Here's What Happens When Neuroscientists and Designers Team Up to Explain

Scientific Research
A new interdisciplinary project results in a moving sculpture, an animated piece, a song that
evolves and more
The afternoon suns warmth on your shoulders as you sat in the stands of a high school baseball game. A
frightening scene in a movie you watched when you were a little too young. The first time you kissed a
sweetheart. Memories, some important, some mundane, lodge themselves in the mind and can arise years
later. Much of that process is still mysterious even though researchers have spent many decades studying the
chemical cues, changing brain cells and flickering electrical patterns that encode memories in the brain.
Postdoctoral researcher Sam McKenzie studies how memories form at neuroscientist Gyrgy Buzskis lab
at New York University. But as fascinating as McKenzie finds the brain oscillations, genes and molecules
involved in memory, he does admit that the subject is complex.
Thats why he has partnered with programmer and artist Brian Foo to create a song that explains how
memory works. This isnt a rhyming explanation la Schoolhouse Rock! Instead, the way the song itself is
built explains how memories form. Theyve created an interactive program where visual patterns are
translated to musical motifs. Repeating a pattern encourages some motifs to grow stronger over time. The
end result is an evolving, interactive song that serves as a metaphor for memory formation.
Foo and McKenzie are just one pair of several in a group of scientists and designers collaborating to explain
scientific research. They are part of The Leading Strand, a project named after a concept involved in the
process of DNA replication. When genetic material is duplicated in a cell, the new, growing strand of DNA is
called the leading strand. The concept, explains the projects founder, science-trained designer Amanda
Phingbodhipakkiya, is a continuous new formation of two parts coming together to create new things.
For the first phase of the project, the teams worked together for two and a half months to create engaging,
innovative visual ways to communicate neuroscience research.
On July 13, an exhibition showcasing the fruits of those partnerships opens to the public at the Pratt Design
Gallery in New York City. Neurotransmission features McKenzie and Foos evolving song; a short
documentary on the genetic, neural and biochemical factors underlying gender and sexuality; and a kinetic
sculpture that demonstrates different models of how neurons fire, or send signals, among other projects.
In the future, Phingbodhipakkiya aims to bring together new cohorts of designers with scientists in other
disciplines, such as climate change and genetics. The ultimate goal, Phingbodhipakkiya says, is "to expand
our understanding of what's possible.
Phingbodhipakkiyas path to combining design and scientific discovery emerged quite naturally. While she
has concentrated on The Leading Strand project since April, she is also the art director at Primacy, a design
agency.
The now 27-year-old was a ballerina when she was younger, but a ski accident sent her into a long and
complicated recovery. The trouble she had learning to move like she did before the accident sparked her
interest in finding out how neurons give rise to movement. She decided to pursue a bachelor's degree in
neuroscience and behavior at Columbia University and worked as a research assistant in a lab at the
university's medical center under the direction of neurologist and professor of neuropsychology, Yaakov
Stern. There, she learned about how cognition changes as people age. But she also found out how difficult it
can be to recruit willing and able volunteers to participate in research.
"We weren't able to reach some populations that we were trying to get in, namely healthy, active, full-time
working professionals," she says. In that trouble, Phingbodhipakkiya saw a clear need to help the public
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understand scientific research. That led her to her next career shift: "I got into design to communicate science
and to help people understand the importance of basic science research."
A Master of Fine Arts at the Pratt Institute's Communication Design Program soon launched
Phingbodhipakkiyas career as a designer. In the spring of 2016, she started The Leading Strand with the
support of a TED Residency, a sort of incubator program for creative people run by the nonprofit conference
series.
The residency gave Phingbodhipakkiya the freedom and time to devote to her passion project, The Leading
Strand. Each collaboration in the first cohort has produced something that will have a life beyond the Pratt
Design Gallery exhibit. Our goal is to make each experience a stand alone piece that is [a] delight to view
and explore, yet maintains the rigor and nuance of the research, Phingbodhipakkiya wrote in a post
published on Medium.
For Quartz, Anne Quito calls The Leading Strand a matchmaking service between scientists and designers
aimed at explaining scientific breakthroughs. Phingbodhipakkiya says that she did spend a lot of time
thinking about how potential partnerships could work. But she gives more credit to the hard work of the
scientists and designers themselves. As [each duo] got to know each other better they would find the hook
of the research and get to know what was most interesting, she says.
Phingbodhipakkiya started The Leading Strand with a neuroscience focus because that was where her
scientific expertise and network lay. For one collaboration, her former mentor Yaakov Stern worked with
motion designer Alisa Alferova to craft a kind of animation that explores how memory can fail. They explore
the process using visual metaphors. For example, retrieving a bike from where it is parked is a simple task
unless the memory retrieval process goes awry. Instead of the location of the bike, the brain may offer up a
flood of other tangentially-related memoriespast experiences with the bike in question, walks along
similar-looking streets, sightings of other bikesthat drowns the attempt to remember the location of the
misplaced bike.
The kinetic sculpture uses ball bearings to represent firing neuron impulses. The ball bearings travel through
a series of chutes, levers and pulleys and help users compare two different models of neuronal
communication. Elaine Khuu is an industrial designer, so thats likely why her partnership with Andrew
Bogaard, an MD/PhD candidate with Eberhard Fetzs lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, resulted
in a kind of pinball-machine-like apparatus.
The film about gender and sexuality came from joining the creative forces of Vicky Du, a filmmaker, and
Dhananjay Bambah-Mukku, a postdoctoral researcher at Catherine Dulacs lab at Harvard University. The
film isnt just a straightforward presentation of Bambah-Mukkus workit also explores the philosophical
implications of his research as well as the young scientists life, background and understanding of the world
around him. Its very artistic and beautiful, Phingbodhipakkiya says.
The final collaboration, between product designer Kelsey Hunter and postdoctoral researcher Julia Basso,
who hails from Wendy Suzukis lab at New York University, has produced a chatbot that helps its users live a
healthy lifestyle. The use of a lot of fitness tracking apps kind of falls off after a few weeks, when people
lose interest, Phingbodhipakkiya says. The bot not only tries to engage its users but also tells them about
rodent research in labs that has shown researchers the changes that exercise makes on the brain.
Four of the five Neurotransmission projects are digital and will live online after the exhibit ends on July
18. Phingbodhipakkiya is working on making sure that the fifth, the kinetic sculpture, will go on permanent
display. The results of the unusual collaboration will continue to demonstrate the possibilities in uniting two
seemingly disparate disciplines.
"I think people don't typically think of neuroscience and design together, but neuroscience is complex and
the purpose of design is to elucidate very complex information," Phingbodhipakkiya says. "Ultimately, I
think it is a very natural partnership."
Tickets to Neurotransmission, the first exhibit for The Leading Strand, can be found at the projects
website. The exhibit runs from July 13 through 18 at the Pratt Design Gallery in New York City.
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