picture it solved

The fox and the hummingbird: new thinking from Dan Roam

2010-03-14T17:12:00.014-10:00

There's no VizThink conference this year, but a lot of the visual thinking crowd is at SxSW in Austin, Texas, right now, and I've been "virtually there" by following their tweets (status updates) on Twitter. Dan Roam spoke there today, and some of the comments about his talk, "Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won't Work" were:

One of the smartest guys I've heard speak.
This is probably the best presentation I've ever seen. Ever.
Hands down best preso I've attended so far.
He could be the smartest guy on the planet.

Interesting that a great speaker and presenter used a lot of visuals and was perceived to be very smart! Could it be that he's onto something?

A lot of tweets repeated concepts that were familiar to me from his two excellent books, The Back of the Napkin and Unfolding the Napkin, but I was intrigued by some new ideas.

More and more people are familiar with the concept of left brain and right brain, and their different strengths. He's got an updated version of that concept for distinguishing between our verbal mind and our visual mind. He likens the verbal mind to a fox - clever, linear, analyzing - and the visual mind to a hummingbird - spatial, spontaneous, and synthesizing.

I don't know much about foxes or hummingbirds, but it will be interesting to see how he uses and develops this idea. Here's a short YouTube video of each:

Another new mnemonic he introduced was "ViVID" thinking: Visual-Verbal Inter-Dependent thinking. Despite the title of his talk, Why Words Won't Work, he's not against words; he thinks we need to use both words and pictures in order to thoroughly explore and share ideas. "ViVID" encapsulates that idea brilliantly. There was even a suggestion that he's working on a new book, to be titled Vivid Thinking.

Check out the original tweets by searching Twitter for the hashtag #whywordswontwork .

Dan is a great voice for visual thinking, and, thanks in large part to him, the business world and wider public are starting to wake up to its value. I'll be watching Dan's blog, and any other public appearances, for more.

Getting linear

2010-01-09T08:48:00.005-10:00

When you're excited about something, you want to share that excitement with other people. But sometimes that comes across as "this is so great, you've got to try it!" which isn't very compelling. Just because you're excited about it, doesn't mean that they will be.

I've had a hard time communicating why I think mind maps (and other visual tools) are so great. I just found something that helps me do that on the Knowledge Games blog. James Macanufo outlines a process for crafting a product elevator pitch. As he says, "The better and bigger the idea, the harder the pitch is to write." This is just what I have been struggling with, so I decided to experiment with it, and found it worked really well for me.

Here's what I learned as I worked through this process.

I tend to generalize, and see mind maps as a multipurpose tool that can be very helpful for almost anyone in many situations. This has made it hard for me to verbalize concrete descriptions of their benefits. This exercise helped me to focus on one beneficiary at a time and be specific about how they could benefit. I needed a tool like this to help me be more linear.

When I got down to crafting a single elevator pitch, I found that I thought of new and more specific ideas, that were more applicable, than the ones I'd initially brainstormed for each field.

I haven't word-smithed these yet, or tested my results on friends or potential customers. But I feel I have something more concrete, that I will be able to communicate more succinctly, than I have had in the past. This increases my confidence and comfort level.

This came at a good time for me, and I plan to do the same exercise for some other products and services.

New ways of seeing

2009-11-03T08:33:00.003-10:00

Storyline threads

My husband has sometimes wished for a way to track characters in a book as he's reading. He often reads several books at a time, so progress through one is slow, and it's easy to lose track of events or who's who. Today he came across an example of one way someone did that for several films (it should work equally well for books, I think). It traces intersecting story threads in a simple but effective way. We've both wondered whether authors use such devices for themselves when plotting a book.

Looking at the top map, for Lord of the Rings, the creators used different colors to represent hobbits, elves, men, and other creatures. Time flows from left to right, and important events and locations, such as Bilbo's party and Isengard, are represented in different places on the map.

It's interesting to compare maps of different stories, on the bottom row. The map of 12 Angry Men shows 12 parallel threads. Without seeing the movie, this is ambiguous, because it could be interpreted either as all interacting together the entire time, or having no interaction. (Adding context, such as an enclosing space labeled "Jury Room", could help.) It looks like Primer would be confusing: Just three characters, whose lives intertwine messily, with no landmark places or times, and whose final fates are unclear! I suppose some lives feel like that at times. (I found out it's about time travel, from this Wikipedia entry.) From xkcd, via Flowing Data.

Evolution of thinking

I have trouble, sometimes, committing myself to a conclusion, because I recognize that my understanding is always evolving as I get more information and consider more points of view. Many scientists and others seeking "truth" can probably relate. The evolution of one scientist's thinking over the course of 13 years is traced in a visualization of changes in six editions of one of his books. With different colors representing each edition, if you let this play out, you see how words are added and removed, and, dramatically, how an entirely new chapter is added. I also discovered that if you hover your cursor over a section, you can read the words, in the color representing the edition in which they were added. The work traced is Charles Darwin's famous On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, first published in 1859, with the 6th edition published in 1872. From Ben Fry, from this CNN article, "A new way of looking at the world", via Flowing Data.

Elephant Egg 5

2009-10-24T09:17:00.013-10:00

I was one of 5 presenters at the latest Elephant Egg event on Oct. 22. This was the best one yet, in my opinion. None of the presenters used bullet points, or read us their slides! In fact, all used the medium in the way recent research says is most effective: the visual content on the slide and the presenters' spoken comments complement and support each other.

Barking
"Dr. Kate" Kathleen Ireland, a science teacher at Seabury school, shared her experience of the trip of a lifetime, going to the Galapagos Islands with other teachers. She told us how excited she was when her application was accepted: she felt like Charlie, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, winning the golden ticket. She told us that all the animals, and even the people, bark, and used that as a metaphor for getting people's attention to recycling and other ecological concerns.

Uncovering Pa`u
Linda Lindsay gave a graceful and dignified presentation about her current film project, a documentary about the pa`u riders - Hawaiian women who ride horses - and their traditions, a piece of Hawaiian culture that few are aware of. You can follow her work by becoming a fan of her Facebook page.

Visual Language

(Click to view a video of my presentation on YouTube. I'm mostly a silhouette in the shadows, but the presentation and audio are pretty clear.)

My presentation had an audacious goal: to teach the audience a new language! I provided a worksheet to make it an active learning experience and was pleased to see almost everyone participating. Having a table full of friends to support me made it so much easier to make my first public presentation - thanks for being there for me, Jeff, Jeff, Francine, Ann, and Don! And thanks to Gabe, who couldn't be there, but suggested doing the video.

Here's the presentation on Slideshare, if you'd like to review it or read through at your own pace.

Karen Bennett Elephant Egg presentation

View more presentations from Karen Bennett.

Wander
Paul Wood, a writer and educator, did a multi-media performance piece accompanied by music by Duke Ellington, commenting poignantly on a current issue, the diversion and restoration of Maui stream water.

Maui forest birds
Mike Neal came to Maui years ago to surf, but has recently discovered a new passion in the cloud forests on the slopes above us, photographing and working to preserve native birds of Maui. These birds are extremely rare, with only a few hundred individuals (of some species) surviving in the world.

The presenters, from left to right: Kathleen Ireland, Mike Neal, Linda Lindsay, Paul Wood, Karen Bennett.

Thanks again to Maggie Sutrov and Ian Blakeslee for organizing this evening of inspiration! They are planning another event next month which promises to be fascinating: The Reverse Origami Film Festival, which will feature short (5 minutes or less) videos by Maui film makers, on Nov. 21.

Simple pictures for complicated situations

2009-10-10T07:34:00.008-10:00

"Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures."

That's the subtitle of Dan Roam's best-selling business book, The Back of the Napkin. Wait, did you say business book? That sounds like a pretty "lite" title for a business book. Well, a book doesn't have to be ponderous or dense to be useful. In fact, the more accessible, the more likely the ideas will be considered and adopted. Dan's book is clear and well-organized, teaching how to use visual thinking to analyze business problems and communicate clearly about them.

Political issues rarely get this kind of treatment. Buzz words and emotion rule, with little rational analysis or explanation for the average citizen. Dan and a doctor decided to provide some perspective on the current health care reform debate. He posted a 4-part presentation on his blog, using simple hand drawings, to explain the factors involved, the types of proposals being considered, and how individuals will be affected under each. It was such a breath of fresh air that Fox News had him go through some of it on-air, and Business Week magazine and Slideshare.net named it the best presentation of 2009 in a recent contest.

Another example of the power of a simple drawing is the "rich picture." I learned about these a few years ago. Last week, Dave Lash turned me on to a useful diagramming tutorial site which is part of a university-level systems thinking curriculum. For 6 different diagram types, self-paced Flash movies explain when each is most useful and how to draw them. Transcripts of the narration are also provided.

A rich picture is a sort of hand-drawn info-graphic, used in the very early stages of an analysis to explore the issue and surface assumptions. This diagram examines a controversial situation in England a few years ago. Here are some comments on the diagram by its creator, from the accompanying transcript (I've emphasized some points that make rich pictures so valuable, in my view):

I don't think rich pictures can be used to depict everything in a problem situation, I think they are devices for some kind of discrimination - you are actually saying what you think are the important issues, and you have to decide on what’s important according to the purpose the rich picture is being constructed for, for a particular problem situation.

In this case my purpose was just to try and gain a general understanding about the miners’ situation.

It can be used as a personal device, so you can explore your own understanding. When you begin to put symbols down on paper and to draw the rich picture, you begin to question your own understanding and it can throw up questions for yourself about what you understand and what you don't understand. It begins to put some structure on the problem situation from your own personal perspective.

It’s probably got a number of faults in it, and I think that’s one of the strengths of a rich picture. It makes you begin to declare assumptions, and because you are declaring and discussing those assumptions, they can be challenged by other people. So your understanding of the situation can be explored, challenged and modified by the debate that ensues. The power of a rich picture is that it provokes that kind of debate, there’s a bit of visual interest there that can spark off thought, you can visit the rich picture randomly, you can move around on it which is stimulating for debate in itself.

I haven't had a chance to go through all the diagram tutorials in detail yet, because I'm preparing a presentation for the next Elephant Egg night. (In developing this presentation, I'm experimenting with the methodologies of Cliff Atkinson and Andrew Abela, who have both recently published excellent books aimed at helping people communicate more clearly in presentations.) If you're on Maui, you might enjoy stopping by Moana Cafe on Thursday, October 22 at 6:30 for an evening of serendipity and new ideas!

Are you in flow?

2009-08-05T13:53:00.005-10:00

Artists, athletes, researchers, and others with a passion for their work or hobby know what it's like to be in a "flow" state. They lose track of time, and feel at one with with what they're doing. The flow state arises under certain conditions - just the right amount of challenge relative to the person's skill level - pushing it, but not too much. This graph shows the flow state in the upper right, and the feelings associated with other combinations of challenge and skill.

This graph is from this Wikipedia page, which I found in this note in this blog post by Merlin Mann on how to get past the obstacles that stop you from starting a creative or challenging project.

Elephant Egg 3

2009-06-29T16:03:00.005-10:00

The third "Elephant Egg" night of pecha kucha style presentations was held at Moana Cafe last Tuesday night. It succeeded in sharing the presenters' passions with the audience, and giving us some new ideas to think about. See photos on Maui Jeff's blog.

(Click the mind map image above to view it in a readable size!)

New VISUAL search engine

2009-06-20T16:06:00.003-10:00

I just found a great new search engine. You can scan through the results like Apple's cover flow. Check out http://www.searchme.com/

Elephant Egg in Maui!

2009-05-13T20:13:00.006-10:00

One night a couple weeks ago, I attended an event called "Elephant Egg," held at Moana Cafe. Maggie Sutrov's invitation promised "Five Presentations by Five Inspiring People." I recognized the format as pecha kucha, which I'd heard of but never experienced (20 slides shown for 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds). I was out of town at VizThink for their first event, so I made a point of going to this one. It was defnitely worthwhile!

There were five presentations:

An outrigger canoe trip to Kure in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, by Peter Nice
Photos from a trip to India near Nepal (above 15,000 feet!), by Daniel Sullivan
Likability, by Bob Sommers
Spiral Dynamics, by Ian Blakeslee
The future of newspapers, by Maui News reporter Ilima Loomis

The format kept the presentations short and focused, and gave just enough information to be intriguing and open opportunities for questions. They're planning to hold them every couple months, so the next one will probably be in late June.

Art history class 1 summary

2009-03-29T10:02:00.004-10:00

Dick Nelson has started an 8-week art history class. We're at the halfway point, and I've been reviewing my notes and starting to summarize them.

In our first meeting, we did two exercises designed to introduce some organizing principles and basic concepts that we'll be working with and going into more depth on in coming weeks. We started by comparing two works by different artists in different periods - see this post. Then we played a game, matching works of art and architecture to their period, to learn "where" in time the periods occurred, and some classifying characteristics. See the game board and more details here.

More on VizThink '09

2009-02-09T13:17:00.004-10:00

There are a few things I forgot to include in my earlier post about VizThink '09.

Dave Gray has a great post, detailing why he thinks you need to go. He says VizThink is different than other conferences, because VizThink is about:

Differences
Innovation
Design
New Voices

Read his post for the details.
If you're planning to go, look for the registration discount code at the end of his post to save money on your registration!

You might want more information before you decide. Just look at the session descriptions, and facilitator bios, and you're sure to be intrigued.

VizThink '09

2009-02-07T18:54:00.008-10:00

My husband and I collaborated on a T-shirt design this week, inspired by our plans to attend the VizThink conference later this month. We wanted to show an aspect of why visual thinking is valuable, and exciting to us. We'll be wearing our long-sleeve Ts at VizThink, and they're available on CafePress at http://www.cafepress.com/visualthinking/.

The VizThink conference starts in just two weeks, on Feb. 22. It's two-and-a-half days with some of the world's leading practitioners of visual thinking and visual communication. Last year's facilitators included two people - Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson - who, through their work and recently published books, are changing the experience of millions of people who spend much of their time in meetings, by teaching new ways to conceive and design presentations. Dan Roam, another facilitator, shared concepts from his (at the time) soon-to-be-published book, The Back of the Napkin. This book was named one of the top 5 business books of 2008 by Amazon and several business publications. Many of last year's greats will be returning, and there will be new people with new ideas. It's sure to be very stimulating for anyone interested in effective visual communication, an increasingly important business skill. (Click on the VizThink08 label to see my posts on last year's event.)

Immerse yourself in color!

2009-01-13T16:49:00.007-10:00

My friend Gabe is planning to build an exciting - real world - interactive demonstration of the relativity of color for an art festival on Maui in February. You'll be able to to go into a room and change the color of the walls, based on where you point.

See his blog for a more complete explanation, and be sure to try out the demo! Play around with changing the colors (mouse over the colored matrix). I love the "light switch" by the "door"! Click on the video floor mat to see and hear his description, and click on the "Donate" button if you feel moved to support this project!

Color is relative video clip

2008-11-17T07:12:00.005-10:00

Gabe had some questions about my last post, and I realized it would be fun to use a Jing video capture on his cool Color is Relative website. He's built some interactive pages demonstrating the relativity of our color perception, based on our recent classes with Dick Nelson. The video above shows just one example. Check it out!

Cool tool

2008-11-15T16:08:00.006-10:00

Today I discovered a new free tool that I think will be very helpful. It's called Jing, and you can use it to capture, annotate, and share screen shots, and make short videos of your screen. I captured the image above from their website, and added their tag line, "Visual conversation starts here", in the blue annotations. The intuitive interface lets you highlight or frame areas in the image, and use arrows to point to areas of interest. You control the colors, fonts, and sizes.

Here's a 34-second screen capture video:

The six secrets of sticky ideas

2008-10-15T15:36:00.007-10:00

Short and sweet today - just the facts. From the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I highly recommend it.
The six secrets of sticky (memorable) ideas - they are:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories

Hint: it spells SUCCESs.

Campaign photos

2008-09-30T10:37:00.004-10:00

Yard sign

Bumper sticker

T-shirt: Ray of Automatic T-shirt Printing in Kahului

Beyond Bullet Points

2008-09-09T18:36:00.011-10:00

We developed another presentation last week, and I used Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points approach to structure it. It wasn't a full-on BBP presentation, because a large portion of the time was devoted to working sessions, and because my partner wasn't that familiar with the approach, but I found it a helpful development tool. The Word template helped me to focus, order, and limit our ideas. I sketched out ideas for some of the slides' graphics, and actually wound up using some of my crude sketches in the final presentation, as the hand-drawn look, though casual, conveyed the important concepts. I kept a consistent look and theme through the "call to action" and three key point slides.

There were some glitches, but they could be traced to the rushed timeframe and limited review cycle time, rather than the methodology.

The title slide and 8 key BBP slides (Setting, Role, Point A, Point B, Call to Action, and 3 Key Points) are shown above. Get a copy of the BBP Storyboard Sketchpad PDF (below) here. Also see my May 26 post, Walking his talk.

Campaign season

2008-08-27T18:29:00.003-10:00

A friend of mine, Michael Howden, is running for the Upcountry seat on the Maui County Council, and he's asked me to help with some of the publicity aspects. We've ordered signs and banners printed with the design above. Check out his website for his take on local issues.

Film and veil

2008-07-20T08:25:00.003-10:00

Films and veils are two visual phenomena that Dick Nelson teaches about in his Interactions of Color class. We learned to recognize them, how they behave, and how to recreate the phenomena. This photo, taken yesterday by my husband, has an example of both.

Unlike solid objects, which are opaque, films and veils are both translucent, allowing us to partially see through them. Common examples of films are sunglasses, tinted glass in windows, and bright or dark colored tissue paper. Shadows also behave as films. Films make everything behind them appear darker. Veils make everything behind them appear lighter. Examples are bridal veils, white tissue paper, and atmospheric mist.

In the photo above, both sails have portions that are opaque, and portions that behave as veils. In addition, the dark top of the sail on the right acts as a film. The spray raised by the sailors' boards is a veil.

Our eyes and brains automatically take in all this information as we make sense of our world. Artists learn to see these details to create the effects they want.

Show and Tell

2008-07-03T11:10:00.005-10:00

Dick Nelson hosted a "Show and Tell" this week, where a handful of artists shared some recent work. Sue's quilt miniature was set off nicely by her top and Donnette-Gene's!

I showed a mind map summary of color class concepts:

Walking his talk

2008-05-26T20:23:00.004-10:00

In the last few days, I've been studying the work of Cliff Atkinson. I've ordered his book, Beyond Bullet Points, from Amazon. The second edition just came out last year. He has developed a presentation formula that really makes sense to me, using the classic structure of stories to design a presentation. I'll tell more about that another day.

You've probably experienced many PowerPoint presentations in your life, most bad. Cliff co-authored a paper with Richard Mayer, a researcher at UCSB, which gives insight into why they can be so mind-numbing. The fundamental reason is that they don't correspond to how humans take in and make sense of information.

"The design of PowerPoint presentations should be compatible with how people learn."

The typical PowerPoint presentation contains slide after slide of text, which the presenter often reads to the audience. Because we have parallel channels for processing visual and verbal input, our verbal channel gets overloaded, reading and translating the written words plus hearing what the speaker says, while our visual channel has little to do (look at the speaker, the room, other audience members) and does not receive any reinforcing input. If a presentation is to inform, the speaker should understand how best to get their message across, which is to use both the visual and the verbal channels. Give the eyes something relevant to look at, and speak the message they are trying to convey. As Bob Horn says, let words do what they do best, and let pictures do what they do best. By stimulating both channels, the brain automatically seeks to make connections between the new information in the presentation, and relate it to existing knowledge.

What I mean by "walking his talk" is that this paper exemplifies the format that Cliff recommends for presentations. It is a "notes page" view handout from PowerPoint, which shows the slide on the top of the page, and the speaker's notes or narration on the bottom half. You can see that there is an engaging graphic on the slide, with a headline that summarizes the current topic, and useful details are given in the narration. The paper, in PDF, is "Five ways to reduce PowerPoint overload". This is one of the most succinct and informative explanations I've seen about why to use visual communication, and how to do it effectively.

Cliff's websites are well worth exploring. There is one for each version of the book. The new site is a focus for a "Beyond Bullet Points" online learning community, so much of the content is restricted to members (currently $25 annually), but there are still a lot of free resources, including PDF downloads of chapters 2 and 3 of the new book, and templates for Word and PowerPoint. Here is Cliff's new website, corresponding to the 2007 edition of the book. The older website represents his business, Sociable Media, and also has chapter and template downloads, plus a lot of articles and interviews, and an archived forum (new discussion is moved to the new site). Here is the website corresponding to the 2005 edition of the book. I invite you to explore these resources to find inspiration, rationale, and tools for improving any presentation you may need to give.

Working, part 2

2008-05-23T20:08:00.001-10:00

More work I've been doing lately is freelance mind mapping for a software company called NovaMind. They make the NovaMind mind mapping program I use for planning, organizing, note taking, and more. They've just revamped their website, and a lot of the mind maps in the informational pages on mind mapping are mine, and I'll be working on mind maps to illustrate some of the pages that don't yet have them.

The illustrations in this post come from this page, Mind Mapping for Students. While I did all but one of the mind maps on the page, the webmaster did the nifty "cover flow" gadget at the top of the page that scans through the mind maps, and the automatic magnifying lens that gives you a closer view when you move your cursor over an image.

See this page, and others linked from it (in the Mind Mapping menu on the right) for more of my work. Check out the informative video (8 minutes) on the NovaMind home page to see just how useful and versatile this program is. I couldn't be without it: it helps me think!

Working!

2008-05-22T17:22:00.003-10:00

Wow, it's been over two months since my last post. Like many bloggers, that means I've been busy with higher priority, i.e., rent-paying, things. Plus, I feel more comfortable posting finished work and considered thoughts, rather than ramble about raw work in progress. So today, I'm posting links to some of what I've been working on lately.

A couple weeks ago, I went to Oahu for a meeting on a Clean Water Act water quality project with the state Department of Health. The lead contractor on the project is a woman named Robin Knox, who has water quality expertise, and she asked me to partner with her to help create informative graphics and facilitate the workgroup meetings we will be convening. She gave a repeat performance on Maui today. This PDF is a good summary of the project, and the purpose of the meeting. Our presentation (PowerPoint file, with speaker's notes) is here. Both, plus a handout, are linked from this web page (scroll down a ways until you see a little yellow "New" flag and "May 7".) Next steps are to convene working groups for two more meetings and to submit a report of the group's recommendations.

Art & science

2008-02-28T21:30:00.008-10:00

In Dick's color class Tuesday we were exploring colored light, and talking about the difference in colors between sunset and sunrise. Kit Gentry proposed a theory about more color at sunset due to more moisture and particulates in the air. I confirmed this later in The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air, by Marcel Minnaert. I was reminded again of the common drives shared by artists and scientists, curiosity and exploration, and their common disciplines of observation and experimentation.

I love this quote from Edward Tufte, because it helps me make sense of my parallel interests:

"Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information."

(from Beautiful Evidence, 2006, p. 9)

Artists and scientists used to be the same person - daVinci, Goethe - the modern gulf between them is artificial and detrimental. This is one of the ideas of Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind: We need to unite these world views. Dick's class does. It teaches artists to see more carefully and scientifically, and shows how this rational approach can enhance their creativity.

This is why I'm so excited about visual thinking and visual communication - it is consistent with more of who we are.

(Photo by Kit Gentry)

VizThink wiki page

2008-02-23T11:30:00.003-10:00

Today I created a new page on the VizThink wiki, in order to share my summaries on each session. I'll be blogging about each session individually, but for now, at least a jpg of my mind map summary of each session's highlights is available.

Illusions

2008-02-20T17:25:00.005-10:00

Color class, Feb. 19

Tuesday was the seventh week (of ten) in Dick Nelson's Interactions of Color class. I'm way behind in blogging about it! He starts each session with an exercise to introduce the day's topic. The students spend some time working in pairs. Here, they've talked through how they would create an illusion of a veil on a given composition (covered in the last two weeks), and are starting to cut and paste to create the illusion of a spotlight, the new topic.

They were given a composition something like this, and told to choose colors (from a set given) which would create the illusion of a veil (such as a piece of tracing paper, or thin fabric) over the elliptical area outlined.

Illusion of a veil

Then they were asked how they would create the illusion of a spotlight on the same composition, and given swatches of color to cut and paste into position. The resulting compositions looked like this:

Illusion of a spotlight

There followed a discussion of the differences between creating the two illusions. A veil lightens, or tints, all colors behind or underneath it. A spotlight causes all areas outside it to appear darker, or shaded (like a film, an earlier subject). What they have in common is their unifying effect on a composition, and they can also create focus, mood, or mystery.

What do these illusions have to do with art? An artist who wants to create a particular mood, or render a particular scene or effect, can use this knowledge to create the effect they want. A misty atmosphere or fog can be thought of as a series of veils. Trees and other objects farther away are lighter, with less contrast to their surroundings. A scene with some brightly lit areas will have other areas of deep shadow. Scenes rendered without this awareness will look flat and false, no matter how realistically drawn.

Visual summaries

2008-02-04T20:06:00.000-10:00

I've been reviewing my notes and summarizing my learning from the VizThink conference. I find mind maps useful for this, and for referring to later, though they lack the hand-drawn images that my composition book notes contain. This image contains summaries of all 8 sessions I attended in the two days (two general and two breakout sessions each day), which is actually readable when printed on two pages. I've also put each session in a mind map of its own.

A couple of other VizThink attendees have also done interesting summaries. My husband did his in a nice one-page visual format

and posted it on his blog, VisualThinkScape.

And graphic facilitator Brandy Agerbeck took her visual notes on index cards, and posted them to the conference wiki. Here's her photo of her cards and markers

and here's her wiki page, with her cards from each session.

Trying new things

2008-02-01T11:49:00.000-10:00

One of the first events in the VizThink conference was a very quick "learn to draw" session with Dave Gray, CEO of Xplane. He had us draw some very basic shapes, then taught us to "take the stick figure to the next level". People instinctively start with the head, but he recommends drawing the head last.

Start with the body, which communicates the action
Draw the legs next
Then the arms
Finally, the head

Dave sees this kind of drawing not as art, but as a means to communicate, and encourages everyone to try it. His argument runs:

Every 5 year-old can draw
You were once a 5 year-old
Therefore, you can draw.

It doesn't have to look just like the real thing for someone else to understand it, so you don't have to be an artist to use drawing to communicate.

Here is his popular 2005 blog post on how to draw a stick figure. In this one, he starts with the body, as above, but draws the head second. And here is his 2007 post on how to draw a stick dog. This uses the body first, head last process. I think his thinking on the best order has evolved over the past couple years.

I drew this picture on my laptop, using the touchpad and a new program I tried at the conference, Alias SketchBook Pro (now Autodesk SketchBook Pro). It was designed to be used with a tablet PC and works well for artists who use a Wacom interactive display or tablet. It has a number of drawing tools like pencil, ballpoint pen, marker, chisel tip, brush, and airbrush, and a unique semi-circular menu that sits in the lower left or lower right corner of your screen. I've only begun to explore it, but it looks fun and powerful!

Bob Horn at VizThink '08

2008-01-31T19:42:00.000-10:00

Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson interviewed Bob Horn about his work during the first general session of the conference.

Nancy described his book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century as "an encyclopedia of visual language and visual thinking" and said it was a big influence on her. (See my earlier blog post on the recent republication of this book.) Bob claims that visual language is a new language being born, an international auxiliary language. He defines it as the "tight integration of words and visual elements". He uses a familiar and simple example of this tight integration, the "one way" sign:

Neither the words alone, nor the arrow alone, convey the meaning. You need both.

Much of his work lately has been in the form of large murals, which can convey both an overview, or big picture view, and details. He says these can help us "think bigger thoughts" about the complex problems we face, because they provide a way of "keeping the entire strategic context in front of us". He thinks that "large murals should invite people to make their own patterns, associations, and objections." Ideally, they provide information which allows us to form thoughtful opinions, and make reasoned decisions, considering the multitude of factors and perspectives involved.

Here is the leftmost one-quarter of a large timeline mural on management of nuclear waste in England:

Bob pointed out that murals can convey emotion as well as information.

I attended Bob's breakout session. Here is the session description. My mind map notes from the breakout session are at http://wiki.vizthink.com/BobHornBreakout

VizThink08 conference

2008-01-30T18:44:00.000-10:00

I just got home from the VizThink conference in San Francisco. It was an inspirational and educational 4 days: 2 days in a pre-conference infographics workshop with former Newsweek graphics director Karl Gude, and 2 days of conference sessions with other greats in the world of visual thinking and visual communication. I'll be posting more pictures and notes from it soon.

Visual deception 2: 3 colors appear as 2

2008-01-22T21:47:00.000-10:00

The second color deception exercise in the Albers/Nelson curriculum is to make 3 colors appear as 2. In this case, there are two ground colors, and the figure color is chosen such that on each ground, it appears to be the same color as the opposite ground. That's pretty abstract - here's what it looks like:

And here's the proof that the two figure colors are the same, and different from the two grounds:

Again, the grays were taken from my array in this post.

For this deception to work, the ground colors need to be closely related, and the figure color must be right in between them.

What's wrong with these arrays?

2008-01-21T14:51:00.000-10:00

In week 2 of color class, Dick gave each student a set of color chips and asked them to sort them into an array, discarding any that were not part of the "family". In the two arrays above, there is one imposter in each family. Can you spot them?

Answer: In the top row, the leftmost rectangle is not part of the family. If you think in terms of the pigment primaries (cyan, magenta, and yellow), it has yellow in it, which none of the others in that row do. In the bottom row, the imposter is the second from the left. It leans toward magenta more than any of the others.

Here are the arrays with the imposters removed:

Once you have an array of related hues, you'll notice the fluting I pointed out in a previous post. If you look at an edge of one of the child colors, you'll notice it seems to glow with the color of the rectangle on the opposite side of it. This is a strong indication that you've identified family members.

Something interesting happens with certain color choices for parents. Would you have predicted that this gray was the child of these pink and green parents?

How about in these contexts?

Look for the magenta and green glows along the edges of the children.

What's happening here? Magenta and green are opposites on the color wheel, or complements. When you mix complements, you get gray.

Here is another complementary mix. The child seems to favor the yellow parent a little, rather than being neutral gray, indicating that I didn't quite choose complements for parents. But the glowing effect along the edges, called "halation", is quite nice.

Visual deception 1: 3 colors appear as 4

2008-01-13T17:18:00.000-10:00

This is the first of the "visual deceptions" we are studying in Dick Nelson's "Interaction of color" class. Many of the principles are easiest to recognize and learn from in shades of gray (values), before trying them in color.

I chose my values from the array I created for the last post.

Here is a proof that they are the same:

This one is quite interesting. If you look at the horizontal bar, doesn't it look as if it changes color right at the boundary between light and dark?

But Dick says, "If you can push it, why not SHOVE it?" Meaning, really emphasize the effect. To do that, you have to recognize what causes the illusion, and what variables you can manipulate to heighten it. In this case, making the ground values as different as possible from each other is what does the trick. This is what he terms "exploitation".

Here, if asked to order these values from lightest to darkest, I would say white, the right gray strip, the left gray strip, then black. But in reality, both gray strips are the same middle gray.

What are the principles involved in this illusion? The figure color must be related to both ground colors, in other words, it is a child of the two parents. The ground colors should differ from each other in both hue and value. (Here, they differ only in value. I will explore this illusion in hue, or color, in a later post.)

So what's the point? The point is, a color looks different depending on its background. So don't use one color on two different backgrounds and expect the viewer to "read" it as the same - they won't.

Eye training: discriminating value

2008-01-13T15:36:00.000-10:00

Dick Nelson has started a new round of his 10-week color class, "Interaction of Color", based on his training with Josef Albers. The students are Maui artists in a variety of media. I volunteered to be his assistant, so I "drive" the computer during demonstrations, and he has me review and comment on his assignment handouts to make sure they're as clear as possible.

In the first class, one of the "discovery" exercises was to sort a set of black, white, and gray strips into an array of equal steps. (See this post on arrays.) The idea is for the value change between pairs to be even, as the distance between stair steps is even.

We are using Adobe Illustrator for this class. It has a function called "blend" which will create intermediate colors between two objects. This can be a smooth gradient blend, or discrete steps, which is what we are using. Illustrator appears to use a linear interpolation to create its blends. We don't perceive the resulting steps as being visually equal. (We'll go into the technical explanation of that later in the course.) He wanted to make a point of this, so we will learn to trust our own eyes, and make our own judgments, not just trust the computer results "blindly".

The arrays at the top of this post illustrate the difference. The top array was produced by the blend function in Illustrator. I built the values in the second one by repeatedly finding the middle value between two extremes. The differences are most pronounced at either end. Looking at the top row, at the light end, the jump from white to the first gray produced by Illustrator is too great. We can imagine a large number of intermediate grays. Then the difference from the second to third does not "feel" as large as from the first to the second. Similarly, at the dark end of the Illustrator row, the final gray is almost black, so that feels like a small step, while the step leading up to it feels larger. In my array, on the bottom, the steps from one value to the next seem more even, so if you were walking up them, you wouldn't stumble.

If you click on the image to see the large version, you may notice an interesting phenomenon when you look at individual gray strips. They appear to have a fluted appearance, as if each rectangle had a gradient, from left to right, of darker to lighter gray. But each is a single, solid shade of gray, which you can prove to yourself if you block off its neighbors. This phenomenon has to do with how we perceive. What we see depends on the context.

The whole point of the class is to increase our awareness of, and sensitivity to, the facts of our visual perception, so we can use that knowledge to create the effects we want.

The meeting game

2008-01-03T20:27:00.000-10:00

What game are we playing? Maybe we need some ground rules.

This evening, I was reflecting on a meeting I participated in recently. It was reasonably productive, as meetings go, but I perceived a lack of focus, and thought we could have accomplished more if we'd had some ground rules. I started thinking about ground rules, and how to introduce them. Why does that notion seem so foreign? It's as if we assume that just because we all speak English, we assume we know how to hold a meeting and get something done. Individually, we each know how to get something done. But our instinctive or habitual approach may not work for everyone in our group.

What if we all decided to play our favorite game at the same time? That's how I felt at this meeting:

One person mentions a topic or raises a question: A basketball is in play. Someone answers, kicking the ball. Oops, are we playing soccer? Someone else lobs in a football. Next, a tennis ball. Another, a baseball. Now - what's that - it's a whiffleball! Oh, now there's a shuttlecock in the air! Wait, a bocci ball! A bowling ball! Juggling pins! Oranges! Apples! Knives! Flaming batons! Wow, this is exciting! Oh - were we supposed to be having a meeting?!?!? Hmmm....

Head or heart?

2007-12-30T18:39:00.000-10:00

A few months ago, a friend of a friend had to make a very difficult decision, and afterward was publicly questioning it in her blog, in a post titled "Head Versus Heart". (Her name is Roz Savage, and she had been rowing, solo, from California to Hawaii.) This motivated me to compile a summary of the various decision making models that I had been studying over the past few years, to share with her.

Some of my letter to her:

...In my opinion, the simple answer is, for complex decisions like you faced recently, use both the head and the heart. Use a structured approach that helps you look at all the important factors from multiple perspectives.

The attached mind map shows the broad steps of a number of decision making models. (To read a mind map, start from the upper right main branch and go clockwise.) You will notice many similarities among them. They typically start by gathering objective data, then subjective data, then developing both obvious and creative solutions, and filtering them through your goal and value systems. It is my hope that grouping these all together in the mind map makes it easy to compare, and to identify similarities and differences...

I've sometimes felt that I've made decisions haphazardly, and that I may have had better outcomes if I'd taken a more organized approach. I am hoping that by comparing these models, I may gain some wisdom to guide my future decision making processes .

I will be writing a series of posts, each focusing on a different aspect of decision making, or a different model.

Wandering

2007-10-31T18:35:00.000-10:00

It's only through wandering that any of us ever get a solid sense of where we want to go.

(Scott McCloud, Making Comics, p. 238)

Seems like I wander a lot. It's nice to have this validation!

Exciting conference!

2007-10-16T21:41:00.000-10:00

I am really excited about the VizThink conference coming up in January in San Francisco. Several of my visual thinking heroes will be there as invited "facilitators" (they're not "presenting"!), and I suspect I'll find some new heroes among the other facilitators.

Here are just a few of the facilitators:
Robert Horn, author of Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
Dave Gray, founder of Xplane
David Sibbet, founder of Grove Consultants
Nigel Holmes, former graphics director of Time magazine
Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics

This conference is sure to be visually and intellectually stimulating! Early registration discounts end October 24. For more detail, see the VizThink conference website.

Graphic facilitation workshop

2007-09-10T21:14:00.000-10:00

I just received an announcement that may be of interest. "Deconstructing Graphic Facilitation" is a two-day workshop being offered in Sausalito at the end of September, with a half-day follow-on session in January.

Great news for visual communicators!

2007-09-06T15:28:00.001-10:00

Robert Horn's Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century has just been republished, by Xplane, "the visual thinking company"! It's been out of print for at least 4 years. The best way to get a feel for it is to look at some of the sample pages, and read about it on Horn's site. It's written in visual language (which Horn defines as "the tight integration of words and visual elements") and arranged in two-page spreads.

I could write a description and review, but that's really going against the spirit of visual communication! That idea is succinctly captured in this sample spread:
The reason I'm so excited about it is because I believe visual communication has enormous potential to solve problems through improving understanding between individuals, groups, even nations, because, compared to the serial nature of text or spoken words,

"Visual language opens wider the gates of communication. It lets more data through, with greater complexity, accuracy, and nuance."

(p. 242) If more people start to consciously use visual language, more people will adopt it as their "native" language, and we will all have an easier time understanding each other. This book is many books in one. It is practical, with a lot of examples, plus a lot of reference information, history, and research citations. It must have been a huge amount of work, so I'm glad it has been republished so more people can benefit from that investment.

If you want to read more about it, check out the announcement on Dave Gray's CommunicationNation blog. And for more background, see Horn's websites here and here.

If you want to buy it, you can order it here.

For a terrific example of crisp, clear, concise visual communication with a touch of whimsy, check out Xplane's website.

Color arrays

2007-04-01T13:31:00.000-10:00

A basic concept in the Albers/Nelson color curriculum is the color array. An array is a "family" of colors, consisting of two "parent" colors and at least one "child" color.

Using arrays makes it easier to start thinking of color relationships.

Color classes

2007-04-01T11:14:00.000-10:00

Over the past 6 months, I've been learning a lot about color. I've been taking classes from Dick Nelson, a watercolor painter and digital artist who studied with the famous colorist, Josef Albers, at Yale. Expanding on Albers' teachings, Dick has created a series of experiential lessons in which students discover for themselves just how relative our perception of color is.

Relative? Isn't red, red? No, how we perceive a color depends on what other colors are around it, how bright the light is, the color of the light, and individual characteristics. What we call red could look like orange, brown, or gray. I'll show some examples later.

Because my mission is to make ideas visible, I plan to summarize my learnings in a series of blog posts. This will also help cement the concepts for myself.

Simple but powerful

2007-02-24T16:37:00.000-10:00

I've been working on a project this week to critique a number of websites, prior to planning a site redesign. To help ensure that I was thorough and consistent in evaluating each, I developed a form to use. This is a simple idea that can have a big payoff.
For each site, I pasted in a copy of the home page, then printed out the form so I could mark it up, noting the areas my eyes focus on first and other striking or unique features, and filling out the objective and subjective design critique.

My next steps will be to review all the critiques, noting ideas I want to try for this website, and developing some thumbnails or rough sketches based on these ideas.

What is your definition of success?

2007-02-20T10:18:00.000-10:00

We chase it, usually unconsciously, all of our lives. If we stop to think about it, we may define it in terms of career achievements, or luxurious possessions, or talented children. Usually, one aspect will dominate at any one time, then some event will bring another area into focus, perhaps health or family. To me, it is multifaceted, with the whole adding up to an overall feeling of peace of mind, contentment or satisfaction. I once defined it for myself in nine elements, which I depicted in a circular, mandala arrangement, with colorful images and evocative fonts. Later, I came across other definitions with eight elements which map almost exactly to the nine I had defined. Last week, I created two sheets which can be printed out and filled in by anyone wanting to explore their own definition of success.

You can use the "Wheel of Life" to define your idea of success in eight areas of your life, and rate how your current situation compares to your ideal. This may provoke some ideas to change in some areas to better align your life with your goals. Sometimes it only takes a small change to make a big difference, and just being aware of the mismatch or desire provides all the motivation necessary to make the change.

The "Table of Life" uses the same eight areas as the Wheel of Life, and can be useful for evaluating a proposed major change, such as a career move or geographical move, to see how it might impact all areas of your life. This allows you to "try on" the change, and can give you a better feeling for whether it's a good idea for you in the long run. I used this approach once when I felt my life felt out of balance, and I was considering options for improving it. Enumerating the impact in each area supported my gut feeling about why the change made sense.

Using tools like these is effective because they involve your head and your heart, engaging both logic and intuition. The whimsical images encourage a light-hearted, fun approach, which is a productive state of mind for exploring options. The structure ensures that all areas are addressed, and provides space for exploring the answers in your heart.

The eight areas of life used in these tools are:

Career, life purpose
Money
Health
Family and friends
Romance and intimacy
Personal growth, spiritual alignment
Fun and recreation
Physical environment

(When I decided to write about this topic, I remembered a poetic definition of success attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. When I investigated, to see if I wanted to tie it in here, I found that it was actually most likely written by a woman named Bessie Stanley for a magazine or newspaper contest. There are theories about how it became associated with Emerson, but no one knows for sure. There is an interesting investigation of the topic, with several versions and theories, here. There's a humorous take on the evolution of what defines success in various stages of life at the bottom of the page.)

Plowing the Dark

2007-01-31T13:45:00.000-10:00

Here's a description of an economics simulation made visible in a virtual reality room:

A crimson comet, at ten o'clock, just above the horizon, paints an upturn in third-quarter commodities. A rose of starbursts means stubborn unemployment.
Hidden relations spill out, suddenly obvious, from a twist of the tabular data. Tendencies float like lanterns across the face of a summer's night.
...
In this room of open prediction, facts flash like a headland light. The search flares burst around you where you stand, lost in an informational fantasia: tangled graphical dances of devaluation, industrial upheaval, protective tariffs, striking shipbuilders, the G7, Paraguay, Kabul. The sweep of the digital – now beyond its inventors' collective ability to index – falls back, cowed by the sprawl of the runaway analog. Five billion parallel processors, each a world economy, update, revise, negate one another, capsize the simulation, pumping their dissatisfied gross national product beyond the reach of number.

(From Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers)

This is from a book I'm reading in which the author imagines the power of visualization which may soon be available through further advances in computing technology. The beauty of this is that it is a NOVEL, not a dry technology forecast, or glossy marketing brochure. The power of storytelling triggers our emotional and imaginative response, allowing us to connect with this future as a reality. It reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in which people interacted in the online "metaverse" via "avatar" personas – a vision of Second Life ("SecondLife is a 3D online digital world imagined, created, & owned by its residents"). While Plowing the Dark is strictly in prose (no graphics), it paints a vivid picture of the power of visual representation to extend our awareness and understanding. I'm not far enough into it to know whether he explores the potential of the technology to further our wisdom, or explores its downsides as well as its benefits. I suspect he examines both sides, as there was already an example of one programmer developing a black eye from a "collision" with a virtual branch!

This book illustrates the principle behind scenario building. A vivid, multi-sensory, plausible scenario causes us to feel the impact of a situation, motivating us to take steps to bring it about, in the case of a desirable outcome, or prevent its occurrence, in the case of an undesirable future.

By the way, you don't have to be a computer geek to enjoy this book. The technical details are described at a high level as an artist character seeks to understand her role in the project, and to contribute to it, and to explain the excitement and dedication (or obsession!) of her fellow researchers.

The bottom line: Whether through story, or scenarios, or graphical representation, visualization is extremely powerful for an individual or group to create a desired outcome, whether that is a new product, a solution to a tough problem, or a better world.

Ram Dass

2007-01-22T15:17:00.000-10:00

I saw Ram Dass speak this weekend.* He was not much more than a famous name to me before, but I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to see for myself why he was famous, and whether he had anything to share that I might want to learn.

His manner of speaking was unusual. Most speakers rush to fill every second with words. His rate of delivery was glacially slow, maybe 10 words per minute sometimes. I wondered at first if this were due to some age- or disease-related issue, or deliberate. I wondered if he was just making this up as he went along, and waiting for the words to come to him. I had time in between words to wonder about a lot of things, and to think about the actual words and their meaning, and why he was giving each one so much importance. I think it was a way of letting us experience living in the now, living each moment, really hearing each word. He never said, "Just live in the now", though he wrote a book called Be Here Now, which I assume conveys that message. He created a space for us to actually experience it. This is what the very best teachers do: design an experience so students can create their own learning. This is what I aspire to do in my teaching and facilitation. There were other master teachers at the event, who used their manner of presentation (body language, rate of delivery, repetition, emphasis) to deliver their message more powerfully than through their words alone. I have a lot to learn.

* See my post on HonuaOla, below.

HonuaOla

2007-01-22T14:13:00.000-10:00

This weekend I attended an event called HonuaOla*, subtitled "Earth, life, and all things sacred". When I tried to describe it to my husband and friends before I went, I had a hard time, even though I'd read some publicity on it. My description sounded vague and new-agey, and didn't explain why it seemed compelling to me. But after reflecting on it afterward, and reading more about it on their website, I felt they'd been remarkably successful in conveying a single message through many voices and media, and that that was part of their message. We are diverse, and each have to craft our own journey through life, take action, celebrate life, and support others in their journeys. This sounds cliche, but experiencing it was profound.

The organizers requested that each attendee fill out a survey. I did, but felt my brief response was superficial and didn't capture the depth of the event's impact on me. This post addresses my need for a more thoughtful response.

The event was very well organized. The presenters and performers were excellent, and it was professionally run. The location, the Maui campus of Kamehameha Schools, was stunning. I liked the main stage format, with its variety and liveliness, and the separate panel discussions, which went into more depth, but again from multiple perspectives.

On the main stage, short performances and lectures alternated, a format which worked well. I've been to similar events, such as Bumbershoot in Seattle, where the genres are segregated. This may be due to the vastly different scale of the two events, but for HonuaOla created serendipitous reinforcement of their theme, as, looking through the schedule, one might have identified some particular draws, and then found interesting parallels or new ideas while sitting through a couple performances they might not otherwise have chosen.

One aspect that didn't feel as well integrated, though, was the "non-profit row". Various non-profit groups had tables set up in the shade of buildings surrounding the quadrangle between the stage and the panel discussion building. It felt like a type of ghetto, segregated: one had to have a reason to go there, and then felt trapped. If they were trying to reach people who weren't already familiar with or sympathetic to them, they needed a way to interact with them, to draw them in. Maybe each could have a slot on the speaking/performance schedule, or just a teaser in the announcements between acts, like when a puppy was featured from the Humane Society. Another way to improve the already excellent event would be to offer more ways for the attendees to interact with the presenters, like associated short workshops or seminars, to make connections with each other and the presenter, and put their learning into action – which was one of the main messages of the event.

* In the Hawaiian language, Honua = earth, Ola = life

Testing text & image placement

2007-01-11T22:40:00.000-10:00

There's no interesting info here today, I'm just testing!

Text that I want to be to the right of the first image.

Text that I want to be below the first image but above the second one.

Text that I want to the right of the second image.

Text that I want following the second image.

An example of analytical design in action

2007-01-05T11:04:00.000-10:00

A few days ago I made some graphs of data my husband and I have kept for the past three years, of the number of days we've windsurfed. What you see below is what I came up with. (Click on any image to see a larger version. Some are PDFs.)

Yes, keeping track of this kind of detail this might seem pretty anal. We're engineers. But these records help us check our instincts when we comment that this month seems better, or worse, than the same month in past years. However, the original charts were becoming unwieldy. We'd posted them on our refrigerator, and they were fading, and took up too much space.

I'm writing about this here because I thought that walking through my thinking, and the process I followed, would be helpful in illustrating the practical aspects of the principles I've been studying for the past few years. Anyone who needs to analyze and report data, whether for a high school science report, a professional journal article, or a business presentation, faces a similar process. In any activity, we encounter choices. Knowing the principles relative to the activity allows us to make informed choices. In this case, the choices should lead to a graphical product that its intended audience finds easy to use.

Analytical design

What do I mean by the term I used in this post's title, analytical design? It is the phrase used by Edward Tufte to describe graphics created to convey information to others. Other terms used for it are information design and information architecture.

In a series of four books, Edward Tufte has compiled examples of good and bad analytical design, and extracted principles that guide it. I won't try to summarize them all here, but will illustrate some of them as I walk through this example. They guided the choices I made in creating my design.

What is the thinking task?

The first question to ask yourself before starting an analytical design project is "What is the thinking task this display is supposed to help with?" Put yourself in the viewer's head and imagine what questions s/he would be trying to answer when looking at your finished design. In this case, I knew exactly what the viewer would be looking for, since I am that viewer. The questions I would be asking of this data are things like:

How many sailing days did we have last March (say)?
How does that compare with other Marches?
Can we expect to sail more in April than in March?
If our friends ask when is the best time to come to sail, what should we advise them?

This is the thinking task that my information display will address.

Consider design options

The original charts, by the density of the colored-in days, provide general "at-a-glance" answers, and our monthly tallies provide the numerical values, but with three years of data we're probably about at the limit of what we're willing to wade through. A more concise summary would be nice. A numerical table

is compact, but hard to comprehend at a glance. A graph would communicate comparisons more quickly. I sketched out three different ways of grouping the data in graphs before settling on one. (I also recognized that in summarizing, I lose some data from the original charts: I won't be able to answer questions such as "What was the longest run of consecutive sailing days that K had?". If this kind of question were important, I would make different choices and come up with a different design.)

Refine the design

Then I used Excel's graphing options to create graphs for each year. My job should be done now, right? Well, not exactly. The Excel charts are quick and easy, but require some tweaking to be most useful. The design should facilitate the thinking task. The default graphs

are rather garish and overdone, calling attention to insignificant details while obscuring more important ones. Comparing the default design

with my variation,

consider these questions:

Which one is easier to read?
Which looks more professional?
Which would you rather present as your work?

I hope you agree that my design is an improvement over the default. (And if not, perhaps you could let me know why.)

One of Tufte's principles is to let your data speak. Another is to maximize the data-ink ratio. In other words, don't let non-data elements of the graph, like the background or the grid, overwhelm the data. With these principles in mind, I made the following changes to get from the default design to my final version:

Remove gray background - improves contrast & readability
Remove outline around plot area - unnecessary non-data ink
Change colors of data sets to be more restful (easier to look at) and convey consistent coding (blues for J, purples for K)
Remove outlines around vertical data bars - unnecessary
Change symbols for data points - clearer
Add value labels for data bars and year-end totals - informative
Standardize vertical scale ranges between years (left axis 0-30, right axis 0-200)
Move legend inside plot area and remove outline around it - more usable
Remove bold effect on chart and axis labels - unnecessary
Scale down font size of chart label (title)
Tone down axes by changing from black to gray
Quiet Y-coordinate labeling by increasing size of major divisions
Tone down outline around each chart

I'm not saying that this version would escape criticism from ET (he presents an elegant re-design of bar charts on p. 128 in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition). I'm sure it could be improved, and if I were going to submit it to him for a critique, or publish it in a professional journal, I would take more time to refine it. But this version meets the requirements I originally set for it, and looks respectable; it demonstrates that I care about the data and the viewer.

Summary

To summarize, these are the points I have tried to illustrate that apply to designing any informational graphic, such as a chart, table, diagram, or graph, for inclusion in a report, presentation, article, or publication:

Begin by defining the thinking task(s) the display is to help with - what questions does the viewer care about answering?
Sketch out some options; evaluate and choose the best one
Refine the look: Good design is unobtrusive and doesn't call attention to itself - it facilitates the thinking task.

Taking stock of 2006

2007-01-01T18:45:00.000-10:00

Briefly, here are a few stats and highlights of 2006.

Stats:

Software applications learned: 7
Books read: 20 (13 non-fiction, 7 fiction)
Windsurfing lessons taught: 130
Days windsurfed: 161

Highlights:

Getting married!
Seeing my 79 years young windsurfing student progress
Becoming a more proficient windsurfer: jibing consistently, sailing waves, clew-first waterstarts
"Interactions of Color" class
Life at "the compound"

I'll go into more depth on some of these in future posts, and look ahead to 2007.

Mapping the world of ideas

2006-12-30T10:14:00.000-10:00

During my high school and college years I loved to bicycle around the scenic hills and gorges of my home town, Ithaca, in the Finger Lakes region of New York. I studied topographical maps to plan my day's route. This helped me judge in advance how strenuous a given section would be and what the alternatives were, and during the ride, allowed me to anticipate what intersections or turns were coming up, and whether my next turn was near or far. I could plan a long ride or a short one, strenuous or relaxing. Familiarity with the map allowed me to make choices according to my goals, and let me make adjustments in real time if conditions changed, such as weather or my energy level.

Mapping the landscape of our ideas provides similar benefits. Representing the current and desired situations visually allows us to imagine possibilities, comprehend options and trade-offs, make plans, and adjust them as we go.

Picture it solved!

2006-12-29T12:52:00.000-10:00

It's obvious once you think of it.

If you can clearly envision the end result, you're likely to achieve it. And conversely, without a clear goal, it's hard to recognize success.

Architects, engineers, and designers have applied this principle for years. Everyone can benefit from applying it in their lives and work. And now, with relatively inexpensive, high quality, graphical computers, software, and associated technologies, many people have access to amazing tools for visual communication, for envisioning and achieving important and meaningful results.

Learning aspects of the language of visual communication over the past 6-7 years has enabled me to: learn more and retain it better; see situations more clearly; understand problems, their causes and solutions; express myself better; and redirect the course of my life; improving my performance at work, and my life overall.

This blog and my website are my first steps in sharing what I have learned, to enable others to also "picture it solved!"