New Project: Combating Anti-Microbial Resistance: Information Design and Architecture in Persuasive Pharmacy Spaces

By Rosemary Lim (Pharmacy)

What do graphic and information design, architecture, pharmacy and human factors have to offer collectively to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR)?

We are very excited to report that a multi-disciplinary team of academics who are members of the Health Humanities research cluster in the disciplines mentioned and Loughborough Design School have recently been successful in receiving funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council special call on tackling antimicrobial resistance in the build environment.

The Information Design and Architecture in Persuasive Pharmacy Spaces: combating AMR [IDAPPS] project, led by Professor Sue Walker (Typography and Graphic Communication), introduces ‘persuasive space’ in thinking about the presentation of information, its situation within an environment, and how users interact with it, in the context of a community pharmacy. Community pharmacies are socially inclusive and convenient, and today play a key role in delivering public health. They are places where people wait for prescriptions to be filled or to see a pharmacist, and offer a persuasive space to raise awareness of the dangers of AMR.

The work done by Otto and Marie Neurath in the 1930s to raise awareness of and support prevention of tuberculosis (TB) inspired our work. They produced a series of charts with striking and effective images based on consistent and carefully considered principles, for public display in schools and community centres. The Neuraths believed that the space in which the charts were read and used was important for their effective reception and understanding. This aligned with the notion of persuasive space in architecture, in particular a significant seam of work taking place in the 1930s in the early stages of modernism when functionalism came to the fore.

IDAPPs considers this historical context studying graphic and information design in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century used to tell people about, for example, TB, infection spread, and approaches to hygiene to combat bacterial infection. We use this information to inform ideas for the development of designs for a persuasive pharmacy space, also taking account of user-centred information design projects which patients, families, carers, health professionals and designers work together, and the integrating and participatory principles of human factors and ergonomics.

IDAPPS has been designed to provoke and to generate ideas for future consideration. Through a competition, good practice report, and public exhibition, we anticipate a thriving legacy. A competition to design persuasive pharmacy space will comprise teams of information/graphic designers, architect or built environment profes­sionals or researchers and pharmacy practitioners or researchers. It will result in the development of a winning prototype set up in a pharmacy.

A report containing good practice guidelines for persuasive space in community pharmacies will contribute to expanding knowledge on the impact of the built environment and information design on wellbeing and education and will therefore be of interest to a wide variety of organisations. An exhibition will show examples of archival material to show how explanations and descriptions of AMR have been dealt with in the past, and the prototype design solutions.

To enhance feasibility and add value to the project, we have engaged two project partners: Day Lewis, a large independent pharmacy chain and Design Science, a leading science communication design group who will advise on the transformation of scientific fact to understandable information and play a key role in the curation and design of the exhibition.

Academic team

University of Reading

Prof Sue Walker (PI) Typography & Graphic Communication; Dr Rosemary Lim (Co-I) Pharmacy; Prof Flora Samuel (Co-I) Architecture

Loughborough University

Prof Sue Hignett (Co-I) Loughborough Design School

 

Examples of late-19th and early-20th century printed ephemera selected to how information about ‘microbes’ was presented to the public. Our intention is to focus on the verbal and graphic presentation of the information, noting, for example, expected level of literacy of the readers; ways in which medical authority is conveyed, and how the idea of microbes and resisting their spread has been represented graphically.

The Moral and Spiritual Implications of Illness and Suffering: the 2017 EMRC Conference

By Alanna Skuse (English Literature)

It’s now 48 hours since the end of the Reading Early Modern Research Centre’s 2017 conference, and I have sufficiently recovered to write up some observations from the event. (How can sitting down for two days be so exhausting?)

This year’s conference theme was ‘Complaints and Grievances’, and both the Wellcome Trust and the Health Humanities Research Group generously helped to fund a medical humanities strand which attracted speakers from various corners of the globe. This aspect of the conference intersected neatly with the University of Reading’s increasingly active medical humanities scholarship, including the cluster for Health Humanities.

Among those who travelled some distance to attend was the plenary speaker Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen (University of Leiden), a literary historian whose work has been central to the recent foregrounding of pain as a scholarly topic. His nuanced presentation on ‘Affliction, Consolation and the Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern England’ dealt provocatively with the question of what comfort and solace religious faith might (or might not) offer to those struggling under various kinds of grievances. His account of Nehemiah Wallington’s inconsolable grief at the death of his infant daughter was a moving reminder of the limits of consolation in the face of tragedy.

Appropriately, the topics of suffering, succour, consolation and punishment ran through many of the papers. Most of the papers in the medical strand focussed on the practical ‘complaints’ of early modern life, with topics ranging from sexual health (Jennifer Evans, Mona O’Brien) to accident and injury (Craig Spence), poverty (Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth, Hannah Worthen), self-help in illness (Hannah Newton, Elizabeth Hunter) and epidemics (Paola Baseotto). In discussions, however, it quickly became evident that underpinning these investigations were common questions about the . Did God send suffering as a punishment for wrongdoing or as a valuable opportunity to strengthen ones faith? Was the correct response to suffering resignation or active struggle? Did early modern people believe that they were bound to suffer, or that they had a right to health and happiness?

A visit to the Cole Collection

The Health Humanities Research Group was proud to welcome poet Kelley Swain and sculptor Eleanor Crook to the Cole Museum and to the Cole Archive on Tuesday. Kelley’s blog post can be read at the following link:

(https://kelleyswain.wordpress.com/2017/04/06/cole-collection-of-zoology/)

Kelley Swain is a poet and writer with a particular interest in  the links between poetry and science:

https://kelleyswain.wordpress.com/

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor of anatomical models and the macabre: http://www.eleanorcrook.com/http://www.eleanorcrook.com/

For more information on the Cole Collection, visit:

https://www.reading.ac.uk/colemuseum/ and https://www.reading.ac.uk/special-collections/collections/sc-cole.aspx

Michael Ruse speaking on evolution as a religion

Prof Michael Ruse from Florida State University will be coming to speak on Tuesday 26th May (week 6) at 2 in the Harborne Lecture Theatre on the theme of ‘Is Evolution a Religion? A View From Literature’. Michael is one of the leading philosophers of evolution, and the author of many influential books on the subject, including Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? and Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology . Please do join us if you can for his stimulating and engaging talk – all welcome.

New Science in Culture module wins University teaching award

We are delighted to announce that a new third-year module on Science in Culture, run by members of the IRHS, has won a University Collaborative Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning.The module was launched this term by John Holmes and Andrew Mangham in English Literature, David Stack in History, and Nick Battey, Keith Chappell and Steve Ansell in Biology. We have been teaching students from a wide range of disciplines, from English to Zoology, alongside one another in a mixed group. Our aim has been to bring together our very different approaches to understanding science and its place in culture, so that students and staff alike can learn how to combine literary, historical and scientific perspectives on topics such as evolution, monstrosity, genetic modification and scientific objectivity itself. We’ve been learning in the lab and museums, as well as the lecture theatre and seminar rooms, and reading scientific papers and controversies alongside novels, science fiction and poems. It has been a rich experience in itself, but also a really valuable experiment in interdisciplinary education, breaking down the barriers between what C. P. Snow called the ‘Two Cultures’, showing how science is embedded in culture, yet also how scientific and humanities approaches to knowledge can complement rather than undermining one another. It is great that the University has given its full backing to this experiment with this award, and we are looking forward to carrying it on next year with a new cohort of students.

Darwin anniversary

David Stack, Head of History at Reading, writes:

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On 24 November 1859 a book containing ‘the best idea anybody ever had’ was published. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of natural selection had been twenty-one years in the making and was written in a hurry.

Over a century and half later the significance of the book is (almost) universally acknowledged, but still often misunderstood.

The Origin did not introduce the idea of evolution. Evolutionary ideas had been around since the time of Aristotle, and in the ‘Historical Sketch’ which Darwin added to the third edition of the Origin he identified over 30predecessors). Nor did it announce the death of God, Darwin was still a theist when he wrote the Origin. And far from proclaiming that men were descended from monkeys, the Origin avoided the subject of human evolution altogether until two pages before the end, where Darwin tantalised his readers with the enigmatic comment that if his theory proved to be true ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’.

What then was the significance of the Origin? Why did it matter? And why does it still matter today? The answer is simple: because in ‘one long argument’ the Origin outlined the mechanism by which evolution works: natural selection. This was what the philosopher Daniel Dennett meant by ‘the best idea anybody ever had’.

Whereas earlier evolutionary accounts had been teleological, the Origin showed that evolution worked by an unscripted process of variation, branching, and differential survival rates. Nature was a ‘struggle for existence’, and evolution occurred by a merciless ‘survival of the fittest’ (the phrase was Herbert Spencer’s, but was incorporated by Darwin into the 1869 edition of the Origin) in which the best adapted survived and passed on their relative advantages to their offspring.

On page after page of the Origin, Darwin showed by example laid upon example, how feature after feature of the natural world could be explained not by Special Creation or an interventionist Creator, but by the simple incremental process of natural selection. This did not demand the death of God: the Origin was concerned with the origin of species – i.e. with explaining divergence and variety – not the origin, let alone the meaning, of life. But Darwin did demand the death of Design.

The target he had in his sights was the Anglican theologian William Paley whose ‘watchmaker analogy’ was the foundation of both nineteenth century natural theology and science. Science and religion, it should be remembered, were not at war in the early nineteenth century. They were at one in reasoning from Nature up to Nature’s God. As an undergraduate Darwin in the 1820s had occupied Paley’s old rooms in Christ’s College, Cambridge, and had been impressed by the theologian’s arguments. By 1838 he had hit upon natural selection as the mechanism to explain evolutionary change.

But if Darwin had, as he later put it, ‘a theory by which to work’ in 1838, why did he then wait twenty-one years before telling the world? The question has divided historians in recent years, with ‘internalists’ stressing Darwin’s proper scientific caution, and ‘externalists’ suspecting Darwin’s acute awareness of the potential social and political consequences – for himself, for his family, and for society –  of unleashing his dangerous idea.

Whichever explanation one favours — and as is the case in most historiographical disputes, the truth probably lies somewhere in between two caricatured extremes – what is undeniable is that the delay made the Origin a better book. It allowed Darwin to flesh out his understanding and systematically work through possible objections. As a result one of the most persuasive features of the Origin is Darwin’s ability to anticipate objections and tackle them head on. Indeed, much of the book is a master class in anticipatory refutation. Even some of the chapter titles – ‘Difficulties on Theory’, ‘On the Imperfection of the Geological Record’ – acknowledged the difficulties he faced, and indicated his determination to rebut every possible criticism.

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Why then was this work, so long in the making, ultimately written in a hurry? The answer is three words: Alfred Russel Wallace. The ‘perennial afterthought’ in histories of evolution, Wallace was a naturalist working in the field in south-east Asia, who during a bout of malaria had an idea for a scientific paper, which he entitled ‘On the tendency of species to depart indefinitely from the original type’, and sent it to Darwin in June 1858. When Darwin read the paper he was flabbergasted. Wallace too had hit upon the theory of evolution by natural selection. ‘All my originality, whatever it may amount to,’ Darwin wailed, ‘will be smashed’.

He would delay no longer. His plan for a multi-volume doorstopper to be entitled Natural Selection was set aside, and he set to work on a crisply composed outline sketch. Darwin proposed calling it An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection, until his publisher demanded something snappier.

It is often said that the Origin sold out on the day of publication. This is not quite true. Darwin was no J.K. Rowling, but all 1,250 copies were taken by booksellers and a second edition was in print by January 1860. Four further editions, all slightly modified, appeared in Darwin’s lifetime, and the Origin has never been out of print since.

There is no better way to mark the 155th anniversary of the Origin than by sitting down to read it. Some of the detail of the science is now outdated (largely because subsequent scientists stood so squarely on Darwin’s shoulders), but that is beside the point. The construction of Darwin’s argument is exemplary; the prose is often poetic; his examples are occasionally startling; and his protests against Paleyan Design are as good a riposte to contemporary Creationists and ‘Intelligent Designers’ as you will find. Most of all I defy anyone to read the Origin with an open mind and not share the awe and admiration of Darwin’s insight with which the Origin concludes: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The limits of science

Dr Berry Billingsley from the department of education will be leading the next work-in-progress session of the IRHS on perceived boundaries defining the extent or limits of science. The session will be at 1 p.m. on Monday 3rd of November in HumSS 127. This will be followed at 2 by a wider discussion of the projects being undertaken through the IRHS and projected plans for this coming year. Both parts of the meeting are open to anyone interested in cross-disciplinary work on the humanities and science at Reading.

Talk at the Linnean Society

This Wednesday lunchtime (1st October) I will be giving a talk at the Linnean Society on how poets have responded to changing conceptions of the natural world, from when the eighteenth-century naturalist Carolus Linnaeus first devised an ordered system for classifying plants and animals, to Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace’s discovery of evolution by natural selection, and beyond. I’ll be looking at a wide range of poets, starting with Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who wrote a speculative account of organic evolution in verse at the beginning of the nineteenth century, moving on to Victorian poets, including Tennyson’s famous account of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ in his elegy In Memoriam, and ending up with the modern American poet and editor of Darwin Philip Appleman, who is one of the most outspoken atheists writing in America today.

I am excited to be speaking at the Linnaean Society, as I’ll be in the very room where Darwin and Wallace’s theory was first announced in 1858. The audience, now as then, will be made up mainly of biologists, so I am looking forward very much too to this opportunity to show working scientists how poetry can help to explore the world that they are uncovering through their scientific research.

John Holmes

A Pre-Raphaelite Museum

As part of this year’s Oxford Open Doors programme, John Holmes will be giving a talk explaining how the Pre-Raphaelites became involved in the design of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in the 1850s, and how the Museum itself encapsulates in stone, iron, and glass its own scientific conception of the truth of the natural world. The talk will be at 3 p.m. on Saturday 13th September at the Museum. The event is free, but you can reserve a seat by through this website.