Design for Research

Evoking Emotions and Creating Trust through Participation

How can we find new ways to communicate the severity and urgency of a crisis, in this case the antibiotics crisis? We have addressed this question and, in close collaboration between design and research, developed a Visual Essay (VE) on the topic. With the help of VE, we want to find out in two initial studies how visual and verbal fear appeals support us in communicating scientific content and how participation affects trust in visual science communication.

1. Investigating the Effects of Visual and Verbal Fear Appeals on Risk Perception

It is well known that fear appeals are an effective means of behavior change in health communication. Therefore, we are conducting a study to investigate how visual and verbal fear appeals influence people’s threat appraisal, fear response and risk perception. In this way, we want to better understand how we can design fear appeals – apart from textual information – to maximize their effectiveness.

The Study Procedure

The visual communication product VE provides information about the antibiotics crisis. Our designer Björn Döge worked closely with the research team to create neutral and fear-based versions for the visual and verbal appeals. The visual fear appeal, for example, shows a stylized simulation of red bacteria growing uncontrollably on a black background. This is intended to give users the feeling that there is no escape. In contrast, the neutral version uses simple white text fields on a black background. The verbal appeal to fear describes a dystopian future without antibiotics, while the neutral version provides a factual explanation of the discovery and function of antibiotics.

In an online experiment, the study participants are randomly assigned one of the conditions:

• visual appeal neutral
• visual appeal fear
• verbal appeal neutral or
• verbal appeal fear.

This way, we want to find out whether the visual fear appeal goes beyond the effects of the verbal fear appeal.

2. Investigating the Effects of Active and Passive Participation on Trust in Visual Science Communication

Participatory science communication is often seen as the key to building trust between science and society. However, there is little empirical evidence to support this claim so far. Our study aimed to fill this gap by simulating a participatory design process. In this way, we want to find out how both direct and observed participation in a design process

• the perceived trustworthiness of scientists,
• the credibility of information and
• the intention to trust scientists.

The Study Procedure

Once again, we use VE as a study object under different conditions. The participants in the active group take part online in a simulated collaborative design process. They can choose the title of the article, the typography, the framing and the visual elements themselves and thus create their own final version. In the passive group, participants are informed that a collaborative design process has taken place and they review the design decisions made by others. The control group received a prefabricated version of VE with the information that it was the implementation of the raw text by a designer.

Further studies are currently being planned.