THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX: PAPER TOYS TO COMMUNICATE SCIENCE

Over the past few months we've been working on a collaborative project for Leeds Creative Labs, a pioneering programme by University of Leeds's Cultural Institute that aims to harness the skills and talents of University of Leeds academics and creative professionals, to spark fresh ideas and make surprising connections.

A collaborative project with Dr Andrew Lee at University of Leeds has harnessed our creative expertise in paper materials, folding techniques and the design of architectural and performative spaces to design and prototype STEM public engagement tools. Our focus has been on communicating the experience of inhabiting nano and microscale worlds that are otherwise inaccessible to most. The focus of the inner world shifted to the Coronavirus given our current pandemic circumstances. 

We incorporated story telling techniques to provide educational messages about the spread of the virus, using a storyboard created by Andrew as a starting point for making work. The storyboard inspired a range of public engagement prototypes around the theme of Coronavirus that each tell different parts of a story. Using paper materials and folding techniques, including pop-ups of the virus, provided a sustainable way to present important and timely messages about the spread of COVID-19. It enabled initial prototypes to be easily made and delivered to Andrew in flat form via postal services during the first national lockdown.

 

We have had a long-term interest in paper toys as a powerful tool for communicating science, architecture and engineering within our public engagement activities. Toys have been traditionally used as educational devices and avant-garde art for children and adults.  

 “Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are precursors to serious ideas.”  Charles Eames.

One such toy is the Dutch Perspective Box: an optical device containing a painted scene of an interior space. An eye hole in the side of the box provides an intimate view into what appears to be a three-dimensional architectural space that the viewer can inhabit. The Dutch Perspective Box is considered to be the 17th Century precursor to contemporary virtual reality.

We based our perspective box on a rare example that uses multiple perspectives that is on display in the National Gallery London. We stripped the room back to the architectural skeleton with floors, doors and windows in which a three-dimensional virus inhabits the space.

There are two alternative views into the room via two eyeholes on the left and right hand side of the box. The box uses anamorphosis techniques (distorted visual projection), which perfectly represents the experience of looking into nanoscale worlds that researchers at the University of Leeds described as being a voyage through rooms.

As a further development we have been prototyping ways in which we can animate the space using optical techniques to create scene changes within the box. These have used Red Green Blue (RGB) colours to create a multiple exposure print of the architectural apace overlaid with anatomical images from our original storyboard to show three scenes of the virus: in an architectural space, within a human mouth and within human lungs.

Looking through a red, green or blue theatre light filter makes one of the images more prominent then the other, such as this example that shows the print viewed through a red light filter. This technique creates an animated space within the box that can tell multiple stories through scene changes.

We would  like to thank the kind support from the Cultural Institute: University of Leeds and the Bragg Centre for Materials Research: University of Leeds.