Lead investigators
Felice Frankel (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
)
Description
The IIC is committed to enhancing the communication of science and engineering to the public and within the interdisciplinary scientific community. Toward this end, the Envisioning Science program is engaged in projects that capture knowledge from hands-on, face-to-face collaboration and apply it to the design of new tools for advancing the visual expression of science.
The Image and Meaning conferences and workshops bring together scientists, computer scientists, graphic designers and journalists to explore and improve the use of images in science. Knowledge and technical skill in design and communication is thus fused with the knowledge and experience of domain experts. The lessons from these interactions are currently being applied to the design of the IM Virtual Graphical Collaborative, an online workspace and curated database where technology will be used in a new way: to record and parse the process of problem-solving so that knowledge can be fed into future collaborative work and made available for individual exploration.
In the Picturing to Learn project, faculty and students probe students’ understanding of difficult scientific concepts by creating illustrations and animations to communicate these concepts to others. Faculty have found that this form of expression provides important insight into each student’s understanding and, in particular, misconceptions that interfere with learning. A technological framework to connect Picturing to Learn participants is being planned.
The Envisioning Science program is also planning a series of one-day symposia on the visual expression of important cross-cutting concepts in science, including risk, probability, scale, multi-dimensional data, and uncertainty.
