Elena
Milani
I have a teaching exercise I run fairly often. I show three images of technology. A floppy disk. A music cassette with a pencil stuck through one of the reels. Smart glasses that look like ordinary eyewear.
It’s a simple exercise to make invisible assumptions visible.
Everyone gets the floppy disk — even the ones who’ve never held one. It’s the save icon. Cultural shorthand. The cassette splits the room. Younger participants recognise it because it’s become vintage, almost retro-cool. But only the older half of the audience laughs at the pencil. They’re the ones who used it to rewind tapes when the mechanism jammed, a small act of analogue problem-solving that meant something if you lived through it, and nothing if you didn’t.
The smart glasses? Only the people keeping up with tech news recognise them. To everyone else, they’re just… glasses.
Same room. Same images. Completely different readings depending on what people bring with them.
The exercise works because it makes visible something we tend to forget in science communication: recognition isn’t universal. It’s learnt. Visual literacy isn’t about intelligence or attention — it’s about whether the reference point exists in someone’s head at all.
I knew that. I designed the exercise around it. But knowing something and getting students to feel it in their bones are two different things.
For the longest time, the exercise was fine. Effective, even. But something was missing. People would nod, seem to understand, and then… well, it just felt like the message didn’t quite land. Not completely.
Then my daughter handed me the missing piece.
She was not quite two. We were at a friend’s house, and the father asked if she wanted to play basketball with him and his son.
She stared at him, puzzled.
He tried again. “Basketball? Ball and hoop? Do you want to play?”
Still nothing.
It took me a moment to realise: she had never seen a basketball hoop. The word meant nothing because the image behind it didn’t exist yet. No amount of enthusiasm was going to bridge that gap.
So I said, “Come with me.” We walked to the garden. I pointed at the hoop, bounced the ball, let her see what the word was supposed to mean. Then she grinned. Now she could play.
It’s a small moment. But it gave me the language I’d been missing.
The next time, after I ran the technology exercise, I told the students about the basketball hoop. And something shifted. Students who had nodded politely at “visual literacy varies by audience” suddenly got it. The abstract concept became concrete.
Before you can recognise something, you have to know it exists.
That’s what was happening with the floppy disk, the cassette, the smart glasses. It wasn’t about being smart or paying attention. It was about whether the reference point existed at all. If it didn’t, the image might as well have been abstract shapes.
And that’s exactly what happens in science communication all the time.
We obsess over jargon in text. We replace technical terms, simplify sentences, explain concepts carefully. But visual literacy? That one sneaks past us.
We assume that when we show an image, people will recognise what they’re looking at and will attach the same meaning we do. We assume the visual explains itself.
Does the audience actually recognise what’s in the picture?
And even if they do — do they understand why it matters?
Take the DNA double helix. Most people recognise the shape. It’s in textbooks, logos, news stories, advertisements, TV crime dramas. But recognising the spiral isn’t the same as understanding what the structure does — how it replicates, why the pairing matters, what it means for inheritance. The image is familiar. The meaning may not be.
Or think about how references fade. The phone icon was based on a rotary telephone for decades. Today, younger people recognise the icon without ever having seen the object it represents. The visual persists. The reference has evaporated.
Visual literacy shifts over time. It shifts across cultures, disciplines, expertise. Colours used for medicines vary by country. Scientific instruments that feel obvious to specialists look like abstract machinery to everyone else. Even everyday technologies — like smart glasses — can be invisible depending on context.
Images aren’t neutral. They rely on shared references. When those references are missing, interpretation becomes guesswork.
This doesn’t mean visuals are ineffective. They’re powerful because they compress information and trigger associations quickly. But that power only works when there’s alignment between what the designer assumes and what the audience knows.
The risk is subtle. When we design a figure, an illustration, a slide, we see layers of meaning because we bring years of experience. We forget that others might see only shapes and colours. A cassette with a pencil becomes just… a cassette with a pencil.
Expertise creates blind spots. Visual expertise, especially.
The lesson — the one my daughter handed me in a garden — is embarrassingly simple: before expecting understanding, you might need to introduce the world you’re referencing. Sometimes that means adding context. Sometimes it means adding a few words of explanation. Sometimes it means choosing more familiar imagery. Sometimes it means checking whether your assumptions actually hold.
Visual communication isn’t just about clarity of design. It’s about clarity of reference.
If you want the image to work, you can’t take recognition for granted. Ask yourself: would someone outside my field know what they’re looking at — and why it matters?
If the answer is uncertain, you might need to show them the hoop first.