Image and Meaning

Pressure-Cooker Collaboration

So it was that Chef Robledo found himself in an Apple conference room with a group that included an astronomer, a chemist, a systems biologist, graphic designers and artists, and two experts in computer visualization as leaders. The group decided to work as a team on a challenge Robledo had prepared with colleague Paula Figoni, author of How Baking Works.

Chefs need to understand how starch molecules behave when exposed to heat — how they gelatinize in water, breaking their normal bonds and forming unusual structures, which themselves break up as additional heat is applied. Robledo, who at 34 is pursuing a master’s degree in teaching, challenged the workshop group to help him find novel ways to help student chefs comprehend this essential chemistry.

“I want to use all teaching modes — not just animations or still images — to reach diverse learners and take advantage of technology to increase learning at my university.” he said. “Our star students can come out into the industry and become more effective or efficient chefs more quickly if they understand these reactions and processes.”

The novelty of Robledo’s problem sparked imaginative solutions.

“As I sat there, I realized that everyone was outside their comfort zone,” Robledo recalled. “If we’re in our comfort zone, then we’re always going to do what we usually do.”

The group grabbed pipe cleaners and ribbons that could be twisted together to represent starch molecules with intertwining side chains. The workshops use tactile materials to spark new visual ideas and encourage the process of “drawing to think through the problem,” explained Angela DePace, a postdoctoral researcher in molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. After a half-day of problem-solving and discussion, the group was ready to present a storyboard for a teaching animation and a role-playing demonstration.

Large Helpings of Talent and Generosity

The cooking-chemistry problem was one of 34 visual challenges submitted to the workshop at Apple. Having reviewed others’ submitted problems in advance, participants arrived with curiosity and questions about the connections between their work and the problems of colleagues working in remote, unrelated areas of science. The workshop format — from the challenge of defining a problem for a submission to simple nametags carrying only a name and an image — was intended to help people find these surprising connections and discover new solutions through teamwork.

Participant David Dailey marveled at the camaraderie. “When people go to conferences in their own disciplines, it’s all presentation of material from the environment they are accustomed to working in…. People strut around like peacocks and present their stuff,” said Dailey, a computer scientist at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. “Forcing them to leave that environment behind is probably a good thing. My main impression is of how surprisingly collaborative the workshop was.”

The small, mixed working groups were created intentionally to foster an environment charged with idea-sharing and collaboration. The cross-disciplinary, problem-driven workshops tap a reservoir of “real talent and generosity” among people who work in the visual expression of science, Frankel said. “People pull ideas from each other.”

Computer scientist Robert Kosara from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte was glad to have a chance to draw ideas from graphic artists and illustrators. “Computer-visualization people live in their own little bubble — very concerned with technical things,” Kosara said. “There should be a lot more connection between fields. How do we even understand images? How do we attach meaning to graphical shapes? How can we keep visualization from being too specific, make it more expressive? Photography, painting, visualization — I would like to try to make sense of these different ways of visualizing our world.”

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