SIREN hired us to create visuals for their annual research meeting. We took them through the usual process of a questionnaire and then followed it with research to come up with a fitting concept. I don’t often share the concept stage but I thought some great visuals came out of this journey! The following concepts were birthed out of researching the work that SIREN is doing towards applying a racial equity lens to social care research. As requested we applied an abstract element to represent this theme.
Concept 01
This Concept brings 3 different perspectives into one by merging 3 different figures. It says community…. it says ‘If what we did to others, directly effected ourselves we would treat each other more fairly”
The figure shows a colorful, amicable gathering of a diverse set of people to think as one. More importanly it speaks to SIREN’s principle of “We aim to feature speakers who represent a diversity of social identities, lived experiences, perspectives, and professional roles.”
Concept 02
This concept creates an abstract city out of a bar chart typically used to compare data. They’re used to represent the research element that goes into analyzing the topic of social health equity. The society is represented by the multi-colored arms reaching toward the sky. This reinforcing a sense of a symbiotic community.
Concept 03
This Concept humanizes the data. It puts a human on the microscope in the place of cells. The woman is looking up and challenging the idea of what the scientist is looking at, a human being not just data.
SIREN speaks about “aiming to create space for these conversations without leading them”. Most importantly this speaks to their description of “We must take an unflinching look at the field and ask hard questions of ourselves, in particular about the ways racism shapes both social care practice and research, and the ways in which these impacts are often invisible to those with socially privileged identities (e.g. white, male, native English speaker, heterosexual, white-collar professional, etc.)”
Overall this image reflects the researcher looking deeper into these topics while surrounded by a healthy picturesque environment.
