Design for research and science communication: turning complex ideas into experiences that last
I'm Himanshi Parmar, a visual designer and artist based in Berlin. For ten years, I've collaborated with researchers, NGOs and academic organisations with a version of the same question: how do we make complex information clear enough to understand, and moving enough that people carry it with them and act on it? What I've learned is that people remember what they feel, and they feel what they can touch, make and recognise themselves in. This is where visual design does its quiet work. It gives shape to things that are otherwise intangible: a colour, a texture or a single image can hold an idea, a history or a feeling that words alone struggle to carry. Once a feeling has a form, people can hold on to it, connect with it and carry it into how they act. The projects below grow from that belief, together with the people who know the subject best, and leaves room for everyone else to respond in their own way.
I work with nonprofits, research teams, and cultural and educational institutions across Europe, the UK and India. Here is what that question has looked like in practice.
Cotton, colour and the hands that grow it
Colours in the Field grew out of Dr Arianna Tozzi's research in Vidarbha, a cotton-growing region of Maharashtra in central India. In the 1860s, demand from Manchester's mills pushed farmers there from food crops to cotton. Today Bt cotton covers almost all of India's cotton farmland, bringing rising costs, debt and pesticide use, while women do most of the farm work and rarely own the land.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Arianna, me, and our community partners SOPPECOM and MAKAAM (Forum for Women Farmers' Rights), who campaign for the rights and recognition of women farmers and co-created the research with us. We used art as a research method: Arianna joined the making, and I brought an interpretive eye to the research. Each piece layers archival material, photographs, illustrations and quotations. The overlaps are sometimes uncanny, sometimes ironic, and ask viewers to question what has carried on from the past and to picture other futures.
The colours come from the field itself. The dyes were made from plants grown by women in the research area, among them moringa, neem, hibiscus, jamun, turmeric, roselle and the leaves of Bt, indigenous and tree cotton. We mixed the pigments into a tapioca paste and screen-printed them onto khadi woven from white desi cotton and a naturally brown, non-GM cotton. Screen meshes are made for chemical inks, so undhaza (अंदाज़ा), a Hindi word for intuition or a feel for something, became our guide: squeegees of different sizes, sometimes our own hands, sometimes a brush straight onto the cloth.
We chose not to fix the colours with chemical mordants such as alum. As sunlight fades the pigments, each showing becomes part of the work's life, and the textiles become living archives whose colours keep shifting as they travel. The exhibition runs with Creative Manchester at the University of Manchester from 3 to 30 November 2026. At the Whitworth, Arianna and I run a screen-printing workshop with natural pigments, where people make their own response to the research with their hands.
Drawing something you cannot see
We have never spoken about carbon as much as we do now. It lives in our footprints and our credits, in every promise of net zero, and yet it stays strangely out of reach, a word we repeat without ever really seeing. Nowhere is that truer than in mangroves, dense and harsh places where so much of it rests quietly beneath the roots and the mud, in quantities too vast to imagine.
For the CARBON exhibition at Science Gallery Bengaluru, (Understanding) Mangrove Carbon brought art, data and geospatial technology together to take visitors into the rich, layered world of mangroves. Technology for Wildlife Foundation, who map mangrove coastlines with drones, shared their research, and each of us artists, Gayatri Kodikal, Svabhu Kohli and I, responded to it in our own way. A magical realm, an abstract painting and maps drawn from data all explored a mangrove's relationship with carbon, ecology and people.
I was captivated by how the drone maps looked. Seen from above, the channels and waterways branch out almost like the roots of a mangrove tree. So I used the maps as a shared starting point with the researchers and built illustrations around them. One of my interpretations is mangroves as the lungs of the planet. The work was designed to leave space, so that each visitor, in that room and from their own context, could make their own sense of it.
One quiet detail
Research organisations rarely need loud brands. They need to be trusted by experts and still make sense to everyone else.
Climate Transition Economics is the Berlin practice of climate economist Dr Michael Jakob, working on the economics and policy of the shift to a low-carbon world. Together with him, I designed the identity and website around one small idea: an upward arrow hidden in the logo. It is the kind of detail you notice on a second look. Work on the climate crisis can feel slow, uphill and often far from optimistic, and the arrow is a quiet reminder that the direction can still be upward: a small sign of hope built into the brand of an organisation working on a long, gradual transition.
Designing the gap
Lacuna Kitchen is a participatory theatre performance by Abhishek Thapar and Afra Tafri Creations, staged as a pop-up restaurant. Performers host the tables, and over a shared meal the evening opens up the lives and labour behind the food we eat.
In most restaurants, the people who cut, cook and serve the food stay invisible. Guest and worker share the same food, sometimes a tip and a smile, yet their lives rarely overlap. Between them there is always a gap: a lacuna. Lacuna Kitchen minds that gap and tries to mend it. Over four plant-based courses, the tables are turned and the workers take the lead role.
The visual identity, which I designed with the team, was drawn from that gap. Its shapes are uneven in size and stacked on one another, never quite at rest, the way a kitchen holds people who carry more than their share. Between them a space is left open: the distance between the one who serves and the one who is served. The logo gathers semicircles and an oval into an uneasy balance around that space, and in their outline a wine glass appears, a reminder of the table where both sides almost meet. Only in the word itself do they touch. The u and the h of the logotype reach for each other and join, the quiet promise of the project to close the gap. Long after the plates are cleared, the shapes carry the word back to the guest.
The identity is a constant work in progress, and it is meant to be. Since 2023 it has travelled with the production from Kampnagel in Hamburg and the Ruhrfestspiele to Arnhem, Oerol Festival on Terschelling and a church in Alkmaar.
What these projects have in common
In each of these projects, I have followed just one thread of the visual language back to its meaning: a pigment, a map, an arrow, a gap. There are many more layers in each, carried by colour, texture, sound, space and the way people move through the work, and every one of them could tell its own story.
Every one of these projects began with a relationship. I deeply believe that any creative work, even with a client, is a collaboration. What we make together depends on the relationship we build along the way, and good design is only ever a by-product of that.
So the process starts slowly: long conversations with the researchers, makers and communities who know the subject best, and time spent with their material before anything is drawn. Sketches are shared early and openly, so the people closest to the work can shape it too. From there, the work moves between clay, thread, natural dye, photography and the screen until it finds its form. Moving between the tangible and the digital adds layers of meaning, where texture meets technology.
If you're working on research, an exhibition or a cause that needs to reach people beyond your field, send me what you're working on. I'd love to hear about it.
About the author
Himanshi Parmar is a visual designer and artist based in Berlin, working where art, science and design meet. About Himanshi · Projects · LinkedIn
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