In today's podcast Ilona interviews Felice Frankel, a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard and a Research Scientist at MIT. Felice is a photographer who is keenly interested in visual communication of complex concepts.  To that end, she has written three books about the subject.  Felice's recent effort to bring visual representation of science concepts into education culminated in the NSF-funded Picturing to Learn project. Her most recent book, No Small Matter, written with George Whitesides, illustrates nannoscience with metaphor. Listen to this podcast to hear about how creating visual representations of science can change the way science is taught. A full transcript of the podcast is below. [19:23] 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Full transript

ILONA MIKO, host:  Welcome to the latest edition of Nature EdCast, by Nature Education.  I'm Ilona Miko, and today we're talking to Felice Frankel from Harvard and MIT about visual communication of science concepts.

Felice is a photographer who is keenly interested in visual communication of complex concepts.  Now she's worked for many years in collaboration with scientists who are looking for ways to communicate their data and their discoveries in visual forms. 

Felice has published three books on the visual communication of information.  The most recent of which is called No Small Matter.  It's coming out this fall, and it's written with George Whitesides.  No Small Matter is about nanoscience, or things that happen at the nanoscale.  No Small Matter is a beautiful book.  I've taken a look at it.  It's at once both an art book full of gorgeous images, and also an educational tool for all ages, student and non-student.  It basically helps a reader understand some of the complexities of how molecules relate at the nanoscale, and how they relate to forces at the nanoscale.  Basically at a scale where we can't see them at all, even with a microscope.  So No Small Matter is just one example of Felice's work, which is aimed at helping people, scientists and nonscientists alike to think about how visual metaphors can be used to describe complicated ideas.  I'm very happy to welcome Felice Frankel to Nature EdCast. 

FELICE FRANKEL:  Thank you.  Great to talk with you.  What a wonderful introduction.  I don't have to say a word anymore.  Thanks so much.

MIKO:  OK.  Well, thanks for joining us.  So I guess we want to lead off with just the basics.  What is visual communication?

FRANKEL:  I would like to think it's about expressing ideas with images of some sort.  Either pictures or illustrations, and all forms of the visual.  The key word to this is communication.  That's where I think many of us fall apart.  The question is whether or not the pictures that we're making, the figures that we're making for journal submissions, or presentations, whether in fact communicate.  That's what I'm all about.  I'm pretty much all about communicating within the science community, but just as important, and maybe even more important for me is to communicate to the public.

MIKO:  So complicated scientific concepts, and representing them somehow in a visual format.  Could you give me an example of something visual that you've used?  Some metaphor maybe that you've used to communicate something complicated?

FRANKEL:  This notion of using metaphor is incredibly powerful, I think.  I don't think we use it enough in science.  At least I don't think the scientists do when they speak to the public.  It's quite a powerful tool to come up with some sort of visual metaphor to get a handle on an idea.  You're never going to express the entire idea deeply.  You can't, because it is in fact a metaphor.  For example, in the book, in No Small Matter, I wanted to make a picture of something that communicates some sort of irreconcilability, let's say.  Something that is counterintuitive, because that is, in fact, what the quantum world is about.  It's not the same kind of science that we're used to. 

MIKO:  Because things are so small that it's not the same?  Because they're just so different?

FRANKEL:  As George Whitesides says in the introduction, small is interesting.  Very small is very interesting.  So this apple is something that I sort of was working on for a while.  I have this glass apple that is one of my favorite things.

MIKO:  Oh, the apple is the metaphor?

FRANKEL:  The entire image, in fact, is a metaphor.  You see this glass apple, and then you see a shadow that it supposedly is casting.  But it turns out, if you look carefully, the shadow is in fact rectangular.  So there is no way that an apple, whether it's glass or anything, can cast a squarish shadow.  So I basically made it up in Photoshop.  I took a photograph of a cube, and I extracted the shadow of that cube, and placed it in the apple image.  So you have this apple and a square shadow.  The idea behind it is to tell the reader, this can't be.  It doesn't make sense, but that in fact is what's going on at the quantum level.

MIKO:  So for instance, in the image that you're describing, the shadow casted by the apple is in the shape of a square.  So the idea, if I understand that correctly, is that when light passes over the apple, we would expect it to create a shadow in the shape of the apple.  What you're saying is in the quantum world, you can't expect light to behave in that way.

FRANKEL:  You've got it.  That's it.  So I want to point out that all the pictures that I tried to make for researchers and for books, first of all, this is a learning process for me.

MIKO:  For you, as well. 

FRANKEL:  It's absolutely fantastic.  I think that there's a whole world of young people out there who love science, who love the visual, and somehow want to combine the two.

MIKO:  Do you think there's a role for using these kinds of things in high schools?  Or for just science learning?

FRANKEL:  I'm absolutely convinced that in the visual vocabulary or language, this is where we can get people to ask questions.  Because when you look at a picture, as opposed to a formula, for example, you're not afraid to ask a question about it.  You're not intimidated.  In the end, I really feel strongly that not only using pictures that other people have made can be an incredibly beneficial experience to learn.  You know, we learn this all the time in school.  But this is the other part that I feel strongly about.  That getting students to actually create pictures could be another very powerful way of learning about science.  I mean as I just said, as I'm making a picture, I'm constantly asking questions about the science that I'm making an image of.

MIKO:  What you're actually trying to represent.  What the choices are.

FRANKEL:  Right, exactly.  You have to make choices.  Just like when you're writing an article.  You have to figure out what it is that you want to say.  You have to understand your subject.  This same thing when you make images.  So in fact, we do have a fabulous National Science Foundation funded program going on, called "Picturing to Learn."  It's an undergraduate program.  We're getting our students to draw the answers to certain science questions, and this is an important thing.  Draw as if you were explaining to a high school student.

MIKO:  So the students, they get together in a room, and they explain concepts to each other by just drawing.  There's no talking?

FRANKEL:  So there are two parts to this.  One is, we have 4,000 drawings in our database from the classes.  These are lecture classes, where the faculties ask the students for homework assignments to draw X, Y, and Z for the purpose of explaining.

MIKO:  Give me an example, would you, of one of the things that these students tried to describe to each other visually.

FRANKEL:  So for example, one of the drawings that it is very appealing when I show a few of these around is, draw the concept of Brownian motion.  And so the student has this great drawing of bumper cars.  It's really cool, and it seems to be really a great metaphor.  But as it turns out, it does fall apart in certain areas.  And we don't have to get into the detail now.  But it doesn't quite work as a metaphor.  So the fun part of this is with our discussions, with the teachers and the students, we discuss why it's not the best.

MIKO:  So it sounds a little bit like these are exercises to get started talking about something.  That, somehow, when you put something on paper and you draw it, it's a way to start saying, ahh, we know this, but we actually don't understand this other part.

FRANKEL:  Exactly, that is it.  You've got it.  It's a means to a longer conversation.  It's sort of, I don't like to use the word gimmick, but in a way it is.  It's a way of approaching something.  And what we're finding, the best part of this program, is that it's the collaborative nature of the workshops, which is a separate part of the program that seems to be shining.  What we do is get together for a full day, science students and graphic design students, and they are asked to create a representation of various phenomenon.  The wonderful thing about it is the conversation that takes place.  It's almost as if the end product isn't that important.  It is the process of getting there, and the questions that the non-science student asks, for example.  And the fact that the science student has to figure out what in the world they're going to say.  And then there's been a wonderful part is that the graphics student can contribute as well.  They could say, oh, I see what you mean by that.  Well, if you want to do, say, that, why don't you do it this way?  So it truly is a collaborative exercise.

MIKO:  Because it becomes an iterative exercise.

FRANKEL:  Yes, and the iterations themselves are incredible fascinating.  You could see, for examples, where the errors are in how they're perceiving the concept. 

MIKO:  So what the students must really enjoy, it sounds like it's a lot of fun for them.

FRANKEL:  It's fun, yeah.

MIKO:  What can a teacher get out of an experience like that?

FRANKEL:  Well, it's a very good question.  And it turns out the teacher maybe in the end gets more than anybody, because the teacher sees where are the misconceptions.  In fact, one of our, well, not just one, many of them.  But one in particular, Don Sadoway at MIT, he's actually changed the way he's teaching a particular subject, because he sees that the students aren't quite getting a very important concept.  In this particular area, it's about boiling point.  And what is related to boiling point is something called secondary bonding.  Don has seen that they're not getting it.  And so he, as a very serious teacher, has decided to start rethinking the way he's teaching it.

MIKO:  When you say, not getting it, many students are making the same mistakes that are wrong?

FRANKEL:  Yes, exactly.  They're leaving out a part of the drawing that has to be in there.  And it's really in-your-face to be honest with you.  You know, they could get the right answer.  If they were asked to circle the right answer, what has the boiling point?  They can get the right answer.  But when they are asked to explain it in a drawing, you see that they don't get it.

MIKO:  So you're getting at a deeper level of learning basically.

FRANKEL:  There you go, exactly.

MIKO:  Right.  Do you think that teachers themselves could design an entire curriculum just based on these visual communication techniques?

FRANKEL:  Frankly, yes, I do.  In fact, we're trying to, in our spare time, put together a series of these drawings.  Some of them, Rebecca Rosenberg and I, Rebecca is the Project Manager.  We're gathering the very interesting examples of what are very good explanations, and what are, let's just say, not so good.  And why they're not so good.  Using this as a jump-off point for teachers to start their own conversations in class.  Not only conversations, but getting students to make their own drawings. Where I would really like to create some sort of wave, if I could say it that way, I just think we should bring this into the middle and high schools.

MIKO:  It seems like a very natural way to get students to really engage, at least in first principles.  But what are the limits of visual learning in this kind of context?

FRANKEL:  Studying, for example, spatial relationships do not necessarily tell you whether they understand phenomena.  So we are collecting data.  This is not just gut feeling any longer.  We're seeing the numbers.  And at the very, very least we can say that this tool is a new tool for teachers to see where are the students' misconceptions.  That we know we could absolutely say.

MIKO:  Do you think there's any danger in trying to represent images quite literally sometimes?  Do you think, where do you draw the line between going for the metaphor and going for the actual, say, this is what an atom looks like?

FRANKEL:  Yeah, that's a really good question.  I think that, again, when we are representing something, we are re-presenting.  We are not showing the thing.  There has to be some sort of translation, some sort of interpretation involved.  So some people think literally.  Some people tend more toward the metaphoric when they try to explain to somebody else.  The problem is both of them fail somewhere.  When you go for a highly literal translation, you're not really getting the essence.  This is the biggest problem a lot of scientists, I think, face is that they want to tell you everything.  Or they want to show you everything in their diagrams.  Then what happens is you can't read any of it.  And the same thing in a way with the metaphor.  All metaphors at some point fall apart somewhere.  But here's the point, if we were to talk about that, if we were to actually include that in part of our educational system, when we talk about how this image was made, why it doesn't work, why it does work, that in itself is a teaching tool.

MIKO:  OK.  So can you give an example of that? 

FRANKEL:  If I were to ask you to think of an illustration showing evolution, I will bet you that most of, let's just say, the non-experts will imagine the series of a chimp that gets crawling, and then standing, and slowly becoming a man.

MIKO:  Yeah, that's been replicated everywhere.  That's in comic strips.

FRANKEL:  All over the place, precisely.  And it's dead wrong.  In so many ways, it's dead wrong.  Evolution is not that linear for goodness sake.  I mean that's the key to understanding some parts of evolution, that so much of it is about probability and uncertainty.  And we're not all males, folks, and we're also not all white by the way.

MIKO:  Right, because it ends with a white male at the end.

FRANKEL:  Yes, at least the one that I have in my mind.

MIKO:  So align them in a line like that in a row implies that there's just been a very standard and gradual change.

FRANKEL:  Yeah, and it ain't that way, and yet it is unbelievably powerful. 

MIKO:  Everybody knows it, yeah.

FRANKEL:  Absolutely, so we have to be incredibly careful when we think about representing ideas in science.  We have to maintain the integrity of the science.  That too is something that we should talk about with our students.  We just don't do it enough. I think it might be changing.  At least I hope it's changing.  We're trying to make a little corner at Harvard, and MIT, and Duke, and even Roxbury Community College, we're trying to create a little corner of our picturing to learn, which I'd love to expand to other schools. 

MIKO:  Wow, that sounds like a really interesting project.  It sounds like it's really useful for the students who participate, and then the people who can actually analyze what just happened.  What did we just make?

FRANKEL:  Yeah, where did we foul up here? 

MIKO:  And that's all just pen and paper, right? 

FRANKEL:  That's right.  In fact, we're very conscious about not having the tools be that sophisticated, because we don't want the tools to inform their thinking.

MIKO:  Well, you know, a lot of people think that with the new media world that we're in now, and with the Internet, and interactive learning, and a lot of online learning resources available for students that there are different formats for learning something visually.  You can have an interactive click-through, or you can have an animation, or you can just have your regular static image.  Do you think that some of these new media developments actually help visual communication?

FRANKEL:  Oh, they have to.  Of course they do.  I mean it's incredibly exciting, but sometimes they get in the way.  That coolness can be so overwhelming that you actually don't even want to pay attention to the content.  That's one of my concerns.  I mean of course I feel that animation and internet activities are the future.  It's the way it's going.  But I don't think we should discount, for example, something like a still image.  Remember animations are basically a series of still images.  You can get a lot of information by reflecting one image, let's say, next to the next thing that happens.  Like two images that are taken maybe 10 seconds apart.  Seeing the difference between one moment in time, and the next moment in time, which you can really only see if you compare still images can be incredibly valuable.

MIKO:  Like a storyboard approach rather than animation.

FRANKEL:  Yes, yes, exactly.

MIKO:  I do think that there is so much information out there, that sometimes the static image is a little bit easier because it's an experience that's paced by the choice of the individual rather than choice of whatever the media is.

FRANKEL:  Yeah, right, right.  And it also even though interactivity of course involves participation, when you hold your attention on a particularly wonderful, or maybe even beautiful still image of science, if gives you pause and allows you to reflect.  I mean I know that sounds very touchy-feely, but I think we're getting away a bit too much from what since really is.  Science is unbelievably, stunningly amazing.  We need to just back off a little on being bombarded with all these animations, and stunningly gorgeous things, and pay attention to what it is that we're trying to convey.

MIKO:  Well, thanks for talking to us today about visual learning of science.  I'm looking forward to seeing your book No Small Matter, about nanoscience, and things that we actually can't see.  Thanks so much for helping us understand a little bit more about why these things are important.

FRANKEL:  It's a joy, and I hope that some of your listeners would just wait for one moment when they see a glorious image in science, and not run away, and just pause and reflect. 

MIKO:  Thanks, Felice Frankel.

FRANKEL:  You bet.

MIKO:  Nice talking to you.

FRANKEL:  Thanks.

MIKO:  Thank you for listening to this edition of Nature EdCast.  You can find this podcast and others at nature.com / scitable.  That's nature.com / s-c-i-t-a-b-l-e.  Please join us again next time.