ECO 2025 - Drawing Voices Into the Spotlight
At ECO 2025 in Malaga, thousands of EU doctors came together to discuss the latest research and treatment innovations around obesity. I was invited by the European Coalition for People living with Obesity (ECPO) to help make sure patient voices weren’t lost in the mix.
As advocates shared their stories, I captured them live through illustration, translating personal experiences into bold, immediate visuals. These drawings gave shape to the human side of the science, making conversations more relatable and harder to forget.
The impact stretched far beyond the conference hall. My illustrations were used as interview backdrops, featured on Sky News, and shared widely online. They caught attention, sparked dialogue, and boosted engagement both in person and across digital channels.
For me, it was proof of how powerful visual storytelling can be: turning spoken words into images that carry voices further and make them resonate longer.
“We have worked with Liam at many events to produce live scribes of highly detailed scientific sessions on obesity. Liam has mastered the skill of capturing the right detail, presenting complex information in a clear and accessible way.”
UN – Repurposing Micro-Fulfillment Hubs to Improve Access to Sustainable Food in Deprived Communities
Context
Created for the Universities for Goal 13 Competition, this project, developed by PhD researchers at UCL, proposes a practical, scalable solution to climate-linked food insecurity. The idea: repurpose unused micro-fulfillment hubs (warehouses built for rapid grocery delivery) into local access points for fresh, sustainable food in deprived urban areas. The project directly addresses seven UN Sustainable Development Goals, including Zero Hunger, Sustainable Cities, and Climate Action.
The Brief
To present the concept to a UN audience, the team needed a short, visually engaging video that could clearly communicate a complex systems idea, showing both the environmental logic and the human benefit. The challenge was to turn academic material into a clear, inspiring narrative within a few minutes.
My Role
I designed and produced the video’s visual storytelling—developing a script, illustrations, and motion flow that made the data and policy context emotionally resonant. The animation mapped out the journey from “food deserts” to “green food hubs,” showing how existing infrastructure can be reimagined for social and environmental good.
How Visual Storytelling Added Value
Clarity through motion: Animation turned dense research (climate data, spatial mapping, SDG impacts) into a flowing story that viewers could grasp instantly.
Accessibility: The video translated technical sustainability language into plain visual metaphors—bridging the gap between academic research and public understanding.
Engagement at the UN level: The moving visuals and narrative rhythm helped the project stand out during UN presentations, highlighting its scalability and urgency.
Advocacy tool: Beyond the competition, the video now serves as a reusable communication asset for partnerships, funding pitches, and outreach events.
Outcome
The film was screened as part of the UN’s SDG13 presentations, capturing attention for its clear, hopeful message: “Together, we can convert food deserts into green food hubs.” It helped position the team’s research as both visionary and practical—demonstrating how creative communication can elevate sustainability ideas onto the global stage.
Visual Scribing at the NERC Annual Conference
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a UK research council that funds and supports environmental science research in the UK.
In June 2025, NERC convened its annual conference, bringing together researchers, policymakers, funders, and stakeholders in environmental science.
My Role
I was engaged to scribe the conference sessions live. As panels and presentations unfolded—on topics such as climate change resilience, biodiversity, ecosystem services, data infrastructures, and applied environmental solutions—I translated the spoken content and discussion flows into visual summaries and illustrations. The aim was to distill complexity, map relationships, and make key takeaways more accessible to all attendees.
How Scribing Added Value
Immediate clarity & navigation
Environmental science involves interlocking systems—feedback loops, spatial scales, trade-offs. The visuals acted as a “map” through sessions, making it easier for participants to follow discussions, refer back to earlier points, and see connections across sessions.
Shared reference across disciplines
The audience likely included ecologists, modelers, data scientists, policy experts, and community stakeholders. Scribed visuals created a common visual language, helping a non-specialist in one domain engage more easily with another.
Durable outputs for dissemination
Post-conference, the visuals became assets: sharable summaries on social media, inclusion in reports or newsletters, and visual hooks for blogs or website recaps. They help carry insights beyond the room.
Anchoring complex stories with visuals
Rather than relying solely on slides or text-heavy reports, the illustrations embed the narrative flow—highlighting “turning points” in conversations, visual metaphors, or spatial relationships that help solidify memory and meaning.
Impact
Attendees reported stronger recall of session themes, especially when paired with the visuals.
Organisers and participating institutes gained post-event collateral that succinctly captured the conference’s intellectual arc.
The visuals served in internal debriefs and as communication aids when translating findings to external partners or funders.
Why This Matters
Scientific conferences can generate enormous intellectual density, which risks losing nuance or audience retention. In the environmental sciences—where systems thinking, interdisciplinarity, and translation to policy or practice are vital—visual scribing makes the invisible visible. It helps complex ideas travel further, stay vivid, and be more readily acted upon. For NERC’s mission of enabling UK environmental science, that amplification is a meaningful multiplier.
Visual Storytelling with Strathclyde’s Entrepreneurial Mindset Project
The Hunter Centre at Strathclyde Business School launched a project to explore how “entrepreneurial mindset” is defined and taught across UK universities. They held focus groups with educators and decided to bring me in as a live illustrator to capture the conversations as they unfolded.
My Role
As participants and researchers shared ideas, I translated their words into real-time visuals. These drawings distilled abstract concepts into images and metaphors that participants could see taking shape right in front of them.
How the Illustrations Added Value
Making the abstract tangible
Entrepreneurial mindset is often discussed in broad, intangible terms. Illustration turned these into visible, relatable stories that everyone in the room could engage with.
Engagement and connection
The project team described it best: “We are delighted to have hired this fabulous illustrator who is producing graphics of our discussions before our very eyes in the research sessions.” They added: “We hope by using the illustrator to summarise each session it will provide a useful and engaging means to connect with our research and provoke further discussion.” The live visuals acted as a bridge, inviting participants to reflect, respond, and see their voices represented.
Memorable summaries for sharing
After each session, the illustrations served as immediate takeaways—easy to circulate among participants, colleagues, and wider audiences—ensuring that insights didn’t remain locked in academic language.
Outcomes & Takeaways
The visuals enriched the research process by making discussions more accessible and memorable. They provided the team with assets to use in reports and public engagement, and proved how illustration can be a tool for sensemaking, not just decoration.
Live-Scribing at RGS-IBG 2023 — Queering Environmental Justice
At the RGS-IBG 2023 conference in London, I joined the “Queering Environmental Justice through Methods of Art and Activism” panel. This session brought together scholars experimenting with artivist methods to explore how environmental justice intersects with gender, sexuality, and social marginalisation.
As the panel unfolded, I turned spoken ideas and debate flows into live visuals. These images offered more than decoration—they acted as a shared map for listeners to see how threads of place, power, identity, and ecology wove together.
Because the conversation spanned dense conceptual terrain and multiple disciplinary lenses, the visuals helped attendees stay oriented. They became touchpoints during discussion, allowed participants to reflect out loud (“oh, I see how that connects to what was said earlier”), and offered a visual record that could be shared afterward to extend the conversation.
In that space of art + activism + geography, scribing helped make invisible connections visible—and amplified voices that might otherwise recede into theory alone.
Gateway to Better Health at the European Parliament
On World Obesity Day, I joined ECPO at the European Parliament in Brussels for Gateway to Better Health: The case for coordinated EU action on obesity. The room brought together MEPs, EU health leaders, clinicians, researchers, and advocates to push for a coordinated EU-level response and for obesity to be treated as a chronic, relapsing disease linked with over 230 health complications. The event was hosted by MEP Laurent Castillo and organised with EASO, with powerful contributions from ECPO representatives.
My role
I scribed the discussions live. While speakers unpacked policy gaps, prevention, treatment, and equity, I translated key points and lived-experience testimonies into clear, immediate visuals. Each board distilled a dense policy thread into a story that decision makers could grasp in seconds.
Why scribing added value
Clarity at speed: Complex arguments about coordinated EU action, cross-disease links with diabetes and other NCDs, and the need to recognise obesity as a chronic disease became structured visual maps that participants could reference during Q&A.
Human voice, not just data: ECPO’s lived-experience messages sat alongside policy detail in the same frame, keeping patient perspective visible throughout the debate.
Portable outcomes: After the session, the illustrations worked as ready-made assets for debriefs, social updates, and follow-on advocacy, helping the event conversation travel beyond the room.
Impact
The scribed panels provided instantly shareable summaries aligned with the event’s policy asks, supporting ECPO and partners as they amplified messages from the Parliament session across digital channels and advocacy efforts.
Why this matters
Gateway to Better Health was not just another panel. It was a moment to align policymakers and patient advocates around concrete EU-level action. Visual storytelling made that alignment visible. It kept the human stakes present, clarified the policy arc, and gave the coalition memorable artefacts to keep momentum after the cameras and microphones moved on.
Bringing Coastal Connections to Life through Visual Scribing
The Coastal Connections initiative is a collaboration between the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and English Heritage, designed to build a global network of coastal heritage sites. Its mission is to facilitate knowledge exchange, share practical solutions, and address the threats that climate change brings to coastal heritage—from erosion and sea-level rise to saltwater intrusion.
As part of the program, WMF runs a series of online workshops (sometimes called the “Coastal Connections Podcast / workshop series”) that bring together site managers, scholars, community leaders, and heritage professionals to discuss topics like loss, policy, intangible heritage, and conservation strategies.
These conversations tend to be rich in technical detail, policy nuance, and lived experience from coastal communities.
My Role: Visual Scribing for the Series
I was brought in to scribe selected sessions in real time. As panels and speakers discussed conservation principles, policy tools, climate threats, and community resilience, I translated their words into dynamic visual maps and illustrations. My goal was to make abstract or specialist content more accessible, memorable, and shareable.
How Scribing Added Unique Value
Making complexity visible
Many sessions delved into layered problems: coastal dynamics, heritage principles, governance, community adaptation. The scribed visuals broke these layers into digestible parts, enabling participants to see connections (or tensions) at a glance.
Bridging between disciplines and audiences
The Coastal Connections series brings together experts from heritage, climate science, public policy, and community stakeholders. Scribes served as translators: visuals helped unify different terminologies and frames, making it easier for a heritage specialist to follow climate-science arguments, for example.
Amplifying workshop outputs
Instead of leaving insights trapped in spoken recordings or slides, we produced visual artifacts that could be used afterward—on websites, in social media, newsletters, or as part of WMF’s promotional materials.
Anchoring narratives with local voices
Many of the sessions included case studies from specific coastal sites, often with input from local stewards or communities. By visually embedding these stories next to technical content, scribing kept the human and place-based dimension front and centre.
Encouraging engagement and reflection
The visuals invite participation—not just passive listening. Participants can refer to the drawing during Q&A, comment on spatial relationships, or recall earlier threads. In a virtual or hybrid setting, that helps maintain attention and make the discussion more interactive.
Example Session: “Reimagining Loss”
In the “Coastal Connections: Reimagining Loss” workshop, panelists explored how climate impacts might be reframed—from seeing loss simply as damage, to framing it as part of transformation, adaptation, and resilience.
During this session, I captured visuals that juxtaposed “loss” and “legacy,” showing how coastal heritage sites—and their communities—might evolve rather than simply fade. The visual narrative helped frame the debate in a more generative light: what could be gained, preserved, reinterpreted, or reinvented? Those visual outputs became shareable summary pieces—helping WMF and participants carry the conversation beyond the workshop itself.
Impact & Outcomes
Stronger recall and clarity: Attendees and follow-up audiences more easily recalled key themes and connections thanks to the visuals.
Greater reach: The illustrations became assets in post-event dissemination—on WMF’s platforms, newsletters, and social media—to communicate the core insights to broader audiences.
Elevated accessibility: The visual formats make technical and policy content more approachable to non-specialists—community members, local stakeholders, or new partners.
Lasting resonance: Unlike slides or transcripts alone, visual artefacts carry presence—they are objects you return to, discuss, or build upon.
Animating Hope for the Future’s 2025–27 Strategy
Hope for the Future’s new strategy is built on a powerful premise: real change happens when communities and politicians work together. Their 2025–2027 plan deepens that mission by prioritising underrepresented voices, connecting climate action to daily issues like housing, health, and transport, and evolving their training, campaign support, and partnerships to match local community needs.
The Brief
Hope for the Future wanted to bring this strategy to life in a way that would be accessible, compelling, and shareable. Instead of just publishing a text document, they commissioned a short animated visual summary of the 2025–27 strategy—something that could cut through the complexity and engage broader audiences.
My Role
I translated the strategy into visual form: creating storyboards, designing illustrative metaphors, and animating sequences that mapped the flow from community engagement to policy change. The aim was to tell the strategy as a narrative — a journey of connection, empowerment, and action.
How Visual Animation Added Value
Turning strategy into story
The animation transformed the strategy’s abstract goals into a narrative journey—how bridging people and politicians can spark commitments, and how those commitments become action.
Clarifying focus areas
The visuals highlighted key pillars: training adaptation, cross-sector collaboration, mobilising at political moments, and inclusive engagement with communities often left out.
Making strategy shareable and digestible
As a visual animation, the strategy is no longer static. It’s a tool Hope for the Future can embed in webpages, presentations, social media, and partner communications—helping the message reach far beyond those who read the document.
Boosting retention and resonance
Viewers are more likely to remember and act on visuals than dense text. The flow, pacing, and metaphors of animation help anchor meaning in people’s minds.
Outcome
The animation became a flagship asset in Hope for the Future’s communications mix. It supported internal alignment (staff, volunteers, partners) and external outreach (supporters, funders, communities). It turned the 2025–27 strategy from a blueprint into a visual narrative people can watch, share, and connect with.
Infographic Series for LimbPower
Background
LimbPower provides resources, guidance and support for amputees and individuals with limb difference, helping them access sport, physical activity and the arts. On their Info Sheets page they note: “Re-engaging in sport, physical activity and the arts can be a daunting prospect … LimbPower have created our own resources including information sheets and infographics … to help you on your way back.”
Project Brief
The charity wanted a series of infographic-style resources to make key topics accessible and visually engaging: what they offer, why exercise is important, overcoming barriers, prosthetic care and tips for children in PE, among others. These needed to serve adults and children, and be shareable as downloadable sheets.
Role & Approach
I worked with LimbPower to design clear, friendly visuals: transforming information sheets into infographic formats that combine icons, colour-coded sections and clear headings; ensuring each item addressed the target audience—for example, children engaging in school PE, or adults returning to physical activity post-amputation; and making sure each infographic could function as a stand-alone asset: downloadable, printable, shareable on social, and referenced in training or rehab settings.
Value Added
Accessibility: The infographics distilled complex content (prosthetic care, adaptive activity, barriers) into digestible pieces, reducing cognitive load and making the content more inviting.
Engagement: Visual formats encourage reuse—participants, coaches and families could view, save or print the sheets, increasing reach beyond the original download.
Consistency & brand: By applying a consistent design across the series, the charity strengthened brand recognition and clarified its messaging around inclusion, activity and empowerment.
Tailored for children and adults: With resources like “Top Tips for P.E. Infographic” created for school-age children, the visuals catered specifically to younger audiences and their context.
Outcome
LimbPower gained a full set of ready-to-share infographic assets that support their mission: enabling sport, physical activity and the arts for people with limb differences. These assets strengthened their communications toolkit, helped users engage with key topics, and provided visual anchors for practical guidance and community support.
