Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Graphic Medicine within the MESSAGE Research Cluster at the University of Plymouth (UK)

The Message research cluster at University of Plymouth is dedicated to the development and discussion of contemporary visual communication messages through research. The intention of the group is to support the development of new knowledge, enabling the exploration and expansion of critical and interdisciplinary activities and debates around visual language and health.
This paper will outline how graphic medicine has been integrated into ongoing interdisciplinary research and knowledge exchange projects involving students and academic staff.
A series of case studies will be presented including:
The Smoke Monster. A piece of graphic medicine aimed at educating rural communities in Uganda on the dangers of household air pollution. This student project has now been developed into an animation used in community-health (CHEW) training curriculum across several countries in Africa.
Breathe Easy: During the pandemic, four individuals engaged in oral history interviews with undergraduate students from History and Illustration. As members of the Breathe Easy Support Group they all suffer respiratory conditions, some of which are debilitating and long-term. These memories were interpreted through a series of visual narratives.
Illustrated Stories of Asthma: This project incites and visualises the memories of patients who have suffered severe asthma, and the major benefits of new therapies in their treatment. In a process of capturing and returning their stories, students in History and Illustration used oral history and visualisation techniques to trial an innovative history-health-illustration method that incited patient storytelling and built graphic comic stories and images.
These projects and research findings will be contextualised using insights into the relationship between visual communication and health from Victoria Squires’ research into Visual communication in a time of crisis which uses a survey of sources, interviews with selected designers, and qualitative content research analysis of published visual communication works during the Covid-19 pandemic.