Laura Evans-Hill, Visual Storyteller (Episode 69)

Sarah's guest for this episode is Laura Evans-Hill. Laura is a visual storyteller and director of research communications agency Nifty-Fox Creative.

Sarah and Laura talk about

1. Why combining visuals and storytelling can be such a powerful communication tool
2. How she works with researchers to turn illustrations into impact
3. Her journey from accidental freelancer to agency director
4. What AI might mean for the future of research communication

Find out more

1. Read the show notes and transcript on the podcast website
2. Connect to Laura on LinkedIn
3. Find out more about Nifty Fox Creative on their website, LinkedIn or BlueSky
4. Check out the More Than Medals online exhibition

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4. Email a comment, question or suggestion
5. Leave Sarah a voice message

Mentioned in this episode:

Member of the Month: Vicky Bowskill, Inklusive Nature

Vicky helps researchers and changemakers to connect nature, science & society by telling compelling visual stories. Find out more at www.inklusivenature.com

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Laura Evans-Hill: We use visuals to help people make ideas

clearer, more memorable, more understandable and more

emotional. You take a sentence of text and you take the same

information presented as a visual, you are going to process

those words in six seconds. You're going to process the same

information as visual in 13 milliseconds. I had ex

colleagues get in touch and say you know those stupid little

doodles you used to do when you were teaching. Can we pay you to

do them?

Hello there. I'm Sarah McLusky, and this is

Research Adjacent. Each episode, I talk to amazing research

adjacent professionals about what they do, why it makes a

difference. Keep listening to find out why we think the

research adjacent space is where the real magic happens.

Hello there. I'm your host, Sarah McLusky, and this is

episode 69 of the Research Adjacent podcast today. My guest

is Laura Evans-Hill, a visual storyteller and chief pencil

wielder at research communications agency, Nifty Fox

Creative. As you might guess, Laura combines visuals, in

particular, hand drawn illustrations with stories to

help researchers get their work out of journals and into the

hands and the hearts of people who can use it. People have been

recommending Laura as a guest since the podcast started, so

I'm delighted that we've finally been able to sit down for a

chat. Laura studied social research and worked for many

years in widening participation, but an extended period of

illness prompted a career u-turn. Laura started

tentatively as a solo freelancer when former colleagues asked if

they could pay her for the doodles that they had seen her

doing. Fast forward eight years and Nifty Fox now has a team of

nine who work with public sector organizations and universities

across the world. In our conversation, we talk about why

visual communication can be so powerful, why it's so important

for researchers to get their work beyond academia, the

evolution of our business, some of the projects that she's

worked on, and what AI might mean for the future of research

communication. Listen on to hear Laura's story.

Welcome along to the podcast, Laura. It's fantastic to have

you with us. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what

it is that you do.

Laura Evans-Hill: Hi, folks. My name is Laura Evans-Hill. I'm an

ex social researcher now director and founder of Nifty

Fox Creative. We're an award winning visual storytelling

agency, and we work specifically with researchers to help them

tell their stories visually so that audiences listen. We've

been helping people do that since 2017 and we've worked with

over 50 universities internationally, 78 public

sector organizations, and getting on for nearly 4000

researchers now

That is, that's a lot of people, 4000 that's

amazing. So tell us what you mean a bit by visual

storytelling.

Laura Evans-Hill: Absolutely. So visual storytelling is almost

exactly what it says on the tin. There's a visual side of it and

there's a storytelling side of it. So for the visual side of

it, we use visuals to help people make ideas clearer, more

memorable, more understandable and more emotional, to actually

drive them to act differently or make a change, and obviously,

for researchers, that's what gets them up in the morning. But

the storytelling side of it is, how do we combine that power of

pictures with the power of narrative, again, to help people

understand what's going on by juxtaposing it with a story that

they may know or a story structure they've heard before,

but also get them to care. If we care about something, we're more

likely to make that policy change, also make that practice

change, or to change the way we're doing research

fundamentally. So that's what it is, and practically that might

look like something like a infographic, an animation, a

live scribed image. It could be the activities we're using in a

co design session with participants to get them to

tease out their own stories. And we've done crazy things at nifty

like interactive online exhibitions through to huge art

installations and murals that are articulating what health

research is. So it's anything visual and telling a story, we

like to give it a go.

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, I think that idea of

doing it in order to make people care, certainly the world that I

come from, the public engagement side of things and research

communications, it's so important, isn't it, because so

often when you go out into the world with, you know, like a

public engagement story or something like that. You're

like, yes, let me tell you about this fascinating, you know,

quantum physics, or whatever it might be. And the first

question, you know, for most people, it's like, well, so

what? So, yeah, yeah. So making people care helps to answer that

so what question doesn't it?

Laura Evans-Hill: For sure, it's also about making them care on a

human level. I think we forget that. We find when working with

our clients, you're so wrapped up in your stuff and your area

of expertise, you forget that there is a person that needs to

receive that communication, whose needs experiences problems

are, in that moment of communication, more important

than yours, you need to have that understanding of, well, why

do they need, you know, why should they care, not from my

perspective, but actually from theirs? I think that's quite an

interesting shift in mindset for a lot of people we work with,

and also, you know, for me as a business owner and and doing all

those marketing at the same time. It's like, well, why

should they give a monkeys about this in their very busy life?

Why would they stop scrolling to give us the time of day? So I

agree, it's a really interesting point.

And it is, it's interesting you say that it is

quite a mindset shift for a lot of researchers to kind of step

out of just doing this research, because it's interesting to me

to thinking about doing this research with the purpose of

changing something in the world, and the steps that you have to

go through to actually make that happen. So why do you think

visual storytelling can help with that shift and getting that

story told.

Laura Evans-Hill: I think this the science behind why it works

in terms of our neuroscience, but there is also our nature. Is

from a human condition of why we're attracted that visual

stories together. So from a scientific point of view, why it

works is because the visual processing part of our brain is

the biggest part of our brain power. So when you're trying to

get somebody at the very base level to understand something,

and often researchers follow that first hurdle. If I don't

get it, I'm never going to care about it. Yeah, and we've, we've

heard, we've heard the kind of the processing stats of, you

know, visuals can be processed 60,000 times quicker than sex.

Now that's a very spurious fact that is very, very contested

across the interwebs now, but the one I like to use is, if you

take a sentence of text and you take the same information

presented as a visual, you are going to process those words in

six seconds. You're going to process the same information as

visual in 13 milliseconds. Massive difference. Yeah,

massive difference. So from a very base level, it works to

make that shift because you're actually thinking about, how is

the person's brain working that is sat in front of me, and I'll

help you to understand it more quickly. The second part of that

shift is thinking about, well, how, how can I use the visuals

and the stories and that science to make it more memorable. You

know, we all hear interesting things all the time, but if we

don't remember it, we're never going to act upon it. So if you

use visuals alongside well chosen words, you're 65% likely

to make your audience remember it three days later. And also,

when you're creating a visual story, it's by nature emotive.

You have to think about your audience in order to craft a

story that feels believable, that feels real, that feels not

written by AI. I'm sure we'll talk about AI. And actually, in

thinking about what's going to resonate with that person in

front of me? You're not only engaging the emotional

processing side of your brain, but also harnessing the visual

and emotional processing at the same time, because they're based

in the same side of the brain. Don't quiz me on whether it's

right or left. I could never remember, but I know that

together, so it helps you make that shift, because you're not

only having to communicate your research even more clearly and

succinctly than you would normally, but you're also having

to do so in ways that are so outside of the research training

that you have, that is very internally focused and less

externally so that you actually resonate with your audience. I

feel like I've had a roundabout answer that question but I think

I

No we've got there in the end. And yeah, no.

Really interesting stuff. I didn't know all that stuff about

how we I mean, I think instinctively people know that

you process visual information differently, and then you can

can connect to it, as you say, much more emotionally than you

do with language. But I didn't realize there was all that

science behind it. So that's really interesting. I'm but as

you say, it's this taking that way of processing information

and applying it to sharing research is something that is

relatively new, but definitely growing, isn't it? I mean, I've

just seen an explosion in recent years in terms of, you know,

infographics and these kind of, you know, illustrations of

meetings and things like that. So, yeah, so how's that changed

for you over since you you got involved with it? What did you

say? 2017, yeah,

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah, it's definitely evolved. And I'll be

honest, I didn't set out to make Nifty into the research comms

agency it is now. I left higher education arena back in 2015,

16, so I got super burnt out, and needed to take some time out

to work out how how I was going to fix myself again and make

something a life that felt like it aligned my academic research

passions with the creativity that was slightly beaten out of

me in the institution. So the reason that I got into it was

because I had ex colleagues get in touch and say, you know those

stupid little doodles you used to do when you were teaching.

Can we pay you to do them? We think there's value in them. So

I never set out to do this. It happened organically, because

sketch noting and communicating visually was how I always did my

presentations. Because PowerPoint for me, was never a

tool that I felt like I could get behind or communicate well

with, it didn't enable me to connect with my audience. So it

started by accident in that way. But also, I've seen a shift from

people almost doing this experimentally in 2017 to go,

we've got we've got some additional funding that we

haven't accounted for, let's give this a go, to now it being

a fundamental part of funding applications, and actually

something that funders are looking for, not just because

it's pretty and, you know, it will tick that PPI box, that

public engagement box, but actually it's a fundamental part

of the method that will drive routes to impact that will

enable us to work with people in policy, in practice, decision

makers across the world. And the other thing that we're quite

excited about at Nifty is not only getting involved at the end

of the research process, which is definitely where we were

maybe in the first few years of our existence, but actually now

being baked in from the very, very beginning. So we become co

design partners within a research project. So I guess the

shift in some has been from pretty output to meaningful

method that actually drives routes to impact.

It's fantastic to hear that that is that you've

seen that shift as well, because I've certainly seen it in some

of the work that I do around engagement and communications

and public involvement and, you know, partnerships and things

like that, this sense of, you know, 10 years ago, it was

something that was tagged on at the end, and then this

acknowledgement that it needs to be not just, and then it sort of

crept back in the process, you know, not just during it, but

now, even right up there with the research design, you know,

before you put in the funding application, actually thinking

what is the process going to be, and how can we embed these more

effective methods in there to help us to have that impact that

we want to have in the world?

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah and I think it makes research culture

and the research we create more inclusive, more equitable, more

aligned to real world problems. And that for me as a social

researcher, I usually, usually use the word ex, but you never

stop being a social researcher. Is so empowering, exciting,

morally, the right thing to do, but also economically the right

thing to do. Because as funding applications get more

competitive, especially in our current environment, I don't

know when people will listen to this podcast, but Trump's just

ruined the world economy. It it's more important than ever to

not only be doing the right thing, but also be doing to be

doing the economic, economically expedient thing to ensure that

we've got research that's actually embedded in in real

world application that will make a tangible difference, the

policy society, the economy, healthcare and the things that

will enable our planet to be sustained. Yeah, and that that's

such an exciting shift, and to use visual storytelling as a

vehicle to be part of that is what gets me up in the morning.

Yeah, oh fantastic that you've, you've

found that channel, and that way to to use all of the experience

and things that you've got. So tell us a bit about you've

you've said there, you've mentioned a bit about you were a

social researcher. So tell us a bit about what you used to do.

And you know you've said how you got into doing what you do now,

but, but that's shift, and how you found that

Laura Evans-Hill: Absolutely so I trained as a social researcher

and then worked for university for 10 years in widening

participation. That was something that was really

interesting to me, being one of the first in my family to go to

university and not having the same kind of support that the

other people around me at my university did, really kind of

stuck in my head as something I wanted to change. So I trained

at Warwick, and then I worked for Coventry, Warwick, Sheffield

and Leeds within outreach and WP teams. I loved it. It was where

I learned the power of communicating differently so

that different audiences can engage in the ivory tower. There

is nothing more humbling than standing in front of a group of

inner city 14 year olds in Coventry who wish you weren't

there. Have no interest in what you have to say, and you're

going this PowerPoint that I've been given is not going to cut

it. So I'm really thankful for those experiences, because they

showed me the power of research when you communicate it well to

change individual lives. There's nothing more rewarding than

seeing, you know, meeting a 14 year old, and then seeing them

six years later at the university, doing something that

they never thought possible. But equally, as I alluded to, I

became a manager very, very young. There was a lot for me

going on personally at the time, and I got really, really unwell.

I got glandular fever and chronic fatigue syndrome, and

within six months, went from being a very active

cross-fitting like 20 year old to not being able to get out of

bed for 12 months. And when I when I say that, I don't mean

that by exaggeration, I did not leave the house for 12 months,

and it was both the best and the worst thing that could ever

happen, because it made me look at clearly my body has given me

a signal that whatever I'm doing, both in my professional

and personal life isn't working, and so I took that time to go,

Well, what do I really want to do? And actually, it was finding

that new purpose that helped me get better. I consider myself a

recover, a recovered person now, and not everybody does, but

that's because you have to look at every facet of your life and

go, What do I actually want? Not what does society want? So, I

started Nifty, you know, I started Nifty, working one day a

week, simply because ex colleagues got in touch and

said, as I said, Can you do this thing? You know, where are you

in your recovery journey? Can you do this? And so, from, yeah,

one day a week to then, now, too many days a week, but starting

from, you know, from you know, from one and I started doing,

you know, live illustration for researchers and university

contacts, and then a little bit of branding here and there for

research projects as it could manage around my energy. And

then, as I got better, the business started to get bigger

COVID hit. And we, live illustration was a massive part

of what we were doing at that point. I say we it was me and my

admin, avenger, Lizzie at the time. And actually, COVID was a

blessing in disguise, because it shifted how we could support

people and the entire research landscape and event landscape

and public sector landscape, realizing in the switch to

online, how on earth are we going to engage people and keep

them within our community, keep them trained, keep them engaged.

So that's when we started to do other parts. So more studio

work, so infographics, animations, e-learning is

something we started in COVID, and I do an awful lot of now. So

that really, that global pandemic actually helped us

reframe our offering to better support researchers, and then

we've grown from there, as I've alluded to, we're now much more

into that co-design space, training is a big part of of

what we do now. We're a team of about to be nine of us going all

over the world doing it so that that shift is, you know, I'd

like to say something really pithy and inspiring, and it was

this grand epiphany. It was I put myself in a space where I

was open to the opportunities that were given, and listen to

the needs of the of my audience, and listen to the needs of what

researchers needed. But because I had those contacts in in unis

already and that sector knowledge, I could see where the

gap was, and then exploited it. But that's the journey from from

zero to now.

That really is, I mean, that's, it's a remarkable

journey, but also that's incredible growth in just five

years to go from just, you know, one, one and a half of you,

whatever it was, to a team of nine. Um, so how's that

expansion process been? I imagine you've had to step in,

step into quite a different role.

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah, it's the most rewarding, terrifying, soul

wrenching adventure I've been on. I would say the, well, first

of all, it shows you're doing something right, and that the

market needs that. It also challenges you as a person,

because you start something by being a doer, and actually liken

this to the process of going through a research team. So

starting as a research assistant and then eventually ending up as

a PI. You're you get very good at the doing, and then you your

role completely changes, and you have to let go of the doing when

that's the thing you started the business to do. So it's it's

been a personal journey, but it's been so rewarding to watch

the team grow and the team buy in to what we're achieving. You

know, our mission is to do visual storytelling for social

good, that we can make knowledge more accessible, equitable,

inclusive for everyone, and that to have a, you know, a gang of

eight of the people that believe in that as much as you do, and

the market is also on your side and wants that too, has been

incredible. But, it's yeah, the honest answer is that the growth

has been relentless, exciting, and as I said, you have to grow,

not only as a team, but also as individuals, to scale that

growth and also to react to and be proactive in seeing what

happens in the market. Obviously, you know, we have

research funding cuts. Universities are going through a

tough spot financially, so it's how you offer that value as

something that has to be included in that financial

forecasting, rather than a nice to have. And that's how we've

shaped Nifty, very much aligned to our values, to make it stand

out from all of the other design agencies that don't have the

same niche that we do, yeah. So make us a competitive option

over anybody else that can do design, because we don't just

make things look pretty. We do it through co-production with a

deep understanding of the sector. And actually, you can

exploit our network, you know, 4000 researchers doing probably

similar things to you. So that's been a joy

Yes, oh, but as you say, a lot I can imagine,

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah, quite a lot, yeah.

But um, but as you say that that is a real

niche, definitely to be doing the design work, but also to

really understand the sector, because that is when I've been

in roles and worked with, when I've been in roles and

universities and places like that, and tried to work with

designers and so often, just found that they just don't get

it. They don't, you know, they think that you can just make

something look nice, but it's like, Oh, does it have to be

exactly like this? Can't it just like because this would be

nicer? And you're like, No, yeah, it has to be this. It has

to be spelt this way. You know, look this way. You know,

whatever it is, that there isn't that scope for flexibility and

and that it's more measured, slightly more measured approach

sometimes to, you know, language and things like that, which

other design agencies don't always get.

Laura Evans-Hill: And something that we do well at Nifty is all

of that upfront work with the client to deeply understand

their research project and what they're trying to achieve. So

our first our first priority as a company is to represent that

research well, and then everything else is in service of

that vision. So we actually support our clients to be

writing the content. We don't just take content and make

something pretty we are rafting that together because you're as

an academic, you're not trained how to do that. How we couldn't

expect you to write an animation script that tells a story that's

engaging and that appeals to your audience for a specific

purpose. When you've never been trained how to do that, that's

madness. So the biggest part of our project is always up front,

working together with our clients to actually craft the

strategy for what we're creating so that it, as I said, just

doesn't just look beautiful, it actually achieves the purpose

and serves the research project and its impact aims, and all of

the measuring that we need to do in the background to make sure

that happens.

Yeah, now, well, it's clearly giving people the

results that they're after, because, as you say, with the

growth that you've had and your reputation goes before you. You

know, so many people had mentioned you to me before our

paths had crossed. So yeah, and so thinking then maybe about

some of the specifics of the sort of things you've done,

maybe you could give us a couple of really kind of specific

examples of things that you've done that you're really proud

of, whether that's some of the interesting, unusual things you

said, you've done, or just things that had a really big

impact. Tell us your choice. Tell us about what.

Laura Evans-Hill: Well, our brain loves three so I'll give

you three examples. I'm going to go for the crazy, disn't know

quite how we were going to do this, but ended up being

incredible project first. So shout out to Steph Cohen at

University of Nottingham. So Steph and the team were working

with female athletes, retired female athletes, and reframing

how we look at environments in sport. So the challenge there is

that sports injury is often seen due to physiological factors,

and that men will have different injuries simply because they

have a different physiology to women and vice versa. Steph's

research actually looks at the gendered environments, so the

norms, environments, relationships, power structures

within sports and how that actually shapes injury risk. So

looking specifically at there was one on ACL injury, and what

it was just so fascinating to see that there is more than

physiology at play as to how female athletes are supported

through their career. Yeah. So Steph had a wealth of

qualitative data, so things like poems, recordings, art from the

female athletes, and wanted to create something that showed the

emotional impact of these environments, whilst also

creating a toolkit for people running those environments. So

people like the Sports Institute, I'm going to get that

wrong begins with UK. I'll find that afterwards big sports

people. So people are responsible for Olympic teams

and athletes. So how can we make, you know, make the emotive

stuff work with the practical this is what we need to do. So

Steph came to us with the idea, I want to make an online

interactive exhibition that can also be used in person and

experienced collectively. And it needs to be beautifully

illustrated, super accessible, include audio visual. Oh, and by

the way, it needs to have all of this exhibition, more

traditional exhibition stuff around it, so we can take it on

tour. Yeah. And I said to Steph, count us in no idea how we're

going to do this, and it's turned into more than medals. So

we worked with them on the naming More Than Medals. We

worked with them on the brand around it, how the exhibition

was created, how it was structured online, how that

would work in person. We collaborated with their tech

team at Nottingham to create a badge of how people interacted

with the exhibition. So that created like a live piece of art

at the same time, and that has now been funded again to create

the toolkit, element of it to actually support sports leaders

to create more equitable gendered environments, and is

now also being showcased at the British Academy summer event as

an incredible example of public engagement and impact work, and

has actually been taken up by masses of sports around the

country training our next Olympic athletes as a new way

for us to get the edge, because it's not just about physiology.

So that's one

that's fantastic does that exists somewhere on

the internet

Laura Evans-Hill: morethanmedals.co.uk. Yeah, I'll link to Steph as

well, and also Joe Parsons at University of Manitoba. It's a

huge global collaboration. And there's something that's come

out of that called the Edge Lab, which is the environments,

gendered environments, in sport lab, that are now doing things

worldwide. So that was, that was, yeah, both really

impactful, but also really rewarding, because we really got

to know the team and are working on other stuff as a result. So

that's one. Number two would be a more general aspect of what we

do, which is co-design. So we work a lot with people who have

had cancer or experiencing dementia, as well as their

families. We're currently working on something with

University of Leeds on people with long term neurological

conditions, so us as a whole team, whenever we get to spend

time with real life people experiencing real life stuff, it

makes a difference to your job satisfaction, but also knowing

that that thing you created isn't just going to say, look

pretty that seems to be my quote of the day. It's actually going

to meaningfully make a difference in somebody's life.

So an example there, we worked with Bradford University and the

Bradford Health Institute to co create a Managing My Medicines

toolkit for people with dementia, so that they could

manage their medicines better at home. And what was really

heartwarming about those co design sessions were that these

people have never really been asked what they thought before

or spoken to as equals, as people with lived experience

that really matters. So that's currently at clinical trial, and

I need to check in with the crew over at Bradford, to see where

we are with that now, but actually to see and be part of

the translation of the experience of patients and

people with dementia or people with autism or or people who

have lived experience of domestic abuse, actually

translating that experience into something that's tangible and

out there and helping people is just the piece the resistance of

what we do at Nifty. And the third one is something we're

doing with the NIHR at the moment, which is actually a

completely different side of the research process. And it's how

do we build capacity within local authorities to access all

of this health research and find the evidence they need to back

up their decisions more than they do now. So that's called

KNOW-PH, and we'll link to that too. That's with University of

Sheffield, Nottingham, and I'm sure lots of other universities

are completely forgotten in the moment, but we're part of that

as a long term design partner to help them find different ways to

help local authorities not only just read loads of research

evidence, but actually feel it, experience it, understand the

public health issues that are, access that their communities

are experiencing, and find ways to make that evidence

digestible, accessible and usable, to actually make a

difference to our public health system. So that's. Something

we're currently working on that's very exciting.

I think then those things, it's just so

important, isn't it, because that's one of this. It's a very

similar area that I've always worked in, but the this, all

this information that's out there, all the papers that are

out there. I remember once some an academic I worked with,

saying, we don't even read each other's papers, you know, just

like, No, there's all this stuff's out there and nobody's

reading it. And the value that is in there that I know isn't

there, isn't being drawn out and actually being given to people

who could use it, finding these ways of doing that and shifting

that focus from just churning out papers for the sake of

churning out papers, because that's what gets the tick boxes,

you know, on, on whatever metric system, to actually papers

research that's usable to me, that's just so important. So,

yeah, fantastic

Laura Evans-Hill: It's that old adage, isn't it like you have to

publish or perish. And we're like, no, you have to be visible

so you don't vanish. That's a shift, and papers have an

absolute place in the academic landscape. Like that is where

you do your thinking, where you can demonstrate your academic

rigor. And for the people that need it, you need that level of

detail sometimes to make change, especially in things like

healthcare or science and engineering, but the vast

majority of people you know, 90% of your audience, only need 10%

of that information to make change. Yeah, and that you know,

when your whole reason for being as an academic is to publish and

to demonstrate your worth that way, it can be a real mindset

shift to go actually, maybe my publications aren't quite as

important for real world impact as I as I thought, I'm

absolutely not disputing their impact academically, but if

they're not even reading each other, then, why bother

Yeah definitely. Well, I mean, that is certainly

one of the challenges of this world that you work in making

things available, and you've talked about some of your

personal challenges and things, I think you touched on AI

earlier. Should we have a think about what, what AI is doing to

the situation, to, you know, the kind of work that you do? How

are you finding it?

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah, sure. I think I'm probably, I probably

have a different view to a lot of other creatives. I'm a

researcher, first creative second. So AI as a tool to help

people execute quickly. I don't have a problem with especially

when things like finding summaries of research articles,

some fantastic research made, you know, made by researchers

for research and software out there. So Size Space is an

example. Napkin AI helps turn your research into beautiful

like theoretical models. So I think it's we need to get on

board with it, because it's happening creatively. I think IP

is a real interesting domain to get into. What big data will do

with all of our data is very interesting, and some of you

know my team and I were talking about this yesterday, actually,

and some of them feel quite threatened by it, but I would

always argue that the AI thing that's created is only ever as

good as a human inputting the prompt, and you can't replace

human thought and human creativity, and finding all of

those connections between things that might seem very disparate.

For example, creating a D and D game of how to engage policy

makers, something I was also talking about yesterday. AI will

only ever churn out the same crap it's seen elsewhere on the

internet, right? And that's just becomes an echo chamber of

sameness. So I think it's a great tool, but it will never

replace human thinking for creatives. I understand the

fear, especially around IP and around you know, what is true

It is a minefield, and I have to admit

art, and you know, how is that potentially replacing jobs? But

it's about how you position yourself as using AI to improve

your process, but not being so threatened by it, or having or

not having the confidence in your own creative thought

process to be, yeah, off put by it. I think so. Yeah, there's a

it's a whole minefield.

one that I am not engaging with a huge amount.

Laura Evans-Hill: I respect that

But yeah, but yeah, I think that, as you see,

it's certainly some of the things that people have said

that really struck with stuck with me is what you say about it

can't replace that human creativity and that kind of one

of my previous guests said, and human weirdness, the like, you

know, it's just our brains can do just weird stuff that an AI

just never think of. And there's also the fact as well that a lot

of the stuff I've seen that AI generated isn't very good. Like,

it's pretty. I mean, I'm sure it'll get better, but it's, it's

pretty. I'm at the moment, it's pretty clear. It's pretty

obvious when it's AI generated. So I feel like that's not going

to replace anything. And then also, I think the other thing is

that it's it's going to encourage a return towards

valuing real craft and real skill and and real human

connection. And I think, actually, that's something

that's been really missing in recent years. I'm my kind of

dream is that it would bring us together more as human beings,

rather than because that just, there'll just be so much stuff

out there that the only thing you can really trust is that

human human connection.

Laura Evans-Hill: Yeah, and there's a book, actually, it's

called the Revenge of Analogue, which came out probably, yeah,

nearly 10 years ago. That says exactly that, and we can see it

in the other trends in our life. You know, return to people

buying vinyl records, to using iPods and buying music, to

rejecting Kindle, because now you can't take your books off

Kindle. You don't what, what is ownership? I think we will

always be drawn to things that feel real, and yes, AI sometimes

is incredibly real, and you can't tell. But there's also

something about a feeling that you get from seeing a scratchy

doodle being done in front of you, that that's why I do what I

do, and I really love what you said about you will always crave

human connection. The reason I draw, the reason I draw with

people, and to present people with drawing, is because it

strips away all of that pretense of a slide deck or something

super flash and slick to actually the raw human

connection that we can make with our audience. And you feel more

authentic that way. And I think authenticity is something that

AI, I'd love it if I get quoted on this, but I don't think AI

can replace authenticity, which you can naturally feel if

somebody's being authentic or not. Yeah, and that that yeah,

I'm maybe famous last words. I'm not worried. I'm excited by the

possibilities of how it improves productivity and things from a

business angle, but I'm not threatened by what it could do

to human thought or to real human creator. There's human

weirdness. I like the way, yeah,

Well, have to give credit to previous guest,

Sam Steele for that one. So yes, human weirdness. Well, to think

about wrapping up our conversation, I always like to

ask my guests, if they had a magic wand, what's something

they would change about the world that they work in? So

money and time were no object.

Laura Evans-Hill: Wow, that is such a big question. And other

than remove Donald Trump, I'm trying to think I would, here's

what I would shape in our arena. I would add storytelling and

visual communication training to every doctoral training

partnership researcher training curriculum across the world. And

I know people buy it in, but I would make it a fundamental

built in from the very beginning, delivered by that

institution as an integral part of the researcher training, to

create an academic that not only is rigorous, but also

communicates well and is actually embedded in the

communities that they're trying to change. That would be my

magic wand.

I think that would be fantastic. So a

wonderful wish to leave it on there. So if people want to find

out more about you, about Nifty Fox, where would you have them

go and look.

Laura Evans-Hill: Fabulous. So for everything Nifty we are

@niftyfoxcreative on LinkedIn, BlueSky. We are on X but don't

actively post on there because everybody's had a mass exodus.

And we will also have a YouTube channel up and running in the

next few months too. So @niftyfoxcreative, on

everything. Niftyfoxcreative.com for all of our resources and

information there. For me, personally, I'm going hard on

LinkedIn at the moment because I feel like that's the most

meaningful and connected place to be. So that's just Laura

Evans-Hill there. You can also find me on X @EvansNifty. I

don't post regularly on there, but that's also interesting, too.

Fantastic. Thank you very much. We'll get all

those links as well and put them in the show notes. So thank you

so much for coming and telling

Laura Evans-Hill: Thank you so much. Take care.

Thanks for listening to Research Adjacent.

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