The image is based on a plan of the house originating in one of the architect’s drawings (Tabula VII: Tværsnit gennem Chirurgisk Academis bygning, Peter Meyn, 1786), and which currently features on the Museion homepage and exhibition floorplan. The image is appealing to us as it highlights the old surgical amphitheatre at the heart of the museum – a space that powerfully links the history of the building with events exploring contemporary biomedical culture – and the quirky ‘reveal’ of the sectioning is visually intriguing. Yet it doesn’t scale down well or pop out visually, and the complex beauty of the image makes it difficult to create a rapid symbolic link to the institution as a whole. So over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on translating the floor plan into an image that can be used more flexibly, and to help increase familiarity with our expanding programme of activities. Below I’ve highlighted some of the thoughts and questions that came up during the process:

Communicating Content or Place?

At Medical Museion we have a plethora of visually intriguing objects that have featured on leaflets in the past. But in this project we moved away from photographs of the museum’s contents, as a single object doesn’t easily communicate the range of activities, and the temporal span of collections, we want to evoke. Instead we focused on the space itself, hoping to nourish some of the shoots of recognition we already have for the auditorium. In looking through online galleries of museum logos, I was surprised how few evoke their uniquely recognizable buildings – I’d love to see examples.

Simplicitly vs. Usability

One question that came up was how simple a design has to be to be a logo; the house designs are evidently not a Nike swoosh or IBM icon. Perhaps the key function of a logo is its ability to aid recognition; you see the logo, you think of the place. In itself, this doesn’t require extreme simplicity. It’s more the need to be able to place, reproduce, and instantly ‘read’ the logo in venues relevant to your audience that usually favours simplicity. For us, venues of interest are primarily online and social media, and larger scale printed postcards and posters. We therefore wanted an image that was rich enough to carry a postcard or poster by itself, as well as scaling down for blog post thumbnails, but didn’t have to worry about stringent brand identity requirements, letterheads and so on. A nice surprise when I began experimenting with scale was that the little versions seem to retain their identity whilst also obtaining a hint of anthromorphic cuteness. I wonder if in our link-rich, social media culture, the notion of the super-simple unconscious ‘pow’ of recognition will become less obligatory for logo design – especially for less commercially driven enterprises.

Architectural Evolution

I hope that basing the designs on the architectural plan will provide a basis for evolution; we can produce more or less simplifed versions, using different mediums, or interleaving particular colours or collaged elements for special events or programmes. Google Logo Gallery is a powerful (if aesthetically mixed) example of this kind of approach, and The Louvre’s website nicely demonstrates the use of an architectural feature as background texture in a way we could emulate.

Democracies of Style and Hue

Logo design is a complex craft that often includes researching audience response – with limited resources, I treated the flow of staff and guests through my office as a barometer (see the final iteration of my whiteboard in the snap). It was quite surprising to me how much intuitions about colour, style, and text varied, even within what you could consider a rather limited demographic. And this made it challenging to reach fixed points; to pull together and tie-off the threads of opinion in the fabric of my own responses. One such fixed point was the decision to use an aesthetic that communicates the handmade; the silhouette/papercut aesthetic that inspired the design is part of a current trend of using traditional crafts in contemporary settings; a nice resonance I think for Museion. Colour is something I’ve not worked with much before, and here Ane and Bente, aided by the delicious Pantone colour bridge and the inspiration of a large-scale photograph of an operating theatre, led me to a palette of ‘medical’ colours evoking surgical gowns and sheets.

We’d love to hear your thoughts or about similar processes – here, or on a postcard…

With thanks to Benny Thaibert, Ane Pilegaard Sørensen, Bente Vinge Pedersen, and everyone else who was accosted to give their opinion on colour schemes and design. 

As I blogged about earlier this month, I have been reading “The Panic Virus” by Seth Mnookin. It’s a book that takes you through a historical journey from the invention of vaccines to its successes, failures and not least the role communication played/plays in both. Ranging from the communication done by experts, the media to laypeople and celebrities. The book is well written and based on a great amount of research. I finished reading it yesterday and despite having enjoyed it a lot it also left me with a slightly discouraged feeling. It is a perfect example of how panic can grab a bunch of worried parents, about how ‘Mommy instinct’ becomes superior to scientific research and how the media at times can put aside rationale in order to follow the conflict, the emotional story and forget the premises of scientific research which makes giving absolute ‘yes or no’ answers extremely difficult. My discouragement was very much: Well what do we do about this, how can we take on mommy instincts and heart breaking stories and scientists who do not apply to scientific standards? Risk is difficult to communicate, communicating all the things we don’t know makes risk seem even more scary. So what do we communicate, how much do we communicate and in what way? And where does public health communication specifically fit into all of this?

I then realised that public health communication is perhaps exactly where some of the communication in the whole vaccine story went wrong. The media attention was taken over by people who took their starting point in individuals – in their own nine patients, their own child or grandchild or their own gut feeling. Even though organisations like the CDC, whose focus is population health, of course did and are doing their best to communicate the benefits of vaccines both to individuals and societies and draws attention to what the majority of the research findings is telling, I believe it is to some extend is still the failure of public health communication that may be to blame here. As I was taught from the very first day in my very first class in Public Health, Public health is exactly about the population perspective and we should be obliged to be much better at communicating this. Public health people should be the holders of that expertise – it is not the responsibility of the medical doctors or the statisticians or sociologists. We should be better at communicating risks and what they mean and be better at explaining what it is we don’t know. Most of public health research, whether it is done by numbers or by qualitative methods is about finding trends, causation in large groups etc that we can utilise to ensure or improve the wellbeing of the individual as well as the broader population. And we need to be better at communicating this. Not only to the public but also across scientific disciplines, across levels of society from decision makers to funders of health initiatives etc.

Taking my own public health training as my reference, I must admit, that I was not given much guidance on the communication side of public health. I was told that my expertise is that I have an insight into many disciplines and can bridge these disciplines, but how actually to carry out this bridging function I wasn’t given tools for. I hope I can be able to ‘catch up’ on this skill and that I can share my experiences with others. To a start I recommend people to read “The Panic Virus” and learn what the consequences can be if we don’t pay attention to the communication side of public health sciences.

The profile page is pretty straight forward – name, address, nationality etc. That is easy and as soon as the letters were typed in, I could easily identify with the person on the page. But when I came to ticking off the boxes under “EUPHA sections“, “Field of expertise” and “Topic areas” it was almost impossible to find myself. Nowhere was there any referral to anything that has to do with public health communication!

I must admit I was really very surprised about this. Under Sections the closest thing to fit me was the “Public Health Practice and Policy-section”. Under Field of expertise there was again no communication related option (see below), so in order just to tick something, I saw “health information” as the best option although this could also refer to be health data (which I luckily also have some expertise in):

And finally, under Topic Areas there was neither any reference made to communication, unless you could assess it to fall within “Health Promotion” or “Health Behaviour”.

All in all, I must admit that didn’t really feel represented in EUPHA categories. And I can’t help wonder why communication is not a least a topic area for EUPHA. Is public health communication not a priority? Is it just something that is assumed to fall as a subcomponent of other public health topics and expertise? Or is this not something a public health person need worry about because we’ll have the communication staff to take care of about this?

On the EUPHA website, communication is not entirelyy missing. Thus, the association refers to EACH The European Association for Communication in Healthcare – which is an interdisciplinary non-profit organisation which brings together researchers and trainers in the field of communication in healthcare.

I am however still disappointed in the severely misrepresentation of communication in EUPHA. Public Health is about the health of the public and communicating health messages, research findings etc. to the appropriate people (whether they be the public, policy makers, other researchers etc.) is in essence the back bone of successful public health research and maintaining a healthy population. It should in my opinion at least qualify for a Topic Area in EUPHA’s profil page options.

At Science Online 2012, I was so fortunate to win a copy of “The Panic Virus” by Seth Mnookin, and with a long stopover in Chicago on my way back to Copenhagen this was a perfect way to pass time and close Scio12 with a well written story about the role of public health science communication! I have not yet finished the book, but will most likely return with a separate blog post on it when I’m done. There is lots of interesting stuff in that book.

I will however just share a poster or infographic that I came across the other day. Actually, it kind of summarizes a big part of “The Panic Virus” or is at least a response to the panic which, among other things, a false report of a link between vaccines and autism created among parents. A panic that still has a strong take on many people today. The poster is created by Medicalcodingcareerguide.com and uses data on vaccine and disease by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

I like the poster for several reasons (see the poster here or inserted below). Firstly, I find the layout very appealing. There is something very retro about it. The yellow colour, the choice of font and the style of the images. Secondly, I like that it plays with the format of a poster. It doesn’t use a conventional format, but plays with the proportion. Thus, it is long and thin (a little bit like a syringe) and it tells a continues story. You can jump in anywhere, but you can also let the poster tell you a story from beginning to end. Thirdly, the numbers are to the point. No excess information or complicated graphs. It gets the message across without being overly complicated, but not naively simple either. That goes for the text too. There isn’t a fear of using latin words, but it is still informative. And then again, it is just a poster/infographic so it can’t contain all the complexity. I still like it however.

One element of critic could be that the two crossing syringes in the title could be interpreted as a crossing out of the word vaccination – which is definitely not the intention by the designers I assume.

Voila the poster, an example of public health science communication:

Created by: Medical Coding Career Guide

Now, Rebekah has taken the effort to collect the tweets and has posted them on her teleskopos history of science blog. The discussion speaks for itself, and I don’t want to dilute it by carrying it over here (but don’t hesitate to join it in teleskopos’ comment section).

What about medicine? Are there any arguments against the claim that medical science and medical technology makes progress?