American Journal of Bioethics January 2020

The article the illustration is based on is "Ethics and Collateral Findings in Pragmatic Clinical Trials". The idea is that sometimes collateral findings (the octopus) outside of the scope of the study pop up with the rest of the findings (the fish in the net) leaving health care professions (the fishermen) with the dilemma of whether they should or should not use these collateral findings that could be useful to some. But since they aren't in the scope of the trial being conducted, it may not be ethical to include them. The metaphor in the illustration could be extended to "an octopus can also be eaten, like fish, but if people are only expecting to get fish, is it really ok to slide in some octopus to the mix, even if it's a good and healthy food source?

This project went through a long ideation phase, exploring in depth how to best visualize such an abstract concept. Scroll through the gallery below to see how the project evolved through initial sketches, value studies, and color compositions to reach the final image.