About Linus Harrison

Linus Harrison is an entrepreneur and a project officer in the third sector, with extensive experience in supporting neurodivergent people. 

News is often presented in a way that’s difficult for neurodivergent people to process. As well as being a neurodivergent visual thinker myself, I’ve worked with a lot of people who are neurodivergent and people who prefer to structure things visually. Some of these people benefit from the TEACCH method of communication, an autistic focussed communication style which utilises visual language and structure to support visual learners. Many other people need things displayed visually, such as people who are non-verbal or aren't able to read or process block text so easily. As news stories online and in print are often word-heavy and lack visual language, they pose a challenge to many. 

I’d been thinking about news delivery for a while when I saw the Clwstwr open call

When I saw the opportunity to apply for funding for research, I applied for seed funding to explore whether news could be delivered in a more visual way. I wanted to see if I could tell a news story with as much visual language as possible, and as few words as possible. My application was successful. I had around £12,000 (including match-funding) to carry out the research.

I started my project by researching visual thinking and news delivery

I used the Design Council’s Double Diamond model, which has four stages: discover, define, develop and deliver. First, I pulled together lots of resources on the subjects. I got quite overwhelmed by a lot of it; there was so much information that I didn't know where to begin. To hone my focus, I refined the information and focused on what was most relevant to what I was doing. 

I found some interesting resources in the process. For example, there’s an organisation in America that teaches maths without using words. I also learnt about other methods of communication for neurodivergent people. It showed me that visual thinking and visual language can come into play for lots of people at different times. 

Next, I asked a research group about their experiences of visual thinking and learning

The research group included neurotypical people, visual thinkers, people questioning whether they were neurodivergent, deaf people who relied on visual language and neurodivergent people.

Through questions and conversations, I explored how they think, how they process information and what's most important to them when communicating. I showed them some visual methods of communication, like health and safety posters. I also showed them some news articles, both standard news articles and those with more photographs. 

I compiled the feedback and used it to inform the next stage: making a prototype

With the goal of producing a more visual way of presenting a news story, I considered the roles of the different parts of a news article. I was aware of the fact that there are a lot of pictures in the news, but I hadn’t realised until then how all of the context is in the words. If you had the pictures alone and nothing else, it wouldn't necessarily tell the full story. This is especially the case if there are two different factions involved in something - how would you contextualise the story if you only have the images? 

For the prototype, I chose a story about a social media boycott in response to racism in football 

It seemed like a good story to choose for multiple reasons. Firstly, the boycott of social media is something I thought would not be easily made visual as it was happening online without obvious images of place, event or situation. I felt that if I could get a concept like that across in pictures, that would be a good start. Secondly, I know very little about football, and the people in my research group weren't particularly interested in football either, so they didn’t have prior knowledge of the story. 

With sources from the BBC and The Guardian, I drew out information from the texts

In doing so, I noticed the absence of certain styles of visual language. These missing elements showed me what I needed to include in my visual story. For example, there were long blocks of text, rather than smaller bitesize sections, so in my version I broke things down into boxes to make the information less overwhelming and easier to digest. 

I sorted elements of the story into groups based on the content 

A lot of news articles jumble the information up; you might get a headline, a bit of context, then more information about what's happening now, then a bit more context, someone quoted at the beginning who is then quoted further down, and so on. To untangle this, I sectioned and spaced out things using appropriate subheadings, so people were able to contextualise and focus solely on what they wanted to know. 

I also considered how images are handled and how colour is used

Sometimes, the photos of people used in news stories are unclear to the reader, unless they already know who the person photographed is. Take political news, for example. The politicians photographed tend to be older white men in suits. It’s easy for people to confuse one politician with another, unless they read the context. We could use visual language to demarcate which party the person being photographed or quoted is from, perhaps by printing the text in the relevant party colour, or putting the party logo next to quotes. 

In this article about football, I used images of the people being quoted. I used logos of the companies that were carrying out the boycott, the Football Association and the boycotted companies. I also used different colours to separate the text, signifying which party was being talked about by using their party colour for the text. Most of the people I spoke to didn't get on very well with cartoon images of people, especially cartoons without faces, so I avoided using them. 

The response to my prototype was really encouraging

Across the board, from neurotypical people to neurodivergent people, the research group found my visual news story a lot clearer than the all-text version. They picked up a lot more information and context. People appreciated how even though things were clearer, they weren't simplified. I was pleased by this. I didn't want to take a complex article and reduce it into something that was too simple; I wanted to protect the key facts without overloading them with too much information. 

I'm open to doing more R&D around this topic

Following the project, the findings have fed into other things that I've done. I've been involved in a number of research projects, including one I started around neurodivergent forms of publishing. I am looking at how well books and other published media meet the needs of neurodivergent people. 

Telling news in more visual ways is a really interesting area that seems to resonate with lots of people. If I were to research further, I'd like to see what the results would be if I had a much larger group of people with different thinking styles.