Designer Jo Bailey collaborated with NZ Post to celebrate four remarkable scientists.
Jo Bailey wears many hats. As a designer at Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand, she’s worked on everything from exhibitions and art installations to book covers and websites. As a lecturer, she teaches students in the creative arts, and as a design researcher, she focuses on facilitating and democratising access to information. She’s also pursuing a PhD, exploring the disconnect between the theory and practice of science communication, from the viewpoint of working scientists.
At the end of 2022, Bailey launched something that brings all of her interests together, and which she describes as one of her “most joyful design projects”. In collaboration with New Zealand Post, she designed a set of stamps celebrating the work of trailblazing New Zealand women in science (ngā wāhine i te pūtaiao).
Australian inspiration
“One of the catalysts for this – and really, the reason I ended up messaging New Zealand Post out of the blue – was a tweet about the Australian Citizen Science stamps,” says Bailey. Released in 2020, this set of four stamps featured collaborative, biodiversity-focused citizen science projects carried out across Australia. The stamps caught Bailey’s eye not just because they were beautiful, but because the project chimed with something she’d been thinking about as part of her PhD research.
Designers have always paid special attention to postage stamps, says Bailey. “Stamps are one of those dream jobs; a box you’d love to tick in your career.” These miniature artworks, she says, are “little abstracted encapsulations of what we value as a culture”.
Sports, the arts, wildlife, anniversaries, major events, and notable individuals have all been depicted on stamps. Looking through the back catalogue of commemorative stamps from the UK’s Royal Mail, Bailey was unsurprised to see plenty of science-related designs.
But as science education professor Michael Reiss observed in 2004, these stamp collections have typically reflected a very narrow idea of what science is, and importantly, of who does it. “The image seems to be that real science is hard physics, with military applications, done by males who are white and worked on their own between about 1820 and 1940,” said Reiss.
As part of her PhD, which she pursues part-time at Victoria University of Wellington with funding from Te Pūnaha Matatini at the University of Auckland, Bailey wanted to investigate if the situation had changed since then. “I started rooting around in that particular grove, because if stamps actually reflect what we perceive as science, then that narrowness is not good,” she says. A month after she published a blog post about her research on her website, she spotted the tweet about Australian citizen science stamps.
“Science-themed stamps were still at the front of my mind,” she recalls. “When I excitedly replied to the tweet saying that I’d love to do something similar here in Aotearoa [the Māori-language name for New Zealand], they sent me a link to NZ Post’s ‘suggest a stamp series’ form. I filled it in the very next day.”
An unplanned path
Bailey has been always been passionate about design, “but never even thought about it as a career”, she says. It was her move to New Zealand in 2006 that gave her the opportunity to reignite that interest. She completed a graduate diploma in design at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts while working in information management for Surf Lifesaving NZ. She’d study “pretty much in my lunch hour”, she laughs. “I’d head up the hill and wheel my bike into the classroom. I did that for a few years.”
During her subsequent Master’s degree, Bailey’s mentor Professor Anna Brown started an in-house design studio at the College, with a mandate to employ students. “That’s when I jumped the fence and became a designer,” says Bailey. “I started teaching, too. That has largely been my life since – combining commercial design work with academia.”
Bailey’s move into communicating science happened gradually, starting with a project called Land, Air, Water Aotearoa (LAWA), which established a visual database of information on everything from air quality to estuary health. “LAWA was a really good baptism of fire in terms of doing design-led public engagement in science, even if us designers were initially a bit naïve about the challenges,” she says.
She started to see lots of overlap between her design approach and the growing need for scientists to effectively communicate their work. Her PhD explores how scientists can give their work context so people can better understand and engage with it. “In design language, it’s about making science communication more human-centred,” she says. One of her research outputs has been a cardboard laundromat in which scientists can ‘air the dirty laundry’ of science culture. Featured at several conferences, it has evolved into a unique workshop that helps working scientists connect with the theory of science communication.
Going postal
When Bailey learned that no women scientists had been featured on a New Zealand postage stamp until 2019, she knew she had to pitch a women in science stamp set to help redress the balance. But she wasn’t content to just pitch the concept – she wanted to design the stamps herself.
“This was pretty unusual,” says Bailey, “as NZ Post has their own in-house design team. But I felt that I could bring my perspective on this, as well as tapping into a network of experts, including historians of science like Professor Rebecca Priestley and Kate Hannah.”
She was surprised to learn that stamps typically featured people posthumously – “That was my first curve ball!” – but had no problem identifying suitable candidates. “We were determined to have a spread of disciplines, to expand the perception of science in the minds of the public,” she says. “The available imagery was also important, as we wanted to showcase the individuals alongside their work.”
The final four scientists were trailblazers in their respective fields:
Mākereti Papakura (1873 – 1930) was an anthropologist. Her posthumously published work, The Old-Time Māori (1938), is a vital piece of ethnography; the first written by a Māori scholar.
Lucy Moore (1906 – 1987) was a botanist and ecologist who was responsible for developing the taxonomy of a variety of native flora. Her reference works are still widely used today.
Joan Wiffen (1922 – 2009) was a palaeontologist who, in 1975, discovered Aotearoa’s first dinosaur bone. She continued discovering fossils – and publishing papers on them – well into her 80s.
Beatrice Hill Tinsley (1941 – 1981) was a theoretical astrophysicist who proved that the universe is infinite and ever-expanding, and that galaxies evolve and interact with each other.
The visuals of the stamps play a central role in the storytelling. The colours – from suffrage purple to an earthy gold – were chosen to suit each individual, as well as to represent the ongoing fight for equality. The chosen fonts included one that celebrates another ‘hidden woman’: British typographer Sarah Eaves.
“The stamps project was a really nice microcosm of all my research interests wrapped into one,” says Bailey. “It brought me back to [the idea of] visual communication having real power. It reminded me that design has a place in terms of not just convincing people, but also celebrating them.”
If you’d like to get your hands on Jo Bailey’s Women in Science stamps, they’re available from NZ Post.
Story by Laurie Winkless