New article, “Glass Art as Bridge: Towards Democratising MRI Sequence Development,” in CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation
Updated: 4 hours ago
I am pleased to announce our open-access article, “Glass Art as Bridge: Towards Democratising MRI Sequence Development,” published in the CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2026), Special Issue on Co-Creation. Read the full article: DOI: 10.23726/cij.2026.1826
I am particularly pleased to see our work included among the contributions to this Special Issue, and honoured to be in the company of such an inspiring and distinguished group of authors. The breadth of perspectives represented here attests to the richness of co‑creation as both a field of inquiry and practice. Read the full Special Issue on co‑creation: https://e-publishing.cern.ch/index.php/CIJ/issue/view/280
As Guest Editors Andrew Dubber and Michela Magas emphasise in their introductory editorial, On Co-Creation, CERN IdeaSquare functions as an “intelligence collider” where art, science, and technology intersect to address complex, multidisciplinary R&D challenges. Our paper asks how transdisciplinary co-creation can create meaningful access to complex R&D environments for the people who will ultimately use, shape, regulate, and depend on emerging technologies in digital medicine.
The overarching STEAM Imaging residency programme (https://shorturl.at/Ly3zo) that I originally co‑developed with Sabrina Tölken fosters digital‑medicine literacy and participatory access. I conceived and curated STEAM Imaging VI, “Resonant Connections through Design and Data,” establishing a framework that integrated artistic research, MRI R&D, secondary STEM education, and science engagement within a sustained co‑creative process
At the centre of this framework was the artistic research of British glass artist and physicist Gregory Alliss (gregoryalliss.com), a PhD student at the Edinburgh College of Art Glass Studio. Working with reclaimed CRT glass from obsolete television sets, among other materials, Alliss created negative-space phantoms that transformed an artistic question into a functional MRI test object. By asking what glass could reveal when brought into the magnetic field, he established the material and conceptual starting point from which scanner experiments, students’ questions, and the public exhibition developed. His experiments with glass directly informed the sequence work undertaken with gammaSTAR, Fraunhofer MEVIS’s hardware-independent, low-code platform for MRI sequence development. In this way, material questions became the driver of a shared field of inquiry among artist, researchers, and students.
The collaboration brought together artist Gregory Alliss; Matthias Günther and the MR research team at Fraunhofer MEVIS; upper-secondary Digital Medicine students at Oberschule am Waller Ring in Bremen, guided by their teachers Jan Wicke and Viktoria Zöger and supported by the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen; and exhibition producer Miriam Walsh at Inspace and the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh for the resulting Between Glass and Magnetic Fields exhibition at the Edinburgh Science Festival, which featured live-streamed MRI scans broadcast directly from the Bremen laboratory, involving researchers and students.
For healthcare and medical-technology R&D, the project highlights a critical question:
How can we create meaningful opportunities for future talent to engage with complex systems early, long before they are expected to design, deploy, regulate, or depend on them? At the same time, these transdisciplinary exchanges generate new questions and perspectives among established researchers.
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