As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended the Image and Meaning workshop held at Apple Computer’s Cupertino campus. It feels as though there’s an increasingly large number of people thinking about how images are used to convey scientific concepts, and it was a thrill to hang out with folks and discuss what we do and what troubles (and excites) us.

The core of the workshop took place in the break-out sessions with less than a dozen people. The image above comes from my section’s discussion. Each of us had identified two images prior to the meeting—one we deemed successful and another we found problematic. During our session, we drew two axes on a sheet of butcher paper: one ranged from “specific” to “general” audiences (although “specialist” to “novice” might be a better pairing) and the other from “iconographic” to “realistic.” We then placed our images on the conceptual plane. It stimulated some good discussion.

What I really enjoyed was hearing the perspective of people coming from a variety of backgrounds. In our group, we had everyone from graphic designers to mathematicians, working on problems from earthquake analysis to interstellar gas clouds, for audiences as diverse as professionals to schoolchildren. (One of the mathematicians, Daina Taimina at Cornell University, crochets hyperbolic objects.) Yet we found surprising common ground, and I think everyone would claim to have benefitted from the experience. Yay!

If I have a chance, I&rdsquo;ll try blogging about at least one of our other activities. All in all, I found my day and a half in Cupertino quite stimulating.