Making Research Accessible Through Creative Design and Visualization

Written by: Sara Lucille Carbonneau

Twenty-twenty (2020) has marked a year of growth for the Extended Mind. As we have taken on more projects, and more responsibility, so have we expanded the scope of our offerings. Most prominently among these offerings are creative and user experience deliverables. This has involved expanding our team to include artists and designers, with the incredible result that our research, in its final forms, has become easier to understand and quicker to intake.

One benefit of using creative deliverables is to translate research is that it makes the findings more accessible to a wider audience. If that audience is public, they may only need to skim an infographic or a few charts instead of reading an entire paper. And if the audience is internal, it can reach beyond the research teams to internal designers and developers who don’t have the time to commit to reading whole papers or sitting through hour long presentations. Creative outputs are simply much better at communicating large data sets at a glance than are the traditional written means used to report on qualitative research.

A good example of how creative deliverables can make research easily palatable is included below. This infographic captures the bulk of our findings, and process, from our research on using Mozilla Hubs as an alternative means of attending a conference.

While the information conveyed in this infographic may not be as thorough as what was published in the final paper, it is enough for the average person to understand what we studied, how we approached the research, and what our overall findings were.

Moreover, the graphic itself guides the reader towards the most important bits of information. The percentage of people interested in participating in future conferences via Hubs is highlighted in large font. And the image at the bottom allows readers to glimpse what the experience would have been like within the virtual conference settings.

This infographic, like many creative deliverables, tells a story. It guides the viewer through the experience of the research, while also giving them the option to pick and choose — jumping from research approach to FAQs with the flick of the eye. With written deliverables, getting a gist of the research is a much more laborious process that requires skimming, scrolling, and note-taking. But with creative deliverables, all of the data is available in a single appealing, yet informative, glance.

For researchers who are interested in making their data more accessible, we recommend using creative deliverables as a useful way of bringing your research to a wider audience.

Thanks to Tori Wheeler (www.https://toriwheeler.com/) for her design work on this project.

About the author: Sara Lucille Carbonneau is a researcher on The Extended Mind team with a passion for futurist narratives.