Picture this – researchers drawing on illustrators

Illustrations are more than eye-candy – they can communicate, provoke interest, and confound expectations. As it turns out, they also lead to unexpected synergies with scientific research. FASoS’ Laura Ogden and illustrator Michael Kirkham have launched Picture This, which sees arts student from Dundee illustrate the research of social scientists from Maastricht University.

Combining illustration with research, as Picture This does, might seem jarring – like seriousness and legitimacy colliding with playfulness. Here, however, they prove to be very much complementary. The idea is a simple enough synergy: arts students would create illustrations for academics to help communicate their research. In return, the illustrators get a chance to build their portfolio. But why does it work so well?
 

How do social sciences and illustration fit together?

According to Laura Ogden, assistant professor at FASoS, “most social science research questions our assumptions and is full of nuance. But it can be hard to communicate such complexity in an accessible, digestible way in our standard academic formats.” This is where illustrations come in. 

According to Michael Kirkham, illustrator and lecturer in Communication Design at Dundee University “illustrations have a different pace, compared to text: you see it and instantly get a sense of what it’s about. It motivates you to get more context, to engage with the research.” The fact that, unlike photography, illustration can distort and exaggerate freely certainly helps. The illustrations in Picture This seem to advertise how the research offers a different, more complex view on a topic.
 

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Ogden and Kirkham collaborating was less serendipitous than it might seem: despite having grown up on different continents, they are cousins. Having grown up in Australia, one of Ogden’s enduring childhood memories of her biennial family visits to England is of Kirkham and his brother drawing at the breakfast table. Decades later, they noticed how their research interests converged in some sense. While Kirkham practices and teaches illustration, Ogden approaches visual language from a different vantage point.
 

Visual media to generate and communicate knowledge

In her research on and with transnational youth, i.e. young people whose lives are spread across two or more countries, Ogden uses visual ethnography. “I involve them in audiovisual and multimodal methods of participatory research. This allows me to generate academic knowledge, and them to understand themselves and their situation in a  different, more profound way by considering their own experience in a broader context.”

Another motivation behind Picture This, is how visual media can help communicate research beyond academia. “UM understands that it's crucial to share our knowledge beyond the walls of the institution. Illustration is a great way to do that.” Thus, Picture This contributes to valorisation, the idea of community engagement and social impact of research."

After getting the green light for the project, they paired eight researchers with, fortuitously, the same number of illustrators. Researchers were asked to outline their project and the communication objective. While it would be tempting to rely on the artists’ craft to illustrate the most obvious cliché, the first visual association that comes with the project’s title, the approach was actually rather the opposite of that.