Visual Thinking

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Visual Thinking

• Rich Miller
• LexisNexis
• Research Scientist
• Alliances New Technology
• richard.miller_at_lexisnexis.com

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What is Visual Thinking?

• An approach to understanding, creating, and
  communicating
• A collection of visually-based concepts and
  methods
• Information Visualization guidelines
• Mindmaps
• Sequential visual representations
• What we can learn from Film and Comics
• Vizability cd/book on visual skills

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Visual Thinking and Aboutness

• General connection
• Understanding what things are about
• Communicating what things are about
• Specific connection
• Visualizations of index term collections
• Result of visual thinking
• Prime you to more visually process todays
  information

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Synonyms

• visual thinking
• Vizability
• non-linear thinking
• lateral thinking
• spatial reasoning
• right brain thinking

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Who is it for?

• Everyone who needs to imagine, resolve, invent,
  analyze, and communicate
• UI designers, product managers, mathematicians,
  geneticists, writers, engineering students, etc.
• Anyone who needs to formulate a problem and/or
  represent its solution to colleagues or users

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Why is it useful?

• To enhance performance in
• Thinking
• Representing
• Communicating
• To create more compelling, usable products
• Incorporating visualization into daily work can
  translate to superior products

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A Basic, Real World Example
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InfoViz Guidelines

• Tufte
• Espouses graphical excellence using his
  principles
• Hates chart junk
• Anti-PowerPoint
• Three landmark books
• Offers excellent seminar
• Presentation guidelines
• Kosslyn
• Psychology-based principles
• Focus on limitations of human perceptual system
• Others
• Many companies creating product solutions
• Ray Daley monitoring infoviz for LEXIS-NEXIS

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Visualization Examples

• Inxight hyperbolic tree
• Criminal Intelligence link analysis
• Thinkmap spider, bubble, chronology
• Demo of answer set visualization

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Sequential Art Concepts

• Film
• Borrow filmmaking techniques for UI design and
  visual representation.
• Use pictures, time, and space to communicate
• Example course
• Comics
• Similar techniques to film, but more
  discontinuous
• Scott McCloud books
• Understanding Comics must read for web
  designers recommended by Tufte
• Reinventing Comics

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Mind Maps

• Spatial/hierarchical representation of a given
  information space
• A.k.a concept maps
• Examples
• Univ. of Zurich professor
• Steve Gould from UK
• Books
• Mindmapping
• The Mind Map Book

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Vizability

• Textbook CD sketchpad
• Outgrowth of McKim book/course
• Used at Stanford to teach ME students how to draw
• Drawing can be taughtnot as innate as one might
  think
• To enhance performance in
• Thinking and Perceiving
• Representing
• Communicating

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Vizability Goals

• Familiarize you w/the visual culture
• Make you aware of your own visual abilities
• Exercise and improve your skills in visualization
• Incorporate these skills into your daily life and
  professional activities

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Vizability Benefits

• Provides a methodology and awareness
• About problem finding and problem solving
• About maintaining momentum on a task
• About knowing how to sustain flow experiences
  -- productivity state between boredom and
  anxiety.
• Get more out of your mind
• By building fluid representational skills
• More useful outputs
• Idea logs
• Whiteboard content
• Pictures used for communication and reference

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The ARC Cycle
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The cube metaphor

• Six sides - 6 elements of visual culture
• Environments
• Culture
• Seeing
• Drawing
• Diagramming
• Imagining
• Like a cube, the product is non-linear

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Samples from the Vizability CD

• Cast
• Culture
• Prototyping
• Sketching
• Idea logs
• Environment
• Seeing
• Imagining
• Drawing
• Diagramming

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Putting in into practice

• Look more closely, and analyze what you see
• When in doubt, draw a picture
• Or ask someone to draw theirs
• Borrow concepts from other forms of communication
  (e.g. film, comics)
• Maximize rate of info transfer, minimize noise
  (e.g. PPT 3D feature)
• Start your idea log
• Feel free to contact me at
• richard.miller_at_lexisnexis.com

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