After a year of intensive work on content, structure, and design, HESCOR celebrated the opening of its Virtual Exhibition at the University of Cologne (UoC) on Friday, October 23rd. The event brought together project members, external colleagues, representatives of the University, and research funding partners (MKW/DLR), as well as members of the public interested in exploring HESCOR’s work. After looking back at the project’s achievements with project leads Prof. Andreas Maier and Prof. Nikki Vercauteren, Jan Völkel (Division 8, UoC) guided the audience through the exhibition, introducing its different spaces and perspectives. A particularly engaging moment was the conversation between exhibition lead Dr. Elena Robakiewicz and designer Karl Sedgwick from Domingos Studios . Their discussion brought to life the creative process behind the exhibition, including the challenges, unexpected turns, and exciting moments along the way. Short introductions of the individual exhibition spaces by the respective responsible HESCOR postdocs further demonstrated how much thought had gone into translating complex research into an accessible and engaging experience. The event continued late into the evening, with plenty of opportunities to explore the exhibition, exchange ideas, and celebrate this shared achievement!
As HESCOR started, it brought together a series of Work Packages, each rooted in a particular discipline and addressing a different dimension of coupled human and Earth systems. As the project evolved, new connections and collaborations emerged across disciplinary boundaries and around shared research questions and challenges. This growing network enabled researchers to rethink established approaches, develop new perspectives, and explore questions that could not have been addressed within a single discipline alone. The Virtual Exhibition makes these connections visible by showcasing interrelated research questions in a series of individual exhibition spaces. HESCOR’s strength lies not only in the diversity of its disciplines, but above all in the new connections between them.
The Virtual Exhibition not only offers insights into HESCOR’s research findings, but also into the processes through which interdisciplinary knowledge is created. It invites visitors to explore researchers how develop ideas, communicate across disciplinary boundaries, and generate new insights. This is reflected in a series of comics , which offers a creative and accessible way to share researchers‘ experiences, capturing the challenges, unexpected connections, and rewarding moments of interdisciplinary collaboration. They are part of HESCOR’s broader science communication strategy, which aims to make research accessible by making transparent the process of how knowledge is created. Together, the exhibition and the comics open up HESCOR’s work to a wider audience, inviting visitors to discover not only what interdisciplinary research can achieve, but also how it happens.
