we need to tell stories, to share experiences and to connect emotionally. If we want people to care, we need to make science humane.
This text is an attempt to put words on my design practice. As a designer I see communicating science as a fantastic opportunity, a vast territory to explore in collaboration with scientists. I believe there is an important role for design in explaining the complexity of our world.
Sources
The power of storytelling and video: a visual rhetoric for science communication
Wiebke Finkler, Bienvenido Leon
https://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_1805_2019_A02/
SciPEP2023 | 2: Perceptions and Preferences — What does the public want?Eve Klein, Association of Science and Technology Centers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlhB2FHjxLI
The narrative truth about scientific misinformation
Michael F. Dahlstrom
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914085117
Narrative Design Patterns for Data-Driven Storytelling
Benjamin Bach Moritz Stefaner Jeremy Boy Steven Drucker Lyn Bartram Jo Wood Paolo Ciuccarelli Yuri Engelhardt Ulrike Koeppen Barbara Tversky
https://datavis2020.github.io/pdfs/Narrative_Design_Patterns__for_Data_Driven_Storytelling.pdf
Introduction: Knowledge Design — Visual Rhetoric in Science Communication
Thomas M. Susanka, Olaf Kramer
https://direct.mit.edu/desi/article/37/4/4/107436/Introduction-Knowledge-Design-Visual-Rhetoric-in
Bringing Design to Science
Boris Muller
https://borism.medium.com/bringing-design-to-science-3fa653f2c149
Design is storytelling
Ellen Lupton
https://ellenlupton.com/Design-Is-Storytelling
You’ll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?
Adam Mastroianni
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/youll-forget-most-of-what-you-learn
