Practical Research - Sophia Martineck, The Body (Bill Bryson)

https://www.martineck.com/e/index.php
Sophia Martineck
- Berlin based illustrator

Kat told me about some leaflets she designed to give to people to inform them about the surgery they're about to have. It was shown that people found these more helpful than the hospital provided ones.
- couldn't find these online, need to do a deeper search.

Would be really interesting to look into subject matter like this. Could demonstrate the impact of science to people in a way that relates to stuff they experience, providing context, allowing things to make more sense.
Eg. Immune system, breathing, allergic reactions, photosynthesis etc.

https://www.charite.de/en/service/press_reports/artikel/detail/warum_ein_comic_patienten_besser_auf_eine_op_vorbereitet/

'Before undergoing surgery, patients must be fully informed about what the procedure entails. The complex nature of the information involved means that patients often feel overwhelmed rather than well informed. Researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have been able to show that patients scheduled to undergo cardiac catheterization may find comic-style information helpful. The researchers’ comic-style booklet was shown to help patient comprehension and reduce anxiety. Results from this study have been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine*.'

'Overall, approximately 72 percent of participants were satisfied with the comic-based information booklet and reported feeling well prepared for cardiac catheterization. This compared with only 41 percent of participants in the standard informed consent group.
 
“A comic-style presentation enables the simultaneous visual and textual processing of complex information. This has been shown to enhance comprehension in different learner types,” says Dr. Brand. '

^ information from website. 

Thinking about the implications of my work, what do I want it to do?

-          - Benefit people with an issue they have (medical)

Feel as though by going down a more medical route there is a way of being able to help people within this. Could incorporate the idea of presenting complex information (health related) in a way that allows people to understand what’s happening to them as well as to others.

-          - Develop a medical device, equipment, information pack could be beneficial.

-          - Thinking along the lines of what charities such as Macmillan do.

What would I want to be communicating?

-          - The science behind different medical conditions, could I make it something I have (DB or psoriasis)?

-          - Common illnesses, how to prevent these, what happens when you get them?

-          - Want to avoid it being a leaflet, would need to be something more inventive.

Need to look in ‘The Body’, think this will be a really helpful in finding information that is true to everyone that they might not know. Would be able to experiment with presenting this in a new informative way.

Need to think about the distribution (could be later in the project).

'The Body' - Bill Bryson

- A book looking inside our bodies. 'We spend our whole lives inside one body, and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works, and what goes on inside it.' 

What it would cost to build the average human:

- 59 elements, carbon, oxygen hydrogen, nitrogen and phosphorous make up 99.1% of what makes us. 

Cost of Elements:

Oxygen = £8.50

Hydrogen  = £16

Nitrogen = £0.27

Carbon = £44,300

Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium = £47,000

Thorium = £0.21

Tin  = £0.04

Totally price of a human, accounting for all elements = £96,546.79

• Your lungs smoothed out would take up the size of a tennis court
• The length of the airways in your lungs could travel from here to moscow
• The length of all your blood vessels would travel around the earth 2.5 times
• You have a metre of DNA packed into every cell, if you lined these up it would stretch 10 billion miles, past pluto
• Need 20 billion strands of DNA placed side by side to equal the wifth of the smallest human hair

Basic building block of life is the cell. 

Cell is full of ribosomes, proteins, DNA, RNA, mitochondria, smooth endoplasmic reticulum, rough endoplasmic reticulum, golgi apparatus etc. 

DNA the instruction manual to making you. 

The book is split into different sections of the body. 

- How to Build a Human

- The Outside: Skin and Hair

- Microbial You

- The Brain

- The Head etc.

Ones I think could be interesting:

> The Immune System

- Could link this to:

>When Things Go Wrong: Diseases

- Could be a lot of information people would want to know in here. 

> Sleep
- Another interesting topic to discuss.

The Immune System:

The immune system consists of a large variety of cells that all work together as part of the immune response. However, there are 5 types of cell at the heart of the system, lymphocytes, monocytes, basophils, neutrophils, and eosinophils. However, lymphocytes often present the most interest.

Lymphocytes are of two principle types: B-cells and T-cells, T-cells are then split into two categories: helper T-cells and kille T-cells. Killer T-cells kill cells that have been invaded by pathogens. Helper T-cells help other immune cells act, including help B-cells produce antibodies. Memory T-cells re

Talk with Dom 

Presenting complex information in a way for people to understand it.

Play with this practically-take one complex system. 

The rodina - research - interaction through design.

Presenting complex systems/information in a way for people to understand it. 
- This is what I'm tackling