I’ve been working with Dr Duncan Rowland at the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham on his paper for the upcoming alt.chi 2010 (that’s the experimental offshoot of CHI 2010 in Atlanta, the world’s leading human computer interaction conference). Duncan’s work is very wide and varied, bringing together aspects of psychology, computer science, and, in this case, visual art. This paper illustrates how visual representation of a narrative (comic or sequential art) can be a successful means for communicating processes, experiences and results in the scientific domain.

Duncan’s recent use of the Comic Life software package as a way of documenting two recent projects opened his mind to the possibilities of comic art in science. In the first, primary school students were encouraged to represent their experience of a practical science lesson in the form of a photostory with some success. In the second, the experiences of participants taking part in a study of the scientific nature of thrill were represented in comic book form (Duncan’s department at the university are involved in ongoing analysis of people’s biological reaction fairground rides!). Anyway, it’s all in the comic strip, so read on…