visualization

One of my favourite fellow bloggers, medical photographer Øystein Horgmo, has just written about how he was recently invited to document a family taking farewell of a young father in an intensive care unit. It’s a moving story. But what actually caught my interest was this painting (by medical doctor Joseph Dwaihy and artist Sara Dykstra), which Øystein uses the illustrate the story. Based on a photograph from the […]

Visiting Lotte residential care home is always an experience. The first thing you notice upon entering is there are no signs warning you of something or pictograms and ideograms giving instructions. The next thing you notice is the lack of plastic. No carers in wipe down aprons, no wipe clean table clothes, plastic beakers or […]

Remember Tom Cruise wawing hands in front of the imaginary screen in the movie Minority Report? Well, Hans Rosling (the famous visualiser-wizard of human demography) does it much better in this awesome presentation of changes in income and life expectance throughout the last 200 years. It’s a BBC production, and will certainly set new standards for […]

Drew Berry, the outstanding molecular animator at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, says (according to Science Roll): Scientists have always done pictures to explain their ideas, but now we’re discovering the molecular world and able to express and show what it’s like down there I know Melbourne, Australia, in ‘down under’. […]

Rollator drawings, 30th September – 4th October 2010: Continuing my appreciation of the aesthetics of seemingly ugly and mundane artefacts we associate with ageing, I investigated a second rollator. This was a contemporary model. It had a clear plastic tray, a wire shopping basket and four wheels rather than three for extra stability. It was […]

Rollator drawings  27th–28th, 28th–29th September 2010: When I began drawing the rollator I asked myself why I was drawing something that was so boring, so ugly with no interesting features. I was reminded of the talk Nurin Veis, Deputy Head Sciences – Science Communication and Senior Curator of Human Biology and Medicine at Museum Victoria, […]

Many of the most essential things in recent biomedicine are too small or too fast for the naked eye to see. At the session The biomedical invisibles, at the conference in September, Henrik Treimo and Victoria Höög addressed the issue of how to represent such invisibles. How can we make objects, which escape an immediate […]

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference. Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time […]

“How do we display artifacts which are neither sexy nor beautiful?” asked Yves Thomas in his presentation at last month’s conference in Copenhagen. His own answer to the question was to bring a human dimension to these objects by adding virtual elements such as interviews with the researchers or video clips of the object in […]

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine? [biomed]KlilrII37zY[/biomed] The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from […]

We’ve just set up the installation ‘An Ageing World’ in the main lobby of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen. The installation has been made to mark the IARU-conference on Ageing, Longevity and Health that takes place 5-7 October, organised by the Center for Healthy Ageing. The simple idea was to make a […]

Back in 2006, I, for one, was unreservedly enthusiastic (here) about XVIVO‘s animated ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’. Originally made for use in undergraduate life science teaching at Harvard, it became immensely popular on the internet. It was magic — as  Jim Endersby said , it was like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”. Since […]