Educating Inventiveness in Science via Illustrations

The most efficient way to educate is to combine visual information with other forms of information delivery. Scientific illustrations are thus indispensable elements of STEM education and communication. A challenge might arise if one attempts to create a coherent set of illustrations spanning a wide area of science, e.g. from physics of particle accelerators to biology. Yet another challenge might present itself if one were to add a set of creative illustrations inspired by analogies from nature, different areas of science, or even fairy tales and fictional characters. In this poster presentation, I will show an example of how these challenges were overcome to create a portfolio of hundreds of illustrations in our recently published textbook “Unifying Physics of Accelerators, Lasers and Plasma,” which connects several areas of physics via the industrial inventiveness methodology known as TRIZ.