Translational Design

Over the past year, the JSTOR Labs UX designers have taken on an exciting and unconventional type of design work: helping our colleagues at ITHAKA S+R make their groundbreaking research more accessible and impactful. ITHAKA S+R is renowned for producing detailed, grant-funded reports on topics like scholarly publishing, equitable access to education, and technology’s role in higher education. These reports are rigorous, thoughtful, and lengthy. One recent example, “The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure,” by Tracy Bergstrom, Oya Y. Rieger, and Roger C. Schonfeld clocks in at nearly 20,000 words. While the depth is invaluable, it can also be a barrier for audiences who need to quickly grasp the key points and insights.

That’s where we came in. We’ve started creating visual and diagrammatic accompaniments to these reports, distilling their core ideas into formats that are easier to absorb at a glance and preserve at least some of the nuance that would be lost with a bulleted list summary. For “The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing,” we designed two diagrams to accompany the report. One is a spatial map that organizes startups, products, and companies according to their roles in the publishing workflow, offering a bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem.

The other is a network diagram illustrating how various forces—like the rise in GoldOA publishing, AI-generated fraud, and declining quality control—contribute to a growing distrust in scholarship as a public good.

These diagrams were used in an informal workshop setting to help participants understand the landscape and brainstorm where we might want to have a presence or plan an intervention. In other instances, our designs are created solely for inclusion in a report, with no specific activities planned around them. For example, we collaborated with Ess Pokornowski on their research into the use of technology in higher education programs for incarcerated students. To bring clarity to this critical work, we created a journey map outlining the incarcerated student experience—from exploring higher education options to reentry as a “digitally literate citizen.”

This visualization highlighted where technological interventions could be most effective. We also crafted comparison charts to weigh the pros and cons of different technological setups, such as a tablet without internet access versus a computer lab with limited access.

This kind of work is a bit outside the typical scope for UX professionals, especially in the previous example where the designs were only used as artifacts for a report and not used as aids for design thinking activities. Nonetheless, it has been helpful for our S+R colleagues and their audiences. By translating complex research into engaging visuals, we’re helping ensure their ideas reach and resonate with the people who can act on them.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe this type of effort. Could it be called “translational design”? Translational research is a term often used in fields like medicine and science to describe the process of turning basic research findings into practical applications that improve outcomes. It bridges the gap between the theoretical and the practical, ensuring that knowledge doesn’t remain confined to academic journals but instead makes a tangible impact in the real world. Similarly, our work bridges the gap between rigorous research and actionable insights, transforming dense reports into tools that stakeholders can readily understand and use. This parallel makes “translational design” feel like a fitting term for our efforts.

Whatever the term, it’s been incredibly rewarding to see how thoughtful design can amplify the impact of rigorous scholarship.