Graphic Designer William Burtin’s ground-breaking 1960s exhibition ‘Visual Aspects of Science’ visualised microbiology and medical facts through models and diagrams. It was commissioned by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, and found a second life in touring from the US to American Pavilion, Italia ’61 (Turin, 1961), Stedelijk Museum, (Amsterdam, 1962), before continuing to the Royal College of Art (London, 1963), and Palais de la Decouvérte (Paris, c.1964) This paper takes as its starting point the RCA version with fifty exhibits (RCA Gulbenkian Galleries, Kensington Gore, London, 8th October – 2nd November 1963). It was co-sponsored by the RCA, The Royal Society of Science, and the United States Embassy. The exhibition’s displays included a working model of audio-visual mechanisms in the brain, images of atomic structure and energy (Uranium Atom), and images and models of metabolic processes and cells. The paper will ask how the RCA’s version was recontextualised in a British art school setting and thereby put into conversation with what was happening in UK art schools at the time, including influences from pop art and ‘low’ popular culture such as comic books and science fiction pulp literature and films. The ‘Brain’ exhibit in particular, resonated with narratives around mind control and early psychedelia. Indeed, in some ways, ‘Visual Aspects of Science’ predicted the interest in ‘a widened area of consciousness’ (Miles, 2011) that came to characterise the late 1960s counterculture. The paper builds on the work of historians including Lysen (2015) and O’Reilly (2018), who focus primarily on Burtin’s contribution to the creation of a ‘visual language of science’ and the ways in which it communicated the technological perspectives of the Cold War period. As well as connecting the RCA exhibition to currents in culture, it will problematise the fact that it was commissioned by a pharmaceutical company, and ask how a show designed for education and advertising had the potential to be appropriated for other ends. It will utilise sources from the RCA’s Special Collections (e.g., ARK magazine) and the Carey Graphic Arts Collection, RIT (e.g., models, correspondence with the RCA) to offer a new perspective on the design history of exhibitions.