All fictional case study articles and learning materials published in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal are licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence.
I, Dr. Moshood Olawale Fadeyi, am an academic specialising in Engineering Education Practice, with a focus on Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Sustainable Building Engineering. I continuously diagnose thinking problems and develop communication solutions — cognitive and emotional tools — through practice-based applied educational research. The global presence of the cognitive-ability problem across education, industry, and community settings affirms that my work is applied educational research that strengthens cognitive capability for real-world problem solving.
My work enhances both engineering education, including applied learning approaches, and actual engineering practice. The central contribution of my applied educational research lies in continuously making the connection between theory and practice exist (the solution is established), visible (clear to understand), and public (accessible to everyone) to improve how people think when solving problems, thereby increasing value delivered to all stakeholders. By improving thinking, I help guide how complex engineering concepts are taught, learnt, and applied for value oriented problem solving, strengthening the capabilities of both future engineers and practising engineers in value-oriented problem solving.
To further support this, I created a teaching note (https://indooraircartoon.com/teaching-note/) to facilitate the integration of fictional case studies from the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal into academic modules. This enables professors and educators across disciplines to use the Journal to break cognitive and educational barriers, fostering more effective and impactful teaching, learning, and professional practice. In my practice-based applied educational research, cognitive barriers are defined as not knowing what to think about (relevant variables. connections, and interaction) and not knowing how to think about them (linking them logically to value-oriented problem solving). The visibility, public nature, and scholarly character of my work are legitimised through the automatic indexing of the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal by Google Scholar and the institutionalisation of my work by my university, making it available in the library for educational purposes. Below is my research statement, which illustrates how I operationalise Engineering Education Practice.
It is widely acknowledged that many people, especially non-experts who are otherwise intellectually capable, are not inclined to read peer-reviewed scientific research articles, particularly in specialised fields such as indoor air quality (IAQ). IAQ research encompasses critical topics, including the sources and nature of indoor air pollutants, mitigation strategies, exposure levels, perceptions, responses, and their impacts on health, performance, and mortality. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identifies exposure to unhealthy indoor air as one of the top five environmental risks to public health.
Despite the critical importance of IAQ knowledge, the technical language and complex writing styles typical of peer reviewed scientific research publications render these findings inaccessible to non-experts, limiting their societal reach and impact. This lack of accessibility prevents individuals from fully understanding the implications of poor IAQ and acting to safeguard their health and indoor environment.
These cognitive deficits not only undermine the effectiveness of IAQ education but also impede meaningful change for healthy living. Peer reviewed scientific articles, due to their purpose, fail to present IAQ issues in ways that engage and resonate with non-experts. As a result, public interest wanes, and efforts to address IAQ challenges through collective action diminish. The inability to see or appreciate how IAQ concepts are related can even hinder IAQ experts from fully appreciating IAQ issues, stifling innovation in research and solution development.
It is essential for non-experts to gain knowledge and understanding of IAQ, as this empowers them to make informed decisions that directly impact their health and well-being. Given that people spend a significant portion of their time indoors where exposure to indoor air pollutant concentrations can be higher than that of outdoors, lacking IAQ knowledge can lead to harmful behaviours, such as improper ventilation practices or the use of harmful materials in homes without effective mitigation strategies.
With the right knowledge, individuals can take practical steps to improve their indoor environments, such as improving ventilation, using low-emission products, using air cleaning systems, and advocating for healthier building standards. These actions can inspire community-level initiatives, contributing to a widespread commitment to reducing IAQ-related health risks.
Furthermore, a well-informed public can influence policymakers and industry leaders to prioritise IAQ improvements, creating long-term benefits for public health. Raising awareness and advocating for necessary changes can drive policy reforms, fostering healthier environments. This ripple effect can empower not only individuals but also communities to advocate for IAQ improvements, ultimately promoting a collective responsibility that extends beyond professional and scientific circles.
The urgent need for effective communication solutions that make IAQ education accessible to non-experts led to my development of an artistic educational research approach. An artistic-educational research approach is a form of scholarly inquiry that uses artistic expression, such as storytelling and visual art, as both a method and a medium for exploring and communicating educational questions, concepts, or problems. This approach is grounded in the understanding that creating, reflecting through, and engaging with artistic artefacts can generate new insights into how people learn, think, and solve problems, especially in complex or value-laden contexts.
This research effort led to the creation of the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal (https://indooraircartoon.com/), a public educational resource featuring communication solutions, which integrate cartoons and fictional stories to communicate IAQ concepts in an engaging and accessible manner and improve cognitive abilities. The journal has reached audiences in over 100 countries, proving that cartoons and storytelling are powerful communication tools for non-experts in a subject (Keogh and Naylor, 1999; Landrum et. al., 2019).
The fundamental research questions that guide each article in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal, and that signify my contributions to the advancement of knowledge in engineering education practice, are as follows: “How can communication solutions be developed with attributes that can break cognitive barriers hindering the development or enhancement of cognitive abilities? How do the acquired cognitive abilities support the simplification of complex IAQ and sustainable building engineering concepts when they are taught or presented, and how do they facilitate non-experts in learning and applying the knowledge and understanding acquired to enhance value-oriented problem-solving?”
The details of the research methodology I used for answering the research questions can be found at this link (https://indooraircartoon.com/research-methodology/). Each article in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal is a unique output of creative experiment that investigate the research questions. The cartoons and fiction stories illustrate the human narrative behind IAQ issues, making the scientific findings that underpin the published communication solutions more relatable and fostering the cognitive processes.
My research outputs, which reflect innovative educational tools, peer-level public scholarship, and communication strategies, have proven effective in mitigating cognitive barriers that hinder the development of the cognitive abilities essential for education and problem solving, particularly in the IAQ and sustainable building engineering disciplines.
The cartoons and fiction stories I develop are the innovative educational tools and methods that provide accessibility to and engagement with the audience (i.e., educated but non-IAQ experts). The content of the cartoons and fictional stories I shared publicly determines the quality of the scholarship I provide. The interdisciplinary communication strategies reflect my ability to effectively integrate engineering, science, art, and literature to break cognitive barriers.
While cartoons and storytelling have long been used in education (Liu and Elms, 2019; Praveen and Srinivasan, 2022; Kwangmuang et al., 2024), my work is fundamentally different in its purpose, structure, and educational research contribution. My innovation is not in using cartoons and stories, but in redefining them as practice-based cognitive tools for enhancing the mental capacities needed to solve complex real-world problems, specifically in IAQ and sustainable building engineering domains.
The Indoor Air Cartoon Journal is not a communication supplement. It is a primary research output, a unique platform where cognitive barriers are actively broken down through artistic-educational research. Each article is designed not just to transmit information but to develop mental models, stimulate the right questions, and enhance cognitive abilities.
What sets my work apart is that my cartoons and stories are not just simplified explanations. They are structured cognitive interventions that engage learners in meaning-making processes. They are tested in real-world educational contexts, refined through iterative cycles of practice, and grounded in a research philosophy that values public scholarship, ethical knowledge transmission, and practical problem solving in a value-oriented manner.
Unlike most prior literature, which focuses on motivation, visual attention, knowledge acquisition and retention, and general cognitive stimulation, my work uses these cartoon and stories as solutions to mediate cognitive transformation and support learners, especially non-IAQ experts, in moving from passive understanding to using understanding for value-oriented problem solving. In this sense, my contribution to the practice of learning in the context of practice based research aided with artistic expression, is original and significant, offering a replicable model for how complex knowledge domains can be made cognitively accessible, ethically engaging, and practically impactful.
Benefiting from outputs (communication solutions) generated from my practice-based research come with a condition. Readers must be willing to engage thoughtfully with the communication solutions—i.e., articles or research outputs—in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal, as they are not intended for passive reading or instant comprehension. Rather, they invite readers into a process of active mental engagement, where understanding is gradually built through attention, reflection, and curiosity. This condition—the willingness to engage thoughtfully—is crucial, as these communication solutions are fundamentally tools for cognitive development, not merely media for delivering information.
Engagement with these communication solutions enhances consumers’ cognitive abilities, deepens their understanding of IAQ and sustainable building engineering, and strengthens their real-world problem-solving skills. Since this is a practice-based research, the evidence of effectiveness lies in the learner’s (user’s) experience. Engagement is therefore essential, as it enables the cognitive transformation that the solutions are designed to support. The impact of my research outputs is seen in the transformation that this experience enables or sustains, whether within learners—be it in an educational institution, industry, or community—benefiting from the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal, or within me as a scholarly practice-based professor.
This transformation shapes how they generate, receive, store, and share both ‘raw’ information and processed information (i.e., experiences comprising knowledge, understanding, and skills), thereby enhancing their capacity for value delivery in problem-solving. The cognitive abilities that need to be enhanced include critical and reflective thinking, abstract reasoning, logical deduction, and creative imagination.
Critical and reflective thinking is often impeded by a lack of exposure to diverse perspectives, over-reliance on memorisation, fear of questioning established norms, cognitive biases, and time constraints. My research outputs, particularly the use of cartoons, address these barriers by presenting IAQ concepts in an accessible and engaging format. Cartoons provoke thought and challenge existing biases by illustrating relatable scenarios that encourage readers to question and reflect. Furthermore, their concise nature makes them time-efficient, enabling readers to grasp essential ideas and reflect on them without requiring significant time investment. Critical thinking is the process of using questions to dissect, sort, organise, analyse, evaluate, and interpret current information in order to generate new experience. Reflective thinking applies these same processes to past experience — that is, to information that has already been processed into knowledge, understanding, and skills through previous events.
Abstract reasoning is the ability to mentally connect different concepts, patterns, or ideas to understand relationships and form new insights. This ability is hindered by barriers such as poor foundational knowledge, difficulty in visualisation, struggles with abstraction, rigid thinking, and challenges in generalisation. My research outputs, which include fiction stories and cartoons, directly tackle these issues. Fiction stories use metaphors and relatable narratives to simplify complex scientific concepts, bridging the gap between specific scenarios and generalised principles. Cartoons further support this by providing visual clarity, enhancing readers’ ability to visualise and abstractly reason about IAQ concepts. Together, these tools create a pathway for readers to move from concrete examples to abstract understanding, fostering deeper cognitive engagement.
Logical deduction, the process of drawing conclusions from available information, facts, or evidence based on premises, is often impeded by weak understanding of logical principles, misinterpretation of premises, emotional interference, complexity, and ambiguity. My research outputs employ storytelling as a tool to teach logical processes implicitly. By presenting structured narratives, they guide readers through logical connections within IAQ concepts. These stories also clarify premises and reduce ambiguity by providing clear, relatable contexts. Additionally, the balance between emotional engagement and scientific accuracy ensures that unwanted emotional interference is minimised, enabling readers to engage with logical reasoning effectively.
Creative imagination, an essential skill for innovation and problem-solving, faces barriers such as fear of failure, rigidity, lack of exposure to stimulating stimuli, excessive focus on practicality, and cognitive fatigue. My research outputs address these barriers by encouraging exploration and integrating multiple disciplines—science, art, engineering, and literature—into their narratives. This interdisciplinary approach provides a rich, stimulating environment that fosters creativity. The engaging nature of the cartoons and stories reduces fear of failure, while their imaginative content inspires readers to think outside conventional frameworks. Additionally, the light-heartedness of the formats serves to refresh and rejuvenate cognition, counteracting fatigue.
Non-IAQ experts, and IAQ experts alike, must ask the right questions to develop these cognitive abilities, i.e., critical and reflective thinking, abstract reasoning, logical deduction, and creative imagination, required to effectively access (i.e., understand) IAQ and its associated sustainable building engineering theoretical concepts. However, many non-IAQ experts lack the basic knowledge, mental models, and curiosity needed to even formulate these questions—this is the fundamental cognitive barrier.
The published articles in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal play a crucial role in breaking this fundamental cognitive barrier by equipping non-IAQ experts, assumed to be intellectually capable, with foundational knowledge, mental models, and the curiosity needed to start asking the right questions. This enables them to effectively access theoretical concepts and transform them into practical solutions or seek guidance from IAQ experts for value-oriented IAQ problem-solving.
I use research to guide my teaching and teaching to inform my research. I integrate the experience (i.e., knowledge, understanding and skills) gained from my research into my classroom practices, fostering an environment where students can develop appropriate cognitive abilities essential for understanding complex IAQ and other sustainable building engineering topics.
My research informs the curriculum by introducing innovative communication strategies, such as using artistic methods and storytelling, to teach IAQ and sustainable building engineering concepts in a relatable and engaging way. By applying these interdisciplinary communication techniques in my teaching, I empower students to view problems from multiple perspectives, encouraging them to connect engineering principles with insights from science, art, and literature. This holistic approach not only enhances learners’ technical understanding of IAQ and other sustainable building engineering concepts and problem solving skills but also prepares them to communicate complex ideas effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
The impact of my research on engineering education and curriculum development is evidenced in another public educational resource I created, called Built Environment Artistic Research Sharing (BEARS) – https://bearsmof.com/. The experience I gained from teaching also informed the research questions that continue to guide and enhance my practice-based research, which in turn informs the articles published in the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal.
As the focus of my research is the development of solutions that break cognitive barriers and enhance cognitive ability for improving problem solving in a value-oriented manner, my research is not limited to the classroom; it extends to improving educational practice and the education industry, with the aim of strengthening problem-solving practice in both industry and the community. In that sense, my research can be considered applied educational research.
Additionally, the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal that I have developed support industry and community sensing needed by my university, the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). Industry and community sensing is about identifying needs that can be addressed through research and education—and a university like SIT plays a crucial role in responding to those needs in applied, impactful ways.
Within this mission, the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal plays a unique and indispensable role. It is not merely a creative dissemination outlet—it functions as a structured, cognitively grounded platform for reporting the outcomes of industry sensing efforts in the fields of IAQ and sustainable building engineering. Through its scientifically informed fiction stories and cartoon-based narratives, it identifies and documents unspoken gaps, cognitive barriers, misaligned values, and emerging needs in professional practice—elements essential to defining high-quality applied research and learning proposals.
What sets the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal apart is its ability to transform industry sensing into cognitive learning and research stimulation. It provides other scholars with foundational mental models, well-structured conceptual problems, and rich contextual awareness that support the development of empirically grounded, meaningful, and cognitively sound basic and applied research.
Each article is crafted to support the development of mental models—that is, the internal representations that help researchers, learners, and professionals organise their understanding of complex systems and interdependent factors. These mental models are crucial to understanding the multifaceted nature of IAQ and sustainability problems, especially when they involve competing priorities, invisible pollutants, behavioural dependencies, or ethical trade-offs.
In helping the reader visualise these systems in action, the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal sets the stage for question generation—the essential gateway to applied research. Strong grant proposals depend not only on technical knowledge but on the ability to frame the right questions in ways that are meaningful, innovative, and feasible. The Indoor Air Cartoon Journal facilitates this intellectual process by providing structured, story-driven problem contexts that expose cognitive breakdowns, ethical tensions, and decision-making blind spots.
Moreover, as a platform for documenting the outcomes of practice-based industry sensing, the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal captures the deeper, often unquantified dimensions of industry need—those not easily surfaced through surveys, trend reports, or statistical modelling.
In conclusion, I am not focused on bridging gaps in understanding needed to explain teaching and learning phenomena, nor am I investigating unexplained IAQ or sustainable building engineering phenomena. Such work belongs to theoretical or empirical research. My contribution lies in developing and applying practical solutions that directly improve educational practice and value-oriented problem solving in real-world settings by breaking the cognitive barriers that hinder the cognitive abilities needed to enhance human capability for effective problem solving.
While non-IAQ experts stand to benefit greatly from my research both cognitively and educationally, enabling them to engage in value-oriented IAQ problem solving, IAQ experts will also experience significant gains. Engaging with my research outputs enhances their cognitive abilities and strengthens their approach to value-oriented indoor air quality problem solving.
Consequently, my research should be judged by the problems it solves and the cognitive transformation it produces through its outputs—cartoons and fictional stories as cognitive and emotional tools—when interacted with, rather than by the generalised proof sought in empirical research.
The uniqueness, pioneering nature, and global reach, usage, and benefits of my research work establish me as a global leader in applied research in engineering education practice in the IAQ and sustainable building engineering domains.
Summary
Output of my research: When I think about the Indoor Air Cartoon Journal, I first see the outputs as the tangible works I have created and shared. These are the cartoon-based articles, the fictional experimental case studies, and the stories that bring abstract indoor air quality and sustainable building engineering concepts to life. Every article I publish, every illustration I craft, and the journal platform itself are outputs that I deliberately design to invite people into difficult conversations through a medium that feels accessible. For me, outputs are the direct evidence of my scholarly practice: they show what I have put into the world for others to engage with, and they embody the scholarly effort I have chosen to invest in a practice-based applied educational research.
Outcome of my research: The outcome of my practice-based applied educational research lies in the quality, quantity, and safety of the cognitive and emotional solutions I develop to potentially transform learners from over 100 countries. These solutions, including cartoons, fictional case stories, and structured learning pathways, are created through a rigorous practice-based methodology that ensures each output is cognitively robust, ethically grounded, and contextually safe for learning. The outcome is therefore embedded in the design of these solutions: their ability (degree of excellence, that is, quality) to break cognitive barriers, stimulate purposeful questioning, and strengthen the cognitive abilities needed for value-oriented problem solving. The large body of outputs I produce is an intentional accumulation of high-quality, safe-to-engage learning tools created to enable cognitive transformation whenever learners encounter and interact with them.
Impact of my research: The Indoor Air Cartoon Journal, I developed through practice-based applied educational research, operates as an upstream cognitive intervention designed to reshape problem framing, ethical and value-based reasoning, and judgement prior to action. Impact at this level is expressed through changes in problem conceptualisation and decision justification, with downstream behavioural effects emerging over longer time horizons. Evaluation therefore appropriately focuses on cognitive transformation, scholarly dissemination, and adoption within educational, professional, and everyday decision-making contexts, where judgement is formed prior to action.
Given the upstream cognitive nature of the work, impact is evidenced through scholarly indexing, institutional adoption, teaching integration, global reach, and demonstrable improvement in learners’ reasoning and judgement, rather than through immediate downstream behavioural metrics. This evidentiary approach is necessary because upstream cognitive interventions influence the internal logic by which individuals interpret situations, weigh values, and justify decisions, rather than producing immediate observable actions.
Accordingly, appropriate evidence focuses on whether the work is discoverable, adopted, and repeatedly engaged with, and whether it demonstrably alters how problems are framed, questions are generated, and decisions are reasoned across diverse contexts. Such indicators reflect causal influence at the level of cognition, which precedes and enables later behavioural change, rather than short-term outcome measures that are insensitive to upstream effects. Indexing by Google Scholar demonstrates scholarly discoverability and academic legitimacy, enabling use by educators, students, and researchers globally. The Indoor Air Cartoon Journal is also institutionally indexed in the university library as a case-based educational resource, demonstrating formal recognition and adoption within higher education learning infrastructure.
The articles are embedded within undergraduate and postgraduate modules as structured case materials to develop mental models, questioning ability, and value-oriented problem-solving capability. Student work demonstrates improved problem framing, greater questioning depth, and enhanced ethical reasoning following engagement with Indoor Air Cartoon Journal case articles. Analytics indicate sustained international readership across more than 100 countries, reflecting global relevance and use as a self-directed learning resource. The work further supports CET-aligned competency development by enabling ethical and value-based judgement in indoor air quality problem-solving contexts.
References
Keogh, B., and Naylor, S. (1999). Concept cartoons, teaching and learning in science: an evaluation. International journal of science education, 21(4), 431-446.
Kwangmuang, P., Jarutkamolpong, S., Duangngern, P., Gessala, N., and Sarakan, P. (2024). Promoting analytical thinking skills development in elementary school students through animated cartoons. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 15, 100467.
Landrum, R. E., Brakke, K., and McCarthy, M. A. (2019). The pedagogical power of storytelling. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 5(3), 247.
Liu, C., and Elms, P. (2019). Animating student engagement: The impacts of cartoon instructional videos on learning experience. Research in Learning Technology, 27.
Praveen, C. K., and Srinivasan, K. (2022). Psychological impact and influence of animation on viewer’s visual attention and cognition: A systematic literature review, open challenges, and future research directions. Computational and mathematical methods in medicine, 2022(1), 8802542.
