Master of Communication Design alumnus Zhen Xiong has worked with researchers to visually communicate the findings from a nation-wide research project funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the circular economy!
Graphic novels have long been associated with our favourite superheroes. After all, that’s how the likes of Superman, Batman and Spiderman came to be household names whose cultural relevance spans generations.
But graphic novels detailing how the circular economy works have – until now – been missing from the shelves of the newsagents, bookstores and online retailers.
Thanks to Xiong, working alongside a team of cross-university researchers led by Professor Ralph Horne, graphic novels can now be used as a medium to communicate important research findings in a way the public can access, digest, and relate to.
“As academics we are used to producing long documents and heavy reports which can be time-consuming to read,” said Dr. Louise Dorignon, Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT Centre for Urban Research, and one of the researchers involved in this project.
“We realised we needed to do something different if we wanted to reach a broader audience,” she said.
“We also noticed that depictions of circular economy are often very abstract and that very few of these depictions relate to home and housing so our intention was to communicate our findings in a way that was accessible to a non-expert audience.
“After all, it is all about the people who ultimately live in these homes.”
