As well as her on-going work with the scientists of King’s College London, Gill collaborates with other scientists to help them with the visual communication of their work. Often, that collaborative work overlaps with, or builds upon, Gill’s graphic design research. This webpage will record these projects, with links to other webpages and websites where appropriate.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 2023, Gill worked with two research scientists from University College London to help them transform their research paper about a new development in radiotherapy treatment into an information sheet suitable for cancer patients. This project was coordinated by a member of the Public Engagement group at King’s College London’s Centre for Medical Engineering, who arranged for four patient representatives to engage with the project throughout, and provide insights and feedback from their unique viewpoint.
This project is described in detail on its dedicated Projects webpage and is briefly summarised below.
The project involved three online workshops to gather input and feedback from the patient representatives, together with a series of online meetings (which did not include the patient representatives) where the scientists, the coordinator and Gill discussed progress on the information sheet. The final sheet (after 17 design iterations) is shown below as an A3-sized spread. It was also made available as two A4-size pages.
A brief article describing the project can be found on the Cancer Research UK RadNet webpage Gill has contributed one of a series of longer articles for the main CRUK webpage. This longer article can be seen on this webpage of the Cancer Research UK RadNet website, with links to articles by the other team members.
Following on from the information sheet project, a clinician at UCL, who was one of the co-authors of the original scientific research paper, asked if Gill could work with her and other clinicians to help create an illustrated patient information sheet (PIS) for the parents/guardians of young cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy treatment. She had shown her colleagues the figures from the information sheet and they could see the benefit of including similar figurees in patient communications. The Public Engagement group at KCL was also involved in this follow-on project, with the work being funded by a grant from CRUK RadNet City of London (who also supported the original information sheet project).
This project is described in detail on its dedicated Projects webpage and is briefly summarised below.
Two figures were required for the PIS, one to show the treatment pathway for a patient (Figure 1) and the second to explain the difference between Proton Beam Therapy and Photon Radiotherapy (Figure 2). A great detail of communication between the research scientists and Gill was required to ensure that the figures were scientifically accurate. This included Gill visiting the UCL radiotherapy centre to see the treatment machines and take reference photographs to help her create the images for Figure 1.
Final versions of both figures are shown below. They were created at A4-size so that they could fit into a standard PIS Word document or be used as standalone leaflets.
Graphical Science 