On 29th July 2026, Professor Aisling McMahon, Principal Investigator of the ERC PatentsInHumans Project & Eimear McNally, artist and visual facilitator, were delighted to have a blogpost entitled “From Articles to Easels? The Role of Art in Research Dissemination and Public Engagement” published on the ALL Institute’s IdeasInALL Blog.
In this blogpost, Prof Aisling McMahon & Eimear McNally reflect on their experience of using art as a means to encourage wider dissemination and public engagement with academic research findings both within and beyond the university context.
As part of this reflection, they discuss the process which led to the first artwork created for the PatentsInHumans project; an illustration which represented the key findings of an article Prof McMahon published in Medical Law Review, which mapped key ways that patents over health-technologies can impact patients and healthcare practitioner’s interests, depending on how they are used. Such visual representations of research allow for the conveying of arguments through visual means which appeal to a broader range of audiences and make academic research findings more widely accessible.
Art has come to play a key role in the dissemination of research conducted as part of the PatentsInHumans project. Since working on the first illustration discussed above, Eimear has also created visuals which illustrated the key themes of two recently held workshops. The first workshop graphic, which focused on Patents, Bioethics and Human Rights, is available here. The second workshop graphic, which focused on Intellectual Property Rights and MedTech – organised as a collaborative workshop by Prof Aisling McMahon (PI ERC PatentsInHumans), Prof Leanne Wiseman (Griffith University), and Prof Jessica Lai (Victoria University, Wellington) will be launched on the PatentsInHumans website in the coming weeks.
You can find out more about the PatentsInHumans project on our website and by watching this short video.
The PatentsInHumans project is funded by the European Union (ERC, PatentsInHumans, Project No. 101042147). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.