Publications

Modern snapshots in the crafting of a medical illustration

K. E. A. Zhang and L. Garrison

Abstract

The time-honored practice of medical illustration and visualization, has, like nearly all other disciplines, seen changes in its tooling and development pipeline in step with technological and societal developments. At its core, however, medical visualization remains a discipline focused on telling stories about biology and medicine. The story we tell in this work assumes a more distant vantage point to tell a story about the biomedical storytellers themselves. Our story peers over the shoulders of two medical illustrators in the middle of a project to illustrate a procedure in one of the small blood vessels around the heart, and through the medium of an online chat explores the dialogue, tensions, and goals of such projects in the digital age. We adopt the two-column format of the CHI template, as it is more reminiscent of the width of our usual messaging windows while working. The second part of our submission reflects on these tensions and modes of storytelling from an HCI and Visualization-situated perspective.

K. E. A. Zhang and L. Garrison, "Modern snapshots in the crafting of a medical illustration," in Proceedings of CHI '25 Workshop "How do design stories work? Exploring narrative forms of knowledge in HCI", 2025.
[BibTeX]

The time-honored practice of medical illustration and visualization, has, like nearly all other disciplines, seen changes in its tooling and development pipeline in step with technological and societal developments. At its core, however, medical visualization remains a discipline focused on telling stories about biology and medicine. The story we tell in this work assumes a more distant vantage point to tell a story about the biomedical storytellers themselves. Our story peers over the shoulders of two medical illustrators in the middle of a project to illustrate a procedure in one of the small blood vessels around the heart, and through the medium of an online chat explores the dialogue, tensions, and goals of such projects in the digital age. We adopt the two-column format of the CHI template, as it is more reminiscent of the width of our usual messaging windows while working. The second part of our submission reflects on these tensions and modes of storytelling from an HCI and Visualization-situated perspective.
@inproceedings{zhang2025stories,
author = {Zhang, Ke Er Amy and Garrison, Laura},
title = {Modern snapshots in the crafting of a medical illustration},
booktitle = {Proceedings of CHI '25 Workshop "How do design stories work? Exploring narrative forms of knowledge in HCI"},
year = {2025},
numpages = {3},
abstract = {The time-honored practice of medical illustration and visualization, has, like nearly all other disciplines, seen changes in its tooling and development pipeline in step with technological and societal developments. At its core, however, medical visualization remains a discipline focused on telling stories about biology and medicine. The story we tell in this work assumes a more distant vantage point to tell a story about the biomedical storytellers themselves. Our story peers over the shoulders of two medical illustrators in the middle of a project to illustrate a procedure in one of the small blood vessels around the heart, and through the medium of an online chat explores the dialogue, tensions, and goals of such projects in the digital age. We adopt the two-column format of the CHI template, as it is more reminiscent of the width of our usual messaging windows while working. The second part of our submission reflects on these tensions and modes of storytelling from an HCI and Visualization-situated perspective.},
pdf = {pdfs/zhang2025stories.pdf},
images = {images/zhang2025stories.png},
thumbnails = {images/zhang2025stories.png},
project = {VIDI}
}
projectidVIDIprojectid

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