Toolkit

The environmental question

The project addressed a group of insects that are ecologically consequential and almost entirely absent from public view. Three species were treated across three years: Ormyrus nitidulus (2024), Osmia caerulescens (2025) and Diplolepis rosae (2026).

These insects matter because they occupy positions in the ecological chain that larger, more charismatic species do not. Diplolepis rosae induces the wild rose to grow a bedeguar gall, a structure the plant would never produce on its own, which then houses a community of other organisms. Ormyrus nitidulus is a parasitoid that regulates gall-former populations from inside that same structure. Osmia caerulescens is a solitary bee, part of the pollination work that is widely attributed to honeybees but largely carried out by species almost nobody can name. Each occupies a different ecological relation: parasitic, mutualistic and generative.

The underlying material was fieldwork data gathered by entomologists: specimen collection, taxonomic analysis, categorisation and evolutionary study, processed into peer-reviewed articles and conference papers. That work is rigorous, sustained and effectively invisible outside its discipline. The question was whether creative practice could carry it to a public audience without flattening it.

Conceptual layer in practice

The framing was to invite audiences into entomology rather than to illustrate its findings. The work set out to present and explain what these insects do in the ecological chain, using tools deliberately chosen for their accessibility, so that the method itself would be reproducible by others.

That choice was substantive rather than pragmatic. Smartphones were used for photography, video and microscope capture. Blender, which is open source, was used for modelling. Vectary was used for the augmented reality components as a low-barrier, in-browser route to AR requiring no app installation by the visitor. A toolkit that recommends expensive infrastructure serves only those who already have it.

Collaborators were entomologists and students at Babeș-Bolyai University, working with their own field data rather than with data supplied to them. A biologist-illustrator produced drawn narratives for children. The insects were 3D printed at exhibition scale, and microscopes with real specimens were made available to visitors, opening the laboratory experience to a public that would not normally enter one.

The ethical commitments followed from this. Scientific accuracy was treated as non-negotiable: every model was checked against specimens and against the entomologists’ own taxonomic work, and creative licence was not permitted to distort morphology or behaviour. Authorship was shared, with the science credited as science rather than absorbed as raw material for art. Accessibility was addressed through multiple parallel routes into the same content, so that a child, a specialist and a casual visitor each had a way in.

Methodological layer in practice

The work used field and specimen data collected by the Biology Department at Babeș-Bolyai University, alongside microscope imaging produced during the project.

The sensory strategy was determined by a constraint that is easy to overlook: entomophobia is common in general audiences. A visitor who is frightened of insects will not look closely at one, however important it is. Proprioception was chosen as the primary modality for that reason. Augmented reality lets a visitor walk around a virtual specimen at their own pace and at a distance they choose, which gives them control over the encounter. The insect is present at body scale, but the visitor decides how close to come. Fear is not argued away; it is designed around.

The fabrication decision extended an existing museum convention rather than breaking with it. Each year the insect was 3D printed and displayed in a vitrine, in the same manner as the museum’s own specimens and illustrative material. Positioning the work inside the institution’s established visual language, rather than as a separate digital intervention, allowed it to be read as part of the collection.

Technical layer in practice

The approach was deliberately low-tech and frugal in its media, prioritising small file sizes and in-browser delivery so that the work would run on a visitor’s own device without installation.

The pipeline ran through Blender for modelling and animation, ZBrush for high-resolution detail, Vectary for AR authoring, Sketchfab for verification and sharing, DaVinci Resolve for video, and R for data handling. Smartphone photography, combined with a microscope, supplied the reference imagery.

The most instructive failure was in 2025. In pursuit of higher image quality, an Axio Zoom.V16 zoom microscope was introduced, an all-purpose light microscope for observing, preparing, sorting and microsampling specimens. A single component, a specific lens, was unavailable, and the setup could not be completed. The work reverted to the smartphone-and-microscope arrangement used the previous year, with no visible loss to the finished exhibition.

The lesson generalises beyond this project. The higher-specification route introduced a dependency that the accessible route did not have, and the accessible route proved sufficient. This is why the Technical Layer marks cost bands and partner access rather than simply listing the best available equipment.

Outcome and reception

The work was shown across three consecutive years in three exhibitions at the Zoological Museum of Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, reaching the museum’s general visitors, school groups and specialist audiences.

It culminated in the 9th International Plant Gall Symposium in Cluj-Napoca, where the process was presented as a keynote addressing how creative practice can extend scientific work and act as a bridge to public audiences. The SEED project was presented in the same session.

The most significant outcome was not the public response but the response of the scientists. The collaboration prompted them to look at their own data with fresh eyes and to consider extending it towards public-facing forms. The exchange ran in both directions rather than treating the science as a source and the art as an output, which is the relation the toolkit’s Conceptual Layer argues for.

What we would do differently

The first exhibition functioned as a pilot for this toolkit, and its main weakness was proportional: too little time was spent in the conceptual phase relative to production.

Specifically, more time should have gone into ideating presentation scenarios. The finished work foregrounded the insects, but not the entomological complexity of the fieldwork that produced the knowledge about them. Collecting samples in the field is physically demanding, highly skilled and genuinely performative, and none of that reached the public. There is a persistent misconception that data gathering is abstract, something that happens in spreadsheets rather than in wet grass at dawn. The work had an opportunity to correct that and did not take it.

For anyone attempting something similar, the recommendation is to treat the conceptual phase as production time rather than as preparation for it. The technical work will expand to fill whatever space it is given; the conceptual work will not, and it is what determines whether the finished piece says anything the data could not have said on its own.