Resonant Connections through Design and Data

International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen: STEAM Imaging VI

It has been a true pleasure to co-develop this year’s STEAM Imaging workshop for the International Fraunhofer Talent School in Bremen. The workshop brought together researchers, Edinburgh College of Art PhD student and artist–physicist Gregory Alliss (www.gregoryalliss.com), and upper secondary school students for a deep dive into the world of MRI imaging and MR sequence development.

Our shared goal was to open up MRI not only as a scientific discipline, but as a field that invites creative inquiry. Through hands-on experimentation and artistic exploration, we encouraged participants to approach complex technology with curiosity, imagination, and confidence.

In a “mini-MR Lab,” a multisensory simulation environment designed for MR sequence creation, participants tackled the challenge of imaging glass, a material that is difficult to measure with conventional MRI parameters, and explored how design strategies can support scientific reasoning with complex materials. The workshop segment 

demonstrated how artistic thinking opens up new metaphors in technical fields, introduces alternative approaches to problems, and provides unexpected access to complex systems.

On the second day, the students, together with artist and MR physicist Gregory Allis and researchers from MEVIS, moved from the virtual simulation environment to real scanners. Working on both low-field and large research MR scanners, they tested sequences they had modified themselves and scanned various objects—glass, plants, and even a human—experiencing firsthand how subtle technical decisions shape what becomes “visible.” This shift from conceptual planning to empirical experimentation, blending STEM and artistic approaches, lies at the heart of STEAM Imaging: understanding developments in digital medicine not only as systematic, objective, and traceable procedures, but also as creative, subjective, and context-dependent processes that sometimes even rely on non-standardized methods.

This Residency & Science Engagement Program, STEAM Imaging VI, which I designed, is a partnership between Fraunhofer MEVIS in Bremen, Germany, and the Institute for Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, to create this unique opportunity to explore the potential for application of creative multi- and transdisciplinary approaches in digital medicine. This collaboration involves the International Fraunhofer Talent School Bremen, Oberschule am Waller Ring in Bremen, and is supported by Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

More about the residence STEAM Imaging VI