Collaborative Design Research: The Visualization of Medical Concepts

The proliferation of data is threatening to swamp our ability to convert data into knowledge. Visualization promises to facilitate this conversion. Yet visual communication designers have not been deeply involved. One potential impediment to involvement is the lack of collaboration between visual communication designers and knowledge workers in specialized domains This paper describes a collaborative research project that integrates medical science and visual communication design. The project involves the development of a visual language to represent medical concepts by deriving propositions from papers, breaking propositions into concept objects, designing a visual object system (consisting of icons, glyphs and combinations) to represent the objects, and displaying the objects as a network of concepts with links to the original papers. Prototypes have proven to be highly condensed and accurate yet readable in seconds. If the visualization approach proves successful, the results would be groundbreaking in science and design.