Science Sketches and Café Cartoons

Summary: The background artwork at the café in the new UO Science Library features sketches from UO faculty and student notebooks. If you’re here, go check it out! [Update: Note Eric Johnson’s comment on the sunshades! Update: Lara Nesselroad, below, notes that there is an informational placard next to the artwork!]

The Science Library here at the University of Oregon has just emerged from a renovation that turned a cramped underground facility into a more expansive space that extends into a gorgeous above-ground “social commons.” (For an overview, see this news item.) I was on the user-group committee that met with architects and campus facilities people throughout the design process. The committee was very time consuming, involving for example, hours-long interviews with architectural firms, but it was one of the most fascinating and enjoyable committees I’ve been on. I was consistently impressed by the architects, the campus planners, and my fellow committee members.

An interesting event in this process, near the end, involved the décor of the café that’s housed in the commons space, specifically the background artwork on the walls. The graphic designers suggested a wall of equations, which I thought would be awful because (i) it’s not warm or inviting; (ii) it feeds into misperceptions that equations are magical entities in themselves rather than distillations of underlying concepts. (Certainly everyone who has taught a physics class has experienced students who want to know what particular formula answers a particular question, rather than trying to understand what concepts allow one to construct the relevant equation.); (iii) it’s unlikely to represent the variety of scientific fields; (iv) it’s cliché and generic; and, most importantly, (v) there’s nothing local about it — nothing that is unique to the University of Oregon

Illustrations > Equations

So, I suggested an alternative: nearly all scientists make sketches, whether of biological specimens, optical components, or countless other things. Let’s get examples from UO faculty and graduate student notebooks, and make the café background art from this! It gives a better sense of how science actually works, especially in multiple fields; it’s more “human;” and it’s more local, and distinctively Oregonian. I volunteered to organize this, and the idea took flight. I got a great response from emailing faculty in all the science departments, who sent in drawings of neurons, crystal structures, Feynman diagrams, design notes for a sudoku-solving computer program, and more. Here’s a marine invertebrate embryo, from Svetlana Maslakova (Oregon. Inst. for Marine Biology)

A large subset of these was chosen by the designers for the final wall panels, including two of mine. Here’s one, a cartoon of proteins binding to a membrane and sculpting it into a sphere:

Here’s what the final Science Café wall looks like:

and another photo:

The first photo is from this morning, soon after the building opened for the day. The second is from a week or two ago, and shows some remnants of construction. (There’s also another section, behind the cashier’s spot.)

Treasure Hunt!

Sadly, there’s no sign anywhere in the Science Commons of what all these drawings are, or that they’re from UO faculty and students. There is a placard next to the drawings identifying the UO faculty and students who contributed! (I didn’t notice this despite several visits to the display — thanks to Lara Nesselroad for emailing and commenting about this!) I drew an arrow pointing to it (just on the photo, not on the actual wall):

The placard is heartening, but it would be great for visitors to have an annotated map. Or even better, a touch screen that calls up more information about each item. (There are great panels that do this at the campus Art Museum, for example.)

Given this lack, this post is all you’ve got! Below (after the update), I’ve pasted the list of contributors and brief descriptions of their work. (I’m not certain that it is completely correct in its correspondence to what was picked for the wall.) You can print out the list, take it to the café, and have a neat treasure hunt matching drawings to text!

Update Oct. 21, 2016: See Eric Johnson’s comment about more science-derived art on the library exterior. A photo of it is at the end of this post.

Name	Department or Institute	Description
Diana Avila	Human Physiology	Blood flow, heart, cranial nerves
Dietrich Belitz	Physics	Phase diagram
Spencer Chang	Physics	Effective Field Theories, Black Holes
Leslie Coonrod	Chemistry	Crystallography
Kathleen Freeman	Computer science	Lambda calculus
Samantha Hopkins	Geological Sciences	Field sketch
Matthew Jemielita	Physics	Zebrafish gut perturbation
Ngan  Luu	Human Physiology	Bones and joints
Lauren Maloney	Chemistry	Chemical reaction
Svetlana Maslakova	Marine Biology	Marine invertebrate embryos
Kat Milligan-Myhre	Biology	Gut microbes, immune & epithelial cells
Chris Minson	Human Physiology	Nervous system sketch
Jens Noeckel	Physics	Paths in Quantum Propagation
Boyana Norris	Computer science	Lambda calculus
Raghuveer Parthasarathy	Physics	1. Vesicle budding 2. ellipse localization
Brad Rose	Chemistry	Chemical structures
Bitty Roy	Biology	1. Beetle (Xanthogaleruca luteola)   2. leaves
Davison Soper	Physics	Feynman diagrams, SU(3) color
Ben Strickland	Physics	Refraction of light through a sphere
Emily Goers Sweeney	Biology	Cloning diagram
Tristan Ursell	Physics	Polymers and proteins; the central dogma
Roo Vandegrift	Biology	Fungi (Xylaria apiculata etc.)
George von Dassow	Marine Biology	Invertebrate embryos and larvae
Travis Wiles	Biology	Bacterial colonization of host surfaces
Hannah Wilson	Biology	Achillea millefolium and other plants
Michal Young	Computer science	Sudoku program design notes