Catch The Exosomes: Outreach Case Study - Part 1
Back in 2018 I started working on my first outreach project. A colleague introduced me to my first client and now very good friend Yuliya. At the time she was looking for someone to help her create some sort of outreach activity for her research project and I was looking for a project to start my career in visual science communication.
In this post I want to walk you through the process on how we got from the idea of a colouring book to a postcard and finally an educational booklet.
Outreach & Visual Science Communication – The Process
Brainstorm and Sketching
Yuliya’s research is focusing on the isolation of exosomes using microfluidic devices. She had seen a colouring book for cell organelles and was thinking of creating something similar for her own research.
In the beginning I thought creating a colouring book would be a lot of fun, but soon I realised that this would not convey a lot of information about such a complicated topic. Yuliya’s target audience was 14+ years old and I was worried that a colouring book would not be able to hold the attention of teenagers and adults for long.
So, I was starting to think how I could explain this topic in more of a story format. And after lots of ideas that didn’t work out, I thought why not just illustrate this great collaboration the way it is, featuring the scientist (Yuliya) and the artist (myself). From that moment I was so inspired to draw and imagined so many funny situations in that setting that I immediately tried to get everything on paper. Luckily, Yuliya was happy to go along with the new idea.
Exosome ID Card
The only problem was: Creating an educational booklet takes time and we needed something quickly to hand out to people, because Yuliya had big plans and wanted to attend European Researcher’s Night as an outreach event. (I will write more on that adventure in my next blogpost.)
We settled on a postcard as the first final illustration. The Exosome ID card was born. It is a postcard introducing exosomes in a playful way. The postcard was intended to spark people’s interest to learn more about the fascinating world of exosomes and as a way for Yuliya to advertise her research.
The positive response to this postcard was completely overwhelming to me. I never expected people to be so enthusiastic about a simple postcard and it was the first time that I thought that there might be a much bigger demand for visual science communication and the development of outreach projects than I imagined.
Catch The Exosomes - The educational booklet
Writing and illustrating the educational booklet was a lot of fun. I enjoyed drawing cute exosomes in more and more situations and the constant feedback cycles with Yuliya and her colleagues.
I think my favourite part was, when Yuliya came up with the idea that the exosomes would carry a secret message. I couldn’t stop drawing exosomes with little letters inside of them and coming up with ideas on how to portrait scientists as incredibly nosy people (:D, sorry guys).
This is my favourite spread in the whole booklet:
Even more than with the postcard, the positive reactions were incredible, and I am so happy that I had the chance to work on this project.
You can download the complete booklet here.
Conclusion
All in all, I am very happy with the result of this project. It was a lot of fun creating and I want to thank Yuliya for giving me the opportunity and a lot of artistic freedom during the process.
The most challenging part was probably finding the sweet spot between scientific accuracy and science communication or as Yuliya put it: “…we had to stay strong to ensure we did not turn “Catch The Exosomes” into ‘Analytical methods for the isolation of extracellular vesicles’…”
If you are interested in Yuliya’s research, please visit: www.exosome.nl
In the next post I am going to describe my experience when we took Catch the Exosomes one step further and attended the Science is Wonderful Event during European Researchers Night 2018 in Brussels at the European Parliament.
Note: At the time I was working under the artist name Annett von Katz. Since then I have changed my company name to SciVizBuddies.
