From data to design: Making health research evidence come alive through art

Karin Hannes

Author: Karin Hannes

JBI Belgium Centre for Supporting Evidence-Based Health Care

Every year, World Evidence-Based Health Care Day reminds us of the critical importance of using the best available evidence to guide health decisions. Yet, for many people, scientific evidence can feel distant, technical or even intimidating. So how do we meaningfully engage the public with the results of systematic reviews?

The answer might lie in a space not traditionally associated with health research: art and design.

Art and design offer more than just aesthetic appeal—they can be integrated into the review process itself. They can help formulate questions, collect and analyse data, and most importantly, represent findings in ways that emotionally resonate with a broader audience. Artistic methods can transform abstract concepts and statistical data—often confined to bar charts and graphs—into tangible, relatable experiences.

Whether through poetry, performance or digital installations, art has always been a powerful medium to communicate complex ideas, evoke emotion and foster connection. In healthcare, it can reveal the human stories behind the statistics, making research findings more accessible and impactful. It can connect diverse communities with the real-life implications of review evidence, inviting people not just to understand the data, but to feel it, question it and engage in dialogue about it.

And the exciting part is we no longer have to imagine these possibilities. We can already walk into online galleries where paintings and audiovisual productions provide narrative evidence from patients, presented as artistic evidence and summarised in an audiovisual production. Alternatively, people can visit exhibitions that present evidence in more tangible ways. We can listen to songs that capture the struggles and hopes of those facing life’s challenges or watch productions in which professional actors perform the experiences of people with chronic conditions. These projects are real—and they’re building an evidence base that bridges the worlds of art and health science.

Turning data into expressive formats makes evidence come alive, creates emotional resonance and makes findings more understandable, memorable and actionable. By embracing artistic and co-creative forms of evidence, evidence-based health care can also become more inclusive, participatory and impactful, ensuring that diverse voices and experiences actively shape the evidence that informs health decisions. It honours the true purpose of systematic reviews: to stimulate meaningful change in health care, grounded in trustworthy quantitative and qualitative evidence.

However, the role of art and design in systematic reviews should not be reduced to a decorative ‘add-on’ or a simplified infographic at the end of a report. Reviews themselves can be presented as art, through storyboarding, oral storytelling practices or other creative methods. We can move the process of review production one step further, by inviting artists into our author teams, fostering co-creative processes where researchers, artists, patients and the public collaborate to shape how evidence is understood and shared.

Of course, there’s methodological work still to be done. We need to adapt review procedures to include artistic outputs as multimodal evidence. This means rethinking how we search for evidence, how we assess quality and how we build analytical frameworks that go beyond numbers and narratives. We must evaluate the creative translations of research evidence with the same rigour we apply to traditional outputs because evidence creation and evidence translation are deeply intertwined and prone to misinterpretation. Communicating review findings is not a neutral act. It reflects the reviewer’s constructive influence, and can either reinforce existing silences or open new spaces for dialogue and innovation for different publics.

At the same time, we must keep on challenging the boundaries of what currently counts as evidence. If artistically inspired research that does not translate too well to the printed page is systematically excluded from our reviews, we risk missing out on holistic insights and nuanced realities that traditional analytical methods might overlook. This highlights the reviewer’s role not just as an interpreter of evidence, but as a mediator of knowledge, determining how knowledge travels within the review community and beyond traditional output channels such as journals and book chapters.

So, let’s get creative…

Join the meta-aesthetic review movement that brings art and science together. Help make health care evidence something everyone can see, feel and understand. Your voice and your creativity can make a real difference.

Reach out. Let’s shape the future of the evidence-based movement together.

References

Archibald, M., & Blines, J. (2021). Metaphors in the making: Illuminating the process of arts-based health research through a case exemplar linking arts-based, qualitative and quantitative research data.International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 1609406920987954.

Bengough, T., Sommer, I., & Hannes, K. (2023). The CONSENSYS approach: An instrument to support CONtextual SENsitivity in SYStematic reviews. Research Synthesis Methods, 14(2), 266-282.

De Andrade, M. (2018). Measuring humanity: Hip-hop as evidence for health inequalities. - The Lancet,391(10128), 1340-1341.

Gerber, N., Hannes, K., Gemignani, M., Biondo, J., Siegesmund, R., Carriera, L., Biffi, E., Centracchio, M., Archibald, M., Chilton, G., Kuhnke, J., Dawson, A., Lucero, J., Haire, N., Scott-Shields, S. with Gerber, N. (joint first author) (2024). Sustaining Life on Earth: Arts-Based Responses to the Lived Experience of COVID-19. Methods in Psychology, 1-41

Gerber, N., Biffi, E., Biondo, J., Gemignani, M., Hannes, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2020, May). Arts-based research in the social and health sciences: Pushing for change with an interdisciplinary global arts-based research initiative. In Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 1-15). Institut für Qualitative Forschung.

Hannes, K. with Hannes, K. (joint first author) (2023). Tactics in support of the strategy to include artistic research evidence in systematic reviews. International Journal Of Qualitative Methods. doi: 10.1177/16094069231176391

Hendricks, L. A., Young, T., Van Wyk, S. S., Mathei, C., & Hannes, K. (2022). Storyboarding HIV infected young people’s adherence to antiretroviral therapy in lower-to upper middle-income countries: A new-materialist qualitative evidence synthesis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(18), 11317.

Meadows, A., & Wimpenny, K. (2017). Core themes in music therapy clinical improvisation: An arts-informed qualitative research synthesis. The Journal of Music Therapy, 54(2), 161-195.

Rieger, K. L., Gazan, S., Bennett, M., Buss, M., Chudyk, A. M., Cook, L., ... & Schultz, A. S. (2020). Elevating the uses of storytelling approaches within Indigenous health research: a critical and participatory scoping review protocol involving Indigenous people and settlers. Systematic reviews, 9(1), 257.

Toye, F., Seers, K., & Barker, K. (2020). ‘It’s like she’s talking about me’—Exploring the value and potential impact of a YouTube film presenting a qualitative evidence synthesis about chronic pain: An analysis of online comments. Canadian Journal of Pain, 4(3), 61-70.

Van Even, P., Zaman, B., Hannes, K. with Van Even, P. (corresp. author) (2025). Quality criteria for evaluating creative and interactive science dissemination in public outreach efforts: A scoping review. Plos One, 20 (7). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328800

Wang, Q., Coemans, S., Siegesmund, R., & Hannes, K. (2017). Arts-based methods in socially engaged research practice: A classification framework. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 5-39.

To link to this article - DOI: https://doi.org/10.70253/LTGJ2536

Disclaimer
The views expressed in this World EBHC Day Blog, as well as any errors or omissions, are the sole responsibility of the author and do not represent the views of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee, Official Partners or Sponsors; nor does it imply endorsement by the aforementioned parties.

Karin Hannes

20 October 2025

Karin Hannes is a transdisciplinary scholar specializing in the development of innovative research methods and models to respond to emerging social challenges, with a particular focus on evidence-based, arts-based, place-based, multisensory and futures studies research designs as well as qualitative evidence synthesis as a meta-review technique. Part of her job is to test, evaluate and improve existing methods and techniques or to re-appropriate them for use in multiple study contexts. She currently coordinates the Idiosynchratic Inventors Collective, hosted by research group TRANSFORM in the Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her inventors collective has a strong record in the coordination of living labs both in and outside a university context to explore new ways of thinking, acting and being in the world in different fields such as social-behavioral sciences, public health, urban sciences, international development and the art & design sector. She has a special interest in community-based research praxis in public spaces and works towards inclusive and sustainable living environments for all. Karin is strongly invested in the development of new approaches for tertiary education and public outreach. She chairs the European Network for Qualitative Inquiry. Her theoretical background aligns with post-human, new materialist, and post-structural thought as well as critical realism and American pragmatism. She is a member of the JBI Belgium Centre for Supporting Evidence-Based Health Care.