Solid State UX

A beautiful figure can get you a cover on a top journal. Some institutions, like the University of Illinois, have special scientific visualization departments to help their faculty get published.

I’ve been reading issues of the prestigious journal, Science, lately, which I always approach in the same way.  First of all, I flip through the first third or so of the pages impatiently.   This is the part of the publication that contains the essays, letters, commentary, political events, news, and short science pieces on things of interest to normal humans- like sex, or how to win an argument, or cool robots, or oil spills, or funny monkey behavior.   In short, this is the material which I’m capable of understanding.

Instead, I go straight to the “Research Articles” section, which contains pieces with titles such as “How the CCA-Adding Enzyme Selects Adenine over Cytosine at Position 76 of tRNA.”  My brain starts to whirl.   This is one of the main articles in Science, man.  Impact Factor something like 32.   Muy Importante.

I have zero background in molecular biology, so I admit that I don’t get much out of the title.  Onto the abstract, where I am counting upon them to tell me why this article matters.  A certain type of enzyme, I learn(ATP(CTP):tRNA nucleotidyltransferases), can add something called CCA onto the 3′ end of transfer RNA precursors without using a nucleic acid template.   Now here’s where the novel part comes in.   I learn in the abstract that this process is well understood for Position 75 of the transfer RNA.  But, Position 76?  Get the hell outta here – you kidding me?

So apparently these loony-birds in the Department of Molecular BioPhysics at Yale who wrote the article had the nerve to stick some of this CCA stuff at Position 76 and pulled it off.   So having comprehended that much, I flip the page and voila!, there it is, my favorite part… something that looks like this:

Or, if I’m really lucky, something that looks like this (from a different article, on the phenomena of tetrophilic liquid crystals):

This stuff is beautiful.  Mesmerizing.  Addictive.  Information.  I just let it wash over me.  Does it really matter that I don’t understand the underlying science?

But of course, this is Science.  Careers are made getting published in this journal, so I can imagine a lot of thought goes into the visualizations.  What about more average journals?  What is the overall quality level of the figures we see there?

This TOC image from the Journal of Physical Chemistry proves that the most dangerous apparatus in the hands of a chemist is PowerPoint. (source: TOC ROFL)

One word. Ouch. And I could go on and on….   Make sure to check out the hilarious TOC ROFL (Table of Contents, Rolling on the Floor Laughing) blog for endless examples of this sort of thing.

Another TOC image from The Journal of Physical Chemistry. Source TOC ROFL

Everyone seems to agree that figures are the most important part of a journal article.  Most readers skip directly to them, which explains a rise in graphical table of contents and figure galleries on scientific publishers’ websites.  In their real lives, scientists communicate in visuals, not paragraphs, which can be witnessed by popping into a weekly lab meeting at any research lab in the world.

Yet published scientific figures are often an explosion of data noise, chart junk, and lazy clip-art visualizations. Their poor quality is often dismissed since their creator does not expect the material to be understood outside of a narrow field.  And journal editors and peer reviewers don’t much care about matters of presentation style, outside of what appears on the issue’s cover, for which they unashamedly seek out a beautiful and sexy image.

In science, there is  peer pressure not to look like you are trying to present your work to a general audience.

“You’re thought by some of your colleagues to be wasting your time and perhaps endangering your academic career,” writes Max Brockman in his preface to the book “What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science.” This sentiment clearly extends to the creation of figures.  Don’t make things look too polished, you’re supposed to be a scientist.

One would never guess that there is a rich heritage and body of accumulated knowledge about scientific illustration – in fact, it has long been a recognized skill, even a profession of its own, and often a source of pride to the researcher.   Galileo made beautiful, skilled watercolors of what he saw through his telescope.   His line drawing style of planetary movements, a durable and considerate example of information design, is still in use today.

Galileo Galilei's "The Phases of the Moon." These are his own skilled watercolors that he made while looking through his telescope, causing noted scientic illustrator Felice Frankel to wonder 'Did his paints freeze on a cold night?"(Image courtesy of Biblioteca Nazionale - Florence, Italy)

The first scientists who started looking into microscopes at the fascinating new world of the infinitesimal were even more fussy about their figures.  Robert Hooke’s Micrographia was published in 1662 and was the world’s first scientific best seller.   The illustrations, famous for their beauty and sophistication, were done by Hooke himself.  The temptation is to think of Hooke as artist first, and scientist second, but he was no lightweight.  He was the Royal Society’s first curator of experiments, the first microbiologist, the first crystallographer, and a precocious physicist who developed a wave theory of light 250 years prior to Foucault’s official discovery of it.

Robert Hooke's illustration of a flea, from Micrographia, 1662.

In the early days of discovery, the researchers with the best mastery of the instruments become the most notable.   Galileo was seeking a fortune at manufacturing top of the line naval spyglasses before thinking to point one of his creations skyward.  A continuum of scientific visual communication begins with pictures, simply trying to convey the magisteria of nature.  As the researchers get deeper into the paradigms in which they study, the pressure is to show how things work, mostly in the form of schematic diagrams.   Therefore the demand for skillful creation of explanatory visualizations should be increasing.

Yet over time, as science embraces new instrumentation and communication tools, the art of visual presentation  is democratized and deemphasized.  It becomes less the pervue of the specialized and the talented, and more dominated by the grammar of ubiquitous platforms such as digital cameras, ChemDraw and MS Office.  We progress in technological sophistication yet we regress in graphical communication – a simultaneous renaissance of explosive scientific breakthrough combined with a dark age of visualizing evidence.