The WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies commissioned a series of “explainer” infographics for Davos 2013, on topics where policymakers needed a primer on technical complexity. Do No Harm covered biotech safety frameworks — specifically, the institutional-review-board, biosafety-level and dual-use-research processes that governed (and sometimes failed to govern) emerging biology research.
The challenge of WEF audience writing is that it needs to land for both ministerial-level readers and for the top-tier journalists covering Davos. Both groups know enough to spot a glib summary; neither has time for the full primary-literature picture. The structure we landed on was a four-panel storyboard: the existing safety frameworks, the gaps they were leaving open in 2013, the recent incidents that had made those gaps consequential, and the policy interventions under discussion at WEF.
What worked editorially
- The four-panel narrative gave Davos session moderators a structure they could quote in panel intros — “the framework, the gap, the consequence, the response.”
- WEF house style required restraint — minimal colour, strong typography, no decorative illustration. The piece read as serious because it looked it.
- For policy-explainer work, the source-citation list at the bottom was as important as the visual itself — it signalled that someone had read the primary literature.
If you’re commissioning similar work today
Policy-explainer infographics are their own genre — the studios that do them well treat the writing as primary and the visualisation as secondary. Get matched with studios who lead with editorial rather than design.