Rheology Comics (RVF 2023)

Rheology is fun and tactile and is directly related to so many things that we encounter in daily life, but when I started my PhD and tried to explain rheology to my family and friends I felt them almost immediately loose interest. All of the terms and concepts made them feel like it was too abstract and too hard for them to understand. And as a student I also felt like it was hard to start learning about rheology. The field is very interdisciplinary, so even though I had the right background to work on this, I still was missing a lot of core concepts from other fields. They say the best way to learn something is to teach it, so I decided to try and make diagrams and pictures that could explain the technical concepts I was learning, and make them feel more accessible and fun. I also struggled with a lot of things at the start of the PhD, and I wanted to reconnect with the fun parts of science that inspired me to work in this field. I'm lucky to have a lot of friends who have experience with science communication and science outreach, and the more I talked with them, the more I felt like if I could convince a 10 year old that rheology is cool, then I could probably get my other friends and family excited about my thesis, too. So when I saw the announcement about the Rheology Venture Fund, I asked a professional artist I knew if I could hire her to work with me on this project, and we were lucky enough to get the grant. Another really important thing to me about science is that our community is very international. I've worked with people from all over the world, and these friends have told me how hard it is to learn science in English and then try and explain those technical ideas to family and friends back in their native language. Exactly the same problem I was having, but to a power of 2. So from the beginning, I knew I wanted to invite other rheologists to help me translate this content into different languages, and help our whole community share our work with each other more broadly. The plan was to work with my Art Director to find a style and format that worked well, write and illustrate 3-4 comics together, and then translate them into 4-8 languages. I wanted the comic to be designed for print, because too much of our life is digital these days, but I also wanted to make them freely available online. ---- Rob Campbell