visualthinkscape

VideoInfographics.com

2011-07-25T13:05:00.000-10:00

I’ve been intrigued with online explanatory videos since attending a workshop at VizThink ’08 presented by Lee and Sachi Lefever of Common Craft. Soon thereafter, I stumbled upon an explanatory infographic video created by Xplane, a prominent leader in visual thinking. Their video, “Did You Know 4.0” hooked me on the educational potential of using simple animated graphics and pictograms to explain concepts and trends. Since then, I’ve collected examples of infographic videos in various ways, until finally deciding to create a dedicated website to curate them, VideoInfographics.com.

Infographics have the potential to engage and visually communicate in a way that normal text can’t. The latest development in visual communication leverages the power and engagement potential of online video with animated infographics using motion graphics software and techniques.

Animated infographic videos are especially well-suited for explaining concepts, ideas, technologies, and issues that are vague or esoteric. Explanatory infographics videos are emerging as a powerful communication format for businesses and organizations.

Along with WordPress consulting and training, my main focus for Digital Splash Media in the future is creating, curating, editing and marketing infographic videos that explain, inform, or educate. One key component of that, curating, is the purpose of VideoInfographics.com.

So, if you’re a fan of video infographics or find them intriguing, check it out. You can also follow on Twitter by following @infographicvid.

Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative Explanatory Video

2010-03-15T10:54:00.000-10:00

I've just published an animated infographic video explanation of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative and I'm inviting relevant websites and blogs to embed and use it on their websites if interested. It's available either on my website or on my YouTube page - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwi1WChxOwQ

Pictures vs Text Grudge Match

2010-02-16T15:42:00.000-10:00

Pictures Demolish Text!

Visual Brainstorming & Storyboarding for Explanatory Videos

2010-02-02T09:05:00.000-10:00

Whether you’re developing a presentation, a screencast or an explanatory video, a key piece of advice you’ll hear over and over again is to develop a script and storyboard for the project before the actual production phase. This is something I’ve tried to take to heart in my presentation, screencast and video projects.

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Explanatory Video - Visual Explanation

2010-01-14T08:56:00.000-10:00

Just published new explanatory video on critical thinking.

Video Zen

2009-11-19T11:06:00.000-10:00

I’ve developed a bit of a fascination with online explanatory and informational videos lately and so decided to create a page devoted to that – a page I’m calling Video Zen. Most recently, Xplane has put out a couple of video presentations that are getting a lot of attention, The Carbon Economy and Did You Know 4.0. Engaging + informative.

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New Explanatory Videos

2009-10-28T14:05:00.000-10:00

Finally had a chance to finish up some explanatory videos I've had in the works for awhile.

First up, Sending Large Files Screencast - an explanatory video on how to send large files like videos to someone when your email provider won't allow large attachments.

Next, years ago I made a Flash animation showing how hydrogen fuel cells work. I've since lost the original files I used to create it, but I've wanted to convert it to video to put up on YouTube since I still get requests from professors and teachers to use this visual explanation. So, using Camatasia for Mac, I captured the playback, converted it to video and uploaded to YouTube. Check out my You Tube explanatory video on Hydrogen Fuel Cells.

Wordpress Tutorial Screencast

2009-07-23T17:07:00.000-10:00

Read on VisualThinkMedia.com

Online Visual Explanation: Plastic Bottles & Ocean Pollution

2009-05-16T15:22:00.000-10:00

We’re living in a time of information overload and complexity, inundated with too much information and too little time to get through it. I believe that visual explanations, such as video and online presentations, will be an important tool for organizations to convey their message, whether that’s selling a product or advocating action of some other kind.

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Visual Creative Thinking

2009-05-11T19:55:00.000-10:00

Just came across this in SlideShare.

Visual Creative Thinking

View more presentations from homehelper.

Index Cards & Mind Mapping to Organize a Presentation

2009-04-23T15:50:00.000-10:00

I'm in the process of developing an online visual explanation SlideShare presentation about plastic water bottles and ocean pollution for my blog SaveTheOcean (and to share with other Ocean advocacy organizations). I've liked both Cliff Atkinson's and Nancy Duarte's presentation development methodologies, but for some reason have still felt the need to combine elements of both and customize.

Two tools that I'm finding to be really useful are a stack of index cards and mind mapping software (I'm using Nova Mind). The index cards are great for capturing key points in the brainstorming phase. In Nancy's workshop at VizThink recently she had us use post-it notes, but personally I'm finding that index cards are easier to use. I don't have a big whiteboard or wall to organize them all so I can just lay out my index cards on a table or the floor and rearrange as needed, then pack them all up in order when I need the space for something else.

At a certain point, the index cards started getting to be a bit unwieldy so I created a mind map in NovaMind to continue working on the structure of the presentation. I think any of the presentation gurus will tell you that defining your presentation content and structuring it all outside of PowerPoint or Keynote is a best practice. So, next time you have a presentation to develop, hold off on opening up PowerPoint, get some index cards and some mind mapping software (free versions are readily available if you don't have any) and give it a try.

An example of the mind map I'm using to develop my presentation is shown below. It's still a work in progress with more to flesh out.

Digital Photo Basics Screencast

2009-04-14T17:10:00.001-10:00

As a web and multimedia developer, I work with photos provided by clients to incorporate into websites on a daily basis. A common problem I run into is that a lot of people don't understand some really basic things about digital images. For example, I'm often provided photos that are way too small for the space needed on a web page. Since I'm expanding my service offerings to include online visual explanations, I thought it would be a good idea to create an explanatory video or screencast that explains some of the basics of using digital images on the web. The result is the following (click on full-screen mode to view it larger).

Digital Photo Basics - Image Size & Resizing from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.

Now for some self-critiquing. One of my explicit goals in developing this video was to work out the process involved - what settings to use in the video screencapture, what images sizes to use for static images that I imported, R&D on audio capture, etc. While I'm not completely satisfied with the end result, I'm very satisfied with what I learned through the process.

The biggest lesson learned was that the script really needs more work and refinement. More time spent up front in developing the script will result in a better explanation and also reduce fixes and edits later on in the production process. For example, after creating all the visuals and audio and reviewing a rough cut of the video, I noticed an error in the narration that I should have caught when writing the script. It was minor, but I re-recorded a portion of the audio to correct it and also to find out if there would be a noticeable difference in the audio recorded at different times. Despite using all the same audio settings and same microphone, I can detect a difference. So, lesson learned - spend a lot of time developing, editing and nitpicking the script, then once it's perfect, record all the audio at once, then synch up the audio with the visuals later in the production process.

The audio quality also leaves a bit to be desired, but this was expected since I just used the built-in microphone on my Mac Powerbook. Investing in a better quality external mic will fix this problem. There's also a slight inconsistency at one point that I did just to make a point. In retrospect, it would probably be better to avoid this kind of thing.

Web Trend Map 4 Release

2009-04-07T16:38:00.000-10:00

Every visual thinking blogger in the blogosphere is going to be blogging about it, but it's just so damn cool that I have to do it too. Information Architects have just released their Web Trend Map 4. Popular domains on the Web are mapped to the Tokyo Metro and organized by how they are most related to the cities. Heights represent success in traffic and branding. Subway lines are colored by area of interest. Check it out!

Visualizing Garbage

2009-03-31T17:55:00.000-10:00

At VizThink '09, Ole Qvist-Sorensen challenged the audience during his general session presentation, "Survival Academy: Imagining a Better World with Visual Language, Thinking and Practice," how we as visual thinkers could contribute to saving the world by putting our talents to work on global problems. That struck a chord with me, so one of my take-away goals from VizThink has been to get involved with at least one global issue that concerns me and apply visual thinking to address or raise awareness of the issue. Ole referenced Sylvia Earle's recent TED wish which struck yet another chord and so I've decided to apply some visual thinking to the issue of raising awareness of the plight of our oceans. My original thought was to develop an online visual explanation either as a presentation and/or video. But I thought it also might be interesting to start up a blog wherein I can capture some of content ideas for the explanation as well as publish snippets from the explanation as I develop them. So, I've started yet another blog. One of the compelling issue I think needs highlighting in the visual explanation is what's known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. There's a lot of visuals and infographics available on the web to depict this, but I thought it would be fun to develop my own infographic. The first draft is below.

Sixth Sense Visual Thinking

2009-03-14T14:58:00.001-10:00

At the recent TED conference, Pattie Maes presented Sixth Sense, a wearable device that projects images on the users' environment, opening some really cool possibilities for data interaction with real life objects. Lots of people are comparing it to Minority Report, but to me it more closely resembles the world described by Vernor Vinge in Rainbows End. After reading Rainbows End and watching this TED presentation I suspect that this concept of our virtual world overlaid on top of our reality is what where we can expect virtual reality to go. Watch the presentation below and if you're intrigued by the idea, I recommend checking out Rainbows End.

VizThink 09 Video

2009-03-07T10:11:00.000-10:00

I brought along a tiny little video camera called the GoPro to VizThink and tried it out at Tuesday morning's general session. It's a wide angle lens camera with a limitation of 56 minutes of video and really limited audio. I set up the camera on the table during the general session and caught the preliminary announcements, presentations by Tableau and XPlane, some of the "live infographics" choreographed by Tom and part of Ole Qvist-Sorensen's Survival Academy presentation. Aside from speeding up the video, I didn't edit anything out. There's also no audio and it's pretty tough to see much of what's on the presenter's screen but I thought the video might be semi-interesting to folks who weren't there to just get a flavor of what it's like attending a VizThink general session.

VizThink 09 Tuesday Morning General Session from Jeff Bennett on Vimeo.

VizThink 09 Day 2 Quick Summary

2009-03-02T16:29:00.000-10:00

Finally back home after family visit following VizThink in San Jose. Day 2 was a heavy hitter, packed with content from the start. The morning kicked off with general session, featuring some sponsor presentations followed by Ole Qvist-Sorensen presentation, Survival Academy: Imagining a Better World with Visual Language, Thinking and Practice. Ole asked us how we as visual thinkers could contribute to saving the world by putting our talents to work on global problems. He inspired me to get involved so I'm planning to get in touch with survivalacademy.org to see about producing some online visual explanations (videos or SlideShare presentations) to spotlight issues like Sylvia Earle's TED wish ("I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films! expeditions! the web! more! -- to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas, hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.")

My choice for Tuesday morning breakout was Luke Wroblewski's Visual Communication for the Web. Luke has been a recognized leader on websites for years and having read both his books, I was really looking forward to this session. Luke's main takeaway was using a visual hierarchy to improve the communication value of a website. Visual hierarchy the main desired call for action on a page - you should deliberately prioritize visual weight using relationships to give meaning. I only sketched a quick mind map of the basic concepts, since he had so much material and went through it so fast. We examined and analyzed several before and after examples to highlight the basic principles. Hopefully Luke will post his presentation soon and I can link to it here.

Tuesday afternoon was another big influencer in the visual thinking world - Nancy Duarte. I recently finished Nancy's book, Slideology and I was looking forward to learning from another visual thinking master. This was a fantastic and fun session focused on Nancy's new methodology for developing compelling stories for presentations. Great theory combined with some fun hands-on exercises and some exemplary storytelling and a take home template for developing stories for presentations. Looking forward to putting it to use in developing online visual explanations.

Tuesday afternoon's general session was replaced by the snapshot sessions. Personally I thought these little mini sessions were a great idea. They gave everyone a chance to pick 4 out of 9 20 minute sessions. Very quick and very focused. I kicked off with Craig Berman's Collaborative Storyboarding, followed by Doug Ranahan's Beyond Fluff - Data Visualization for Business, then Ron Gould's VizThinking Marketing Strategy.

By the end of the day I was pretty saturated with information and starving for some good food and down time to let things soak in and process. Karen and I popped into Mezcal for a great alternative to mexican food - featuring Oaxacan cuisine. Mmmmmm!

Overall another succesful, inspiring day at VizThink. Great job everyone!

VizThink 09 Day 1 Quick Summary

2009-02-24T04:49:00.000-10:00

Starting out on day 2 here in San Jose. Day one was a whirlwind of networking and sessions. Started out in the morning general session with Tom's Table Scramble, chaos and commotion in the main conference room as Tom created networking opportunities for people along with a real-time live data visualization using the attendees ourselves to represent Mac users vs PC users, distance in miles flown etc.

Interesting opening discussion by Colin Ware about visual thinking - my main take away from that being, communication is best if we use the appropriate medium.

Breakout session 1 - Karl Gude. Oh my God! That guy has energy! Karl showcased Do's and Don'ts in infographic design. Very entertaining session and a few take-aways. Probably deserves it's own dedicated blog post some time later.

Breakout session 2- Joyce Hostyn. Interesting points on 3 Brain Theory, 6 types of story. She presented the case that facts are meaningless without a contextual story. Having a good story is essential to visuals being able to communicate your intent.

Afternoon general session - the every impressive Tom Wujec - some very cool visuals, how the brain works to process visual information - nice seque into Dan Roam discussing principles from his Back of the Napkin book. I attendeed Dan Roam's session last year and highly recommend it to anyone this year. I'd attend myself, but it's at the same time as Luke W.'s session on visual communication and the web today. Really looking forward to that one. Luke W. has a couple of nice summaries of Tom Wujec's and Dan Roam's general session presentations.

By the end of general session yesterday I was exhausted. Karen and I needed a break from the commotion so we snuck out for a quiet dinner at Original Joe's. Some great Italian with huge portions. After that, the plan was to prep for and attend the scheduled VizCamp at 9pm, but I ended up having to attend to some work issues till about 9:30. After that there was no way I could process anything more.

Time to get ready for Day 2.

VizThink 09 Opening Reception

2009-02-22T20:17:00.000-10:00

VizThink 09 kicked off today with the opening reception in the lobby lounge, along with an Fairmont's Oscar party. By my count about 60 - 70 VizThinkers congregated around the bar under the big screen broadcasting the Oscars. Lots of conversation, mingling and networking going on. A bit noisy and congested for my taste so I hung around the periphery with the Brazilian SOAP team and then cut out to E&O Trading Co. again for Indonesian BBQ beef and Alaskan Winter Ale. Mmmmmm! General session starts at 8:30 tomorrow so it's time for bed. Looking forward to Day 1 of VizThink 09.

VizThink 09 Saturday Pre-Conference Tweet-up and Restaurant Reviews

2009-02-22T09:00:00.000-10:00

Karen and I arrived to the conference hotel late Friday night and spent most of Saturday wandering around the neighborhood checking out restaurant options. More on that below.

The Tweet-up was scheduled for 6:00 in the hotel lobby and we arrived around 6:15- 6:30 and didn't see anyone we recognized or any indication of a VizThink Tweet-up. We did recognize Rodolpho and chatted with him for a bit. It wasn't long before Tom showed up and honed in on the Tweet-up crowd. Tom served as our bird-dog and we followed him to a group of 6 - 8 people chatting in a corner.

We introduced ourselves to Tom and Tom introduced us to some others and we chatted with Tom for a bit. I was struck by how much energy Tom still had after two days already spent setting up the conference. Sounds like attendance at this conference will be a bit smaller than last year, but still well over 200 attendees and the line-up of facilitators is very impressive.

Before long the Tweet-up group had expanded to about 20 people, mostly dispersed in small groups of 4 or 5. We found ourselves conversing with Tom again, as well as Mark and his SOAP (VizThink Sponsor) Brazilian compatriots, and Julia, a local VizThink volunteer.

Lots of good conversation about visual thinking, presentations, books, culture, surfing, physics and local restaurants. At some point, Ryan showed up, as well as Dave Gray and Karl Gude - veritable visual thinking celebrities. The get-together was planned to last until 7:30, but it was still going strong at 8:45 when we pulled ourselves away to go find some dinner. All in all it was a great little gathering with some good conversation and networking - and the conference hasn't even officially started yet.

Restaurant Reviews

There's seems to be a pretty diverse variety of eating options within a 3 block radius of the hotel, in addition to the hotel restaurants. On arrival Friday night we opted for Gordon Biersch, a chain brew pub. We're both fans of microbrew beers. Gordon Biersch isn't the greatest, but they do have some pretty decent beers. Food was ok, nothing fancy. Ambience is a bit noisy as you'd expect. The schwarzbier and Marzen were both pretty good.

For breakfast yesterday (more like brunch actually), the hotel Concierge recommended Flames, about three blocks northeast of the hotel, next to San Jose State University. It's apparently a chain restaurant though I had never heard of it. Nice, clean, open atmosphere, good service an enormous selection of breakfast choices. Belgian waffle for me and crab cakes benedict for Karen - both very good. They've got a weekday early special which might be a good breakfast option for VizThinkers if you want a good sit down breakfast outside the hotel at much better prices than the hotel restaurants. Another option is the Bijan Bakery in building adjacent to the hotel (actually in the same building as the hotel's south tower). Lots of pastry options, bagels and coffee. A bit disorganized when I went down for coffee and croissants this morning, but pretty good croissants.

Since we had a big late brunch we weren't hungry until late afternoon and skipped lunch. On our way to Gordon Biersch we had past by E&O Trading Company. At VizThink 08 in San Francisco we had had dinner at the their San Francisco location and both enjoyed it so we popped in for an appetizer and drink before the Tweet-up. E&O's fare would probably be described as Asian Fusion. It's an eclectic blend of southeast asian (Thai, Singapore, Indonesia...) with some Indian influence as well. They also have some good beers on tap. They're seasonal beer right now is Alaska Winter Ale from Alaskan Brewing Co. I didn't have to hear anything else. Anything from Alaskan Brewing Co. is going to be good and the winter ale didn't disappoint. Outstanding beer! Nectar of the gods. For appetizers the sesame beef satay and panir cheese naan bread we're also very tasty.

At the tweet-up we got some recommendations from Julia, who lives in the area. Her recommendations; La Victoria for Mexican, Il Fornaio or Original Joe's for Italian and Hanuman for Thai. The Thai food options on Maui are a bit disappointing so good Thai food was high on our list of dining on this trip. Hanuman is a pretty small little family place located between E&O and Gordon Biersch, within a block or two from the hotel. The dining room is on the second level, nothing fancy, very quiet, very good service. I can't seem to every expand my Thai horizon past phad thai so I ordered up a big spicy plate of chicken phad thai and Karen got a bowl of tom ka with shrimp. Tom ka soup was excellent, some of the best in Karen's opinion and the phad thai was the best I've had since the little neighborhood thai restaurant in Seattle where we lived several years ago. If I order it again though I'll go for the medium spicy level, rather than spicy.

So, high recommendations from both of us so far for E&O Trading Company and Hanuman. Highly likely that we'll be back to both of these two during our VizThink stay. And we still need to try at least one of the italian restaurants and La Victoria.

It's a cool, cloudy, rainy day in San Jose today so we'll likely spend our day inside on some visual thinking projects before the reception this evening. Should be an interesting reception this evening. In addition to hundreds of visual thinkers, the hotel is hosting an Oscar awards party in the lounge and the timing of the two will partially overlap. So, if you're torn between watching the Oscars and coming to the reception, you can do both at the same time. We'll be there tonight, sporting our visual thinking t-shirts. See you there.

VizWear

2009-02-10T13:59:00.000-10:00

Tony Karrer's comment in my last blog post about doing a T-shirt for the upcoming VizThink conference was a great idea. Tony's suggestion was to do a T-shirt with my mind map from the previous post that shows what my visual thinking interests are. Great idea, but I thought, why not come up with a T-shirt design that other people might be interested in wearing as well. I've previously sold some T-shirts online through CafePress for another website/blog that I run. So, I figured, why not come up with a Visual Thinking T-Shirt? So, here's the first "VizWear" (that I'm aware of).
And here's a look at the design on a T-shirt from the CafePress store.
My wife (who will also be attending VizThink) and I collaborated on the design (she also did the VizWear logo at the top of this post) and finished it this weekend and I opened up the Cafe Press Visual Thinking Store and ordered one for myself and one for her. We both plan to wear our "VizWear" at the opening reception on Sunday night and Monday so we'll be easy to spot. This little project is primarily intended as a networking tool for us to distinguish ourselves at the conference. Both of us are natural introverts so schmoozing and socializing don't come naturally to us. So, we hope the T-shirt idea will help us mingle and meet people a little better. But, if you like the design enough to sport one yourself, they're on sale now in the Cafe Press Visual Thinking Store.

We've also got another design in the works that will go on T-shirts as well some other items like mugs possibly, so you'll have more opportunities to show off your inner visual thinker with pride. Coming to VizThink in San Jose later this month? Be sure to look for us sporting our VizWear and introduce yourself.

Mind map of VizThink 09 Interests

2009-01-18T16:15:00.000-10:00

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since the first VizThink conference. VizThink '08 renewed my interest in visual communication, but I came home from it a bit overwhelmed by all the types and disciplines within visual thinking. I spent the first several months after the conference trying to identify and categorize everything that fell within the visual thinking domain. Hence the obsession in this blog with categorizing and coming up with a taxonomy of visual thinking. While I never came up with a nice, neat visual that captured the whole field of visual thinking, I at least got comfortable with most of the terms, artifacts and disciplines such that I no longer feel overwhelmed by the scope of it all.

Since there's so many interesting areas in visual thinking that will be represented at VizThink 09, it seems to me that the best approach going into this year's conference is to select a few key themes, disciplines or interests and focus on those. This idea was reinforced by the recent podcast with Tony Karrer on the VizThink blog. His key point, to get the most out of the VizThink 09 conference, you need to do some prep work, figure out what you want to get out of the conference, brainstorm 5 - 10 key questions you want to get answers for that you can use to select sessions and while networking.

So, taking that advice to heart, I took a little time to brainstorm what areas of visual thinking I'm currently most interested in and created a mind map of that. The result is below. I hope to flesh this out a bit more as the conference draws nearer, but if you're attending VizThink '09 and you share any of the interests on this mind map, let's hook up and chat.

Slide:ology

2008-12-26T11:21:00.000-10:00

I just finished Nancy Duarte's book, Slide:ology. I've recently become interested in presentation development, not because I give many presentations anymore, but primarily because I think presentations shared online through services like Slideshare have the potential to be good vehicles for visual explanations.

My overall impression of the book? Excellent! It should be required reading for anyone who has to develop or give presentations. She starts with an overview of the need for better presentations, discusses some basic prerequisites like identifying audience needs and touches on ideation and story development briefly. The majority of the book though focuses on design aspects of presentations and slides. Lots of good, useful information. I outlined the basic content of the book in a mind map, below. Take a look then buy the book.

Social Media & Internet Marketing Presentation

2008-11-29T11:51:00.000-10:00

Yet another presentation about social media. There's already thousands of other presentations on social media available. Why another one? Inspired by Cliff Atkinson's book, "Beyond Bullet Points," I've taken a renewed interest in presentation development. There once was a time as a corporate drone where I developed a lot of boring bullet point presentations. I really like presentations as a medium for visual explanations (they're visual, interactive and user-paced) especially with sites like SlideShare.net that makes it so easy to share presentations.

Social Media&Internet Marketing

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Much of the content in this presentation is HEAVILY influenced by several other presentations out there, including, Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3 and Marta Kagan's "What the F**k is Social Media?" The main difference is that I tried to develop the presentation around the structure that Cliff Atkinson outlines in "Beyond Bullet Points" - developing a story outline before even opening up PowerPoint.

As a web developer, I manage several websites for several small businesses and organizations. Over the last few years, it has become apparent that just having a website isn't enough for businesses and organizations. It's the minimum mandatory requirement. But to really join the Internet of the 21st century, businesses and organizations need to adopt a social media marketing strategy. I wanted to develop a presentation myself that I could share with my clients that explains why they should jump on the social media band wagon. Any constructive feedback appreciated.

Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

2008-09-22T15:50:00.000-10:00

Several weeks ago I created a really simple presentation illustrating the process of signing up for a new blog account with Blogger. It's an incredibly simple and basic presentation, but I run into enough people who aren't that savvy with computers or online applications, so I thought a really basic tutorial that walks these kinds of people through the process might be a useful resource to have available. At least when people ask me, "How hard is it to set up my own blog?" I now have somewhere to point them.

Creating a Free Blog with Blogger Presentation

Next up will be some follow-up online visual explanations on how to create a blog post, mark things up in it, add links, add photos, etc.

Intereactive Hurricane Tracker Visualization

2008-08-31T08:26:00.000-10:00

Stamen Design just released their latest work, an interactive hurricane tracker for MSNBC, just in time for Gustav.

Great interactive visualization in my opinion. Hover your mouse over different parts of the track to get specific information about that part of the visualization. This visualization will no doubt go in my Visual Zen Gallery.

Visual Thinking & Ideas V3

2008-08-02T15:41:00.000-10:00

More good feedback from people on this on the VizThink forum. Through discussion on that forum, I realized I'd blundered. The original graphic I did was just trying to show the difference between getting ideas out of people's head vs getting ideas into people's heads. In the Dan Roam lexicon, it was a "what" problem I was trying to show.

After getting feedback about the procedural nature of visual communication, the problem really became a "how" problem - best shown with a flow chart. Rather than realize that at the time, I just tried to adapt my original graphic, and to complicate it, I had mind maps, um... on my mind. So, I just provided a good example of using the wrong kind of graphic to communicate something. Doh! Oh well. Live and learn.

So, version 3 below is an attempt at more of a procedural "how" depiction. I suppose a true flow chart should conform to little boxes representing each process and arrows between the processes. But I've done so many typical flow charts in my former corporate life that I wanted to go with a more graphical depiction (plus I'm feeling lazy and want to recycle elements from the previous versions). I've also shown it as cyclical to try to show the iterative nature of it.

Visual Thinking and Ideas Part 2

2008-07-18T09:13:00.000-10:00

After getting good comments from Tom and Tom and Christine, plus Ryan Coleman in the VizThink forum about the Visual Thinking and Ideas post, I thought I'd revise the graphic for it. Results below:

Back of the Napkin Digital Mind Map

2008-07-16T16:10:00.000-10:00

After creating a hand sketched Back of the Napkin mind map awhile back, I wanted to create it in a digital format that I could easily refer to. Dan Roam recently made some of his tools downloadable on his website, so I decided to create a Flash-based mind map with links to Dan's PDFs. Click on the image below to see the result.

Visual Thinking and Ideas

2008-07-11T14:56:00.000-10:00

It's pretty cool living with someone else who's also a visual thinker. Just had lunch with my wife and we were discussing visual thinking and VizThink '08, specifically some of the differences between the work of people like David Sibbet who do a lot of graphic facilitation, and information designers like Karl Gude who create infographics.

Both deal with visualizing ideas and concepts. The difference seems to be that graphic facilitation, graphic recording, sketching, etc. focus on getting ideas and concepts OUT of people heads and capturing them in a visually engaging way that facilitates better ideas and problem solving. In these disciplines, the group process of creating that visual is as important (and one might argue even more important) than the resulting graphic.

On the other hand, the goal of people creating infographics is to get ideas IN to peoples heads. In this process a designer creates a graphic that is then dispersed to a larger audience to aid in understanding an idea or a concept.

I think that understanding the purpose and the goals of the various visual thinking disciplines is important to help us appreciate the values of each.

Visual Thinking Blog Map

2008-07-07T16:11:00.000-10:00

There's about a dozen visual thinking blogs/websites that I follow regularly. Most I subscribe to via RSS feed. Some don't have feeds though or they're broken so I thought I'd create a little "map" of these sites in Flash using the logos of each which would link to the site.

While I was at it, I thought I'd organize them by what visual thinking content they primarily focus on using a spectrum of focusing on visual communicating ideas and concepts on the far left to visualizing data and information on the far right. Those that are in the middle are broader in scope. Placement is purely subjective of course. It's skewed a bit heavy on the right. Until I had placed all these I hadn't realized just how biased my visual thinking surfing was. It's odd because I'm actually more interested in visually communicating ideas and concepts than I am information and data. But, it's been easier for me to find sites and blogs relating to information visualization than idea visualization. I'm hoping that VizThink will help raise awareness of idea and concept visualization and that more good sites will become available. And I think the publicity that Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin" is getting may help along those lines too.

I know there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other web sites and blogs that fall within the visual thinking realm, but these are the small set that focus on. In the interest of rounding it out a bit, I added a more traditional text list below the map.

Back of the Napkin Mind Map & Visual Thinking Codex

2008-06-30T11:59:00.001-10:00

I started reading Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin" months ago, but just didn't have time to get very far into it. Finally this weekend I was able to get through the first two parts of the book, which essentially explain his framework. I've mentioned in other blog posts that I really like Dan's ideas and I think his book has been excellent so far. After getting through the first two parts of the book, I went back and mind mapped the basic concepts.

For those not already familiar with Dan's concepts, there's several sources online. Dan's blog. VizThink's Podcast with Dan.

Beyond using Dan's framework to solve business problems with pictures, I've begun to think that Dan's framework does more than just provide a framework to solve problems visually. I think perhaps his visual thinking codex that he outlines in the book might be pretty useful as a visual thinking taxonomy.

Since VizThink '08 in January, I've been obsessed off and on with the idea of defining a taxonomy for all things in the visual thinking world. It's been an attempt to get my head wrapped around all the various things out there that seem to fall under the visual thinking umbrella. I've tried a few approaches at a taxonomy, the latest being a concept map and a visual thinking spectrum to show the range of styles of visualizations.

Now my latest idea is that Dan's Visual Thinking Codex can be used to classify the various visualizations available. I subscribe to a number of visual thinking blogs and websites, including; Flowing Data, Cool Infographics, Visual Complexity and many more. Each of these serves up examples of visual thinking on a regular basis. A lot of these can be classified as data visualization or infographics, but these terms seem to mean different things to different people and/or have fuzzy definitions. My new idea is to try to classify these according to Dan's codex.

A quick overview of Dan's codex. In any of the links to Dan's material I've listed above, you'll see him reference a framework for 6 ways of seeing and showing things; 1)Who/What, 2)How Much, 3)Where, 4) When, 5) How, 6)Why. When these are combined in a grid with Dan's SQVID criteria, you get a pretty good way of classifying visual thinking things. At least, that's my working theory I'll be testing.

For example, I came across this network visualization today; Ranking and Mapping Scientific Data.

Using Dan's Codex, we merely determine that this is predominantly showing relationships between things - a "what" framework. "How much" is also represented by the thickness of lines between things as well as the size of the dots. The next step is overlaying that on top of the SQVID criteria (S (Simple vs. Elaborate) Q (Quality vs Quantity) V(Vision vs Execution) I (Individual vs Comparison) D (Change vs Status Quo)). I'd say it falls somewhere in the middle of the Simple vs Elaborate scale, focuses on quantitative features more than qualitative, is more execution-based than vision-based, shows comparison of things rather than individual and shows the current or conditions in the past (status quo) vs the future or change.

So what's the big deal about being able to classify these things? Well, I think if we want to be able to expand acceptance of visual thinking, that visual thinking products need to have a way of being compared, ranked, judged, graded, etc.

If you're lost with all this talk of SQVID and Who/What's vs How muchs, I highly recommend checking out Dan's book, or at the very least, exploring some of the links to his stuff that I referenced above.

Visual Zen Gallery

2008-06-11T16:54:00.000-10:00

There's a lot of examples of visual thinking on the web. I thought it would nice to have a single spot where I can collect examples that I like - kind of a visual zen garden. There's only a couple of examples in there at the moment, but it will grow.

Visual Zen Gallery

Got an example you think belongs there? Let me know.

Visual Communication through PowerPoint

2008-06-10T07:54:00.000-10:00

PowerPoint is considered by some to be a visual communication tool. We've all suffered through bad examples of PowerPoint presentations where we could argue that it's a bad visual communication tool. There are good examples of PowerPoint though. One I just came across is a presentation by Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen reviewing Dan Pink's new book. Check it out:

| View | Upload your own

Getting Back to Visual Thinking

2008-05-22T09:44:00.000-10:00

It's been a long time since I've had a chance dabble with visual thinking. Work, visiting company and other projects have all kept me from spending the time on visual thinking that I'd like to.

Before getting bogged down with life there were some cool projects I was looking into. I can't even remember what some of them were, but one was this visual map sent to me by Christopher Watson of visualthinkmap.blogspot.com.

I like how this shows the concept similar to Dan Roam's Look, See, Imagine, Show but shows detailed cognitive elements and how our past experiences and perspectives flavor how we see things. I think that in visual thinking and visual communication, like anything in life, each of us is influenced and biased by our own thinking styles, personality traits, etc. That's something that I think some of the data visualization extremists don't take into consideration enough. Anyway, cool map and I look forward to seeing future iterations of it as Chris fleshes it out more.

On to more recent things, today I just came across a post on the Visuale blog abour "Vis 2.0." I subscribe to a lot of data visualization blogs, and a lot of the far right data visualization extremists continually bemoan that visualization isn't as well known as they think it might be. I disagree. I think the proliferation of web visualizations has made visualizations very well known to the public. They may not all be good visualizations or people may not even realize that what they're looking at is a visualization, but I think that web visualizations are so much a part of the web landscape now that they just blend in and people don't often recognize them for what they are, visual explanations of information and data. Anyway, nice write-up on the Visuale blog, check it out.

Simple Online Video Explanation

2008-04-15T20:24:00.000-10:00

At VizThink ‘08 I attended a session with Lee and Sachi LeFever of Common Craft, “Solving Explanation Problems with Simple Online Videos.” It was a great session and I came away from it excited about doing my own. I started a project weeks ago (ok, months ago) and have finally finished it. I’m only mildly satisfied with it. The quality of the video and audio is pretty poor in my opinion. But, it was a great learning experience and I really do think that simple online video explanations are a great idea. I’m not sure that doing it digitally vs the “paperworks” method that Lee and Sachi use saved me any time and the resolution is pretty poor. So, I may play with increasing the resolution, or I may just try a paperworks version for the next one. Regardless, thanks to Lee and Sachi for the inspiration. You can find the video here.

Visual Thinker Spectrum

2008-04-08T20:51:00.000-10:00

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last few months research various areas of the visual thinking world. From VizThink 08 resources, sketching, Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin (which I’m currently reading), to information and data visualization. I’ve learned a lot, learned that there’s so much more I don’t know, but one thing I’m sure about is that the visual thinking world is broad and pretty loosely defined. I’ve seen some disagreement in the community about what is or isn’t visual thinking or what is harmful or helpful to furthering the cause of visual thinking. So, it seems, like just about everything in life, we all have different ways of looking at visual thinking. It occurs to me that each person’s particular style or perspective on visual thinking is heavily influenced by things like thinking styles and personality types. With that notion bumping around in my brain it occurred to me that there’s probably a spectrum of visual thinker styles or types. So, inspired by David Armano’s cool diagrams, I set out to create the Visual Thinker Spectrum diagram. Version 1.0 is below.

As I said, this is version 1.0. I think it still needs work, both the concept and the diagram. But the basic premise is this; I think that there is a spectrum of visual thinkers ranging from artistic types of people who are inclined more to graphics and using graphics to explore ideas, and communicate concepts. To them, visual thinking might be all about exploring and conveying ideas and concepts using graphics. These may be what Dan Roam calls “black pen people.” I think VizThink ‘08 was heavily skewed to this type of visual thinker.

On the other end of the spectrum are the data people. I think these people are what we see heavily representing the information and data visualization communities. Their focus seems to be on interacting with, analyzing and representing data. I think this is where the Edward Tufte and Stephen Few types of people stand. These might correlate to Dan Roam’s “red pen people.”

Now, a disclaimer. The spectrum isn’t trying to say that the data people don’t care about graphics or pretty pictures or that the graphic-centric people don’t care about data. It’s just trying to show that some people are inclined to approach visual thinking from a given point of view. Also, nobody is going to be exclusively on one end of the spectrum.

I think it’s important to recognize that we’re all approaching visual thinking from somewhat different biases. It’s just like when we recognize that there are different personality types and thinking styles and by recognizing those differences we can improve our communication. Recognizing different biases in visual thinking might help us as a visual thinking community be more cohesive.

So, I’d love to get some feedback on this (there’s only a handful of visitors to this blog right now, but let me know what you think). Agree? Disagree? Sound off by leaving a comment. Thanks!

New Visual Thinking Website

2008-04-02T12:15:00.000-10:00

I jumped head first into the visual thinking pool after the VizThink conference in January this year. As a result, I started this blog. But, I quickly found out that I wanted a better way to organize all the visual thinking information I came across. So, being a web developer by trade, it felt only natural to create my own visual thinking website. The result, VisualThinkMedia.com.

I'm not sure what direction the new website will take. It's definitely going to be an evolutionary growth rather than a planned and designed growth. The site is somewhat sparse and there's still some holes and sections that I'm filling in.

Now that I've got the the beta version of the new site up and running, I'm hoping to get back into doing more research on visual thinking, and of course, adding what I find to the new website.

VizThink 08 Tag Cloud

2008-03-26T18:31:00.001-10:00

I thought it would be interesting to get a measure of the topics at VizThink 08. First I started manually going through the program and highlighting "business" terms vs. other terms with the idea of making a tag cloud or heat map of the various terms used in the breakout session descriptions. Then it occurred to me that in the era of web 2.0 there should be some online tools for generating tag clouds.

As it turns out there are several, but the one I went with was TagCrowd.com. This allowed me to copy session titles and descriptions from VizThink and paste them into their form and generate the tag cloud. The result is below:

This is just the top 100 terms, but it gives kind of a good idea of what terms were most favored in the breakout sessions - at least in their descriptions. The full set is too big to post in an image, but TagCrowd also supplies you with the html code that generates the cloud. Once I get my new visual thinking website up and running (just a couple of days...), I'll post the full set, or at least a bigger set there.

InfoVis

2008-03-20T19:12:00.000-10:00

Over the last week or so I've spent most of my free time surfing the web looking at visual thinking websites, focusing mostly on information visualization, or InfoVis, as some call it. Wow, there is some really cool stuff out there. Anybody who has been involved in that discipline for very long is no doubt aware of most of these findings, but I thought I'd share some here just in case any out there aren't familiar with them.

Of all the disciplines represented by the term visual thinking, I seem to be most drawn to information visualization and data visualization (I'm still struggling to try to find the distinction between the two). I was a bit disappointed that this particular discipline wasn't very well represented at VizThink 08, but I'm hoping that will change in coming years.

Anyway, first up is a paper that's nearly 3 years old from Chaomei Chen of Drexel University titled, "Top 10 Unsolved Information Visualization Problems." It's a bit old but it had some great insights into information visualization discipline from within the community.

Next up, I ran across Stephen Few's website, PerceptualEdge.com. Stephen writes a monthly newsletter, of which I've downloaded and read a couple, "Practical Rules for Using Colors in Charts," and "InfoVis as Seen by the World Out There: 2007 in Review." Some really good stuff on information visualization here.

I forwarded these to my wife and she commented to me that Stephen was originally scheduled for VizThink 08. I found his blog entry about his decision to drop out of VizThink kind of interesting. While I agree with a few of his concerns, mainly that VizThink '08 was too heavily skewed to drawing and sketching, from my perspective he made the wrong decision by dropping out. I really would have enjoyed attending a breakout session of his. I think the conference needed more of what I'm calling the "analytical" side of visual thinking as opposed to mostly the "creative" side that was represented.

As an attendee of VizThink, while I was a bit disappointed there wasn't much available in the data and information visualization disciplines, I came away from it with a renewed interest in anything related to visual thinking and I think had infovis been better represented I, as well as others, would have been positively influenced and Stephen could have made headway in the points he makes in his "Infovis as Seen ... " article.

But I digress. On to the next find. This one I had heard about and seen referenced but never actually seen, Hans Rosling's 2006 TED conference presentation.

This is absolutely awesome! If you consider yourself a visual thinker and haven't seen this, it's a must see. Eighteen minutes of fantastic data visualization. Check it out. On that note, I'm going to leave it at that for now and go look for some more cool stuff.

SXSW Graphic Recording

2008-03-16T15:55:00.000-10:00

Sunni Brown, owner of BrightSpot Information Design has created and posted some cool graphic recordings of the recent SXSW conference.

Information Design Planning

2008-03-13T07:52:00.001-10:00

A week or so ago, Tom Crawford sent me a link to the PDF, "Visualizing Design for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design." In my opinion it's a great little primer on information design for those of us who don't have any experience with it.

They outline a process for planning an information design campaign as well as providing a lot of examples of information graphics along the way.

While it's a great stand alone piece, I wanted to reinforce some of the concepts as well as create a simple one page cheat sheet that captured the basic process, so I decided a mind map would be a good idea. I looked at a few of the online web-base mind mapping tools that someone mentioned in a comment here awhile back, but I didn't see any that offered the ability to create a mind map with anything more than just simple lines for branches and boxes. For some reason I was stuck on the idea that I needed to use arrows as my branches so I opted to hand sketch the mind map instead. The result is below. I also incorporated a little bit of Dan Roam's material since it seemed to make so much sense. It's on the Assessing Available Data branch.

Fried Egg Diagram

2008-03-11T08:00:00.000-10:00

Karen Martin drew this map to visualize the relationships between the disciplines in urban computing. Some of these disciplines are the same disciplines I've got listed in my visual thinking taxonomy and seeing this map makes me wonder if a similar map of the visual thinking landscape might be a good way to go.

You can download a larger version of the map from her website.

Dan Roam Presentation

2008-03-10T19:33:00.000-10:00

VizThink '08 facilitator Dan Roam has apparently been making the conference rounds, attending MIX08 and as well as SXSW. The cools news is that if you missed him the MIX08 presentation is now available online:

MIX08 Windows Media Player Video

I've only watched the first quarter or so of this so far, but it's very similar to Dan's breakout session at VizThink08 that I attended. Highly recommended viewing!

BTW, if you want to download this to your computer for later viewing, just right click on the link instead of left clicking and choose to download or save the file to your computer.

Infographic Annual Report of Your Life

2008-03-09T14:46:00.000-10:00

This is cool. New York designer Nicholas Felton has created a 2007 annual report of his life, The 2007 Feltron Annual Report, full of infographics, such as number of vacation days taken per month, itunes tracks played, miles traveled, subway trips, dining (including most bizarre - fermented sea cucumber intestines), dishes eaten by type and much, much more. (Note: The navigation to the pages inside is at the top far left.)

My first thought when I saw the cover was that it was really cool that a company would do an annual report using only information graphics - visual language. Once you see the first page though you realize this is for an individual. Still, wouldn't it be cool if more annual reports were more visual than text.

The next thing that came to mind after going through the report was how much time he had to spend tracking all that data throughout the year. How cool, and telling, it would be to see your past year's life laid out in infographic format! But I don't think I'll have the discipline track all that data.

Visual Communication: Images with Messages

2008-03-08T09:11:00.000-10:00

Came across a reference to the book, Visual Communication: Images with Messages by Paul Martin Lester. Looks pretty good, but at over $100 for a new edition, I won't be ordering that very soon. However, I also came across Lester's course notes. He's a professor in the Department of Communication at Cal State Fullerton. He's got 18 separate sections of topics you can click on, each with dozens of slides, some with well over a hundred. Topics range from how we sense and see, light, the eye, visual theories, visual persuasion, typography, graphic design, information graphics and many more. I haven't had a chance to get through them all yet and most of them obviously need additional explanation as they are essential PowerPoint presentations, but there's still some good information in there and sources for further surfing, particularly for a noob like myself. I particularly liked seeing references to the history of graphic design and information graphics in each of those sections.

Information Visualization is a Medium

2008-03-07T18:39:00.001-10:00

I thought this was an interesting take on my attempt to classify and categorize all things Visual Thinking. The Emerging Technology conference just took place in San Diego the last few days. Eric Rodendeck of Stamen Design gave a presentation titled "Information Visualization is a Medium." Wish I could have been there for it. But there is a nice little blog write-up on it at We Make Money Not Art.

Visual Thinking: Evolution or Revolution?

2008-03-02T17:03:00.001-10:00

A comment in the last post got me thinking about how the different disciplines in visual thinking may have evolved over time and it occurred to me that certain disciplines probably emerged, or at least gained more prominence, from certain industries.

For example, I was thinking about graphic design. According to Wikipedia, graphic design has been around for centuries. But I can't help but think that graphic design as a community of practice, aka discipline, really gained prominence with the emergence of marketing and PR (I could be way off base on this and someone correct me if I am). Similarly, I wonder if we could attribute the rise in acceptance of infographics to the journalism industry. I think similar extrapolations could be made of other industries; science, engineering, computing. These are all examples of visual thinking mapped to certain industries.

As I was going through this mental exercise, I happened to revisit Dan Roam's website. Right there on Dan's home page he asks the question, "So what about visual thinking for business?" He goes on to assert that the business world is behind in visual thinking.

So, I thought a pseudo-time line of how visual thinking disciplines have emerged from certain industries would be interesting. The result is below. (Sorry about the poor quality, my scanner broke so I'm just getting by snapping photos of my doodles).
I should point out that I didn't try to accurately portray the order that each particular industry/discipline emerged. It's essentially a napkin sketch without consulting any references. The graphic is merely trying to show that in the realm of business, visual thinking has probably lagged behind other industries in terms of cultural acceptance, cultural awareness and size of the community of practice.

While it's true that visual thinking has been used within the business world for years or even decades, it seems that now it is starting to gain more publicity and acceptance. Before going to VizThink '08 I was a little perplexed by the preponderance of breakout sessions related to things like strategy, planning and organizing. In fact, I don't think I "got it" until just today. The reason is, is that the trend and excitement and buzz everyone was talking about at VizThink is all about visual thinking applied to the business world. Whether it's merely the evolution of visual thinking or a revolution remains to be seen.

Regardless which, it's been interesting to notice coverage of visual thinking, or elements thereof, in the mainstream media over the last few weeks. CBS News is using sketching to illustrate concepts. The New York Times is reviewing that. Business Week is covering how simple drawings can communicate complex ideas. Just a few examples. But it looks to me like visual thinking is gaining momentum in the mainstream business media.

Visual Thinking Taxonomy Concept Map V2

2008-02-29T11:23:00.000-10:00

I spent some time the last couple of days looking for definitions of the items I had listed as "disciplines" in version 1 of my concept map. Specifically, I was looking into data visualization, information visualization, scientific visualization, information graphics and information design. There seems to be a whole lot of overlap and/or fuzzy boundaries amongst these terms. So, I revised the concept map to just include bucket of things that I like to think of as disciplines.

I also, added another bucket - styles. This was Tom Crawford's idea and I think it makes sense. I also went through the VizThink Conference Content diagram and pulled out the things that felt more like applications to me. They're represented in an applications bucket at the top right of the concept map. I really think the list of items in the applications bucket is virtually limitless though so I don't think it's realistic to try to capture everything that visual thinking could be applied to.

On the bottom right side of the map is where the Tools and Methods bucket goes. There's a ton of those and I thought the best place to start would be the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from Visual Literacy. It's a good start but somehow I can't believe that it's comprehensive.

Another thought occurred to me in considering the disciplines. I think there are varying levels of "disciplineness." For example, information graphics and graphic design just feel like much more established disciplines than say graphic recording or graphic facilitation. I think there's perhaps a spectrum in the disciplines ranging from nascent and emerging to established. It seems like disciplines might be born from methods. Think about mind mapping. It started out in the 60s, started by Tony Busan (I think), but it has become common and pervasive enough that it's emerging as a discipline.

That begs the question, how do you know when something has evolved from just a method or tool into a discipline? My working hypothesis on this is that when a method becomes pervasive enough that people actually make a living doing just that thing, maybe it has evolved into a discipline. There's probably flaws with that rule of thumb and it's a bit fuzzy, but for now I'm somewhat satisfied with it.

It's also come to my attention that some people are going to resist the idea of categorizing like I'm attempting to do. They don't want to feel like they're pigeon-holed into a particular box. I can understand this to a degree, but the idea is to categorize the concepts, not the people who do them them. It's perfectly fine for a person to perform multiple disciplines have multiple styles and use various methods. I could easily see someone being a practitioner of the cartooning discipline as well as the information graphics discipline, for example.

I think in order for visual thinking to become more accepted in the business community it needs to be more concrete and better defined. It's human nature to recognize patterns and to classify and categorize and it helps us learn. And, as with so many things, the learning process that one goes through in an exercise like this is more valuable than the end result itself.

Cool Data Visualization Mind Maps

2008-02-27T20:26:00.001-10:00

Last night I was googling and checking out web sites about data visualization. Tons of really cool data visualization stuff out there that I'll have to blog about in another post. But one of the most intriguing to me was the Web Trends mind map from Information Architects. I've seen this covered already on a few other visual thinking blogs, but I think it's cool enough to mention it again.

Visit the Web Trends map here

You can download various size, print out a big poster size or they even have it as a web page. They've been doing this for a few years ago. Personally I think I like last year's version a little better. Not quite as clean, but less data and easier to read.

Concept Diagrams

2008-02-26T17:52:00.000-10:00

Last night I learned that the way I was trying to represent my idea of a visual thinking taxonomy was called a Concept Map. I had thought that a mind map would work and had started one in SpinScape, hoping to get some collaboration on it. Sadly, the collaboration hasn't really happened. And, I was really wanting to annotate the relationships between the entities in the diagram, which I couldn't see that I could do in SpinScape - maybe you can, I just didnt' see it.

I've used Entity Relationship Diagrams in the past and that was really what I was wanting to do. I showed a sketch to my wife and she replied, "Oh, that's a concept map. There's a free concept mapping tool you can download that you could do that in and I've got some information about concept maps on my web site." My wife has a lot more time and experience in the visual thinking world than I do.

So, I found the software last night, from CMap Tools, downloaded and it installed it. Didn't even get a chance to open it up and play with it until about 20 minutes ago. So far I like it. I'm not one to read user manuals unless I absolutely have to so I just began clicking around. It's pretty intuitive. Within about 15 minutes, I had the following concept map of my idea of a visual thinking taxonomy.
It's still a work in progress (both the concept map and the taxonomy). I'd like to identify more of what I'm calling the disciplines of visual thinking and then start in on defining the methods and tools used. I don't know about anyone else, but understanding how all these various components of visual thinking relate will help me understand it better. And I think it could be useful to explain to those who are new to the idea of visual thinking. Any suggestions or comments on the taxonomy are welcome.

Napkin Sketches 101

2008-02-25T16:16:00.000-10:00

I came across this great little article titled Napkin Sketches 101 from ThoughtForm. Nine tips to make better napkin sketches. Great stuff! Makes me want to grab a pile of napkins and start drawing.

Online Video Explanations - Take Two

2008-02-24T21:06:00.001-10:00

I got a little more time to work on my online video explanation project this weekend. In Take One, I created a mind map of the ideas and elements that I wanted to include and started on a script. Over the last week or so I spent some time here and there editing the script. The next step in the Common Craft process is to storyboard the video, so that was my focus this weekend.

One of the constraints in the approach is to limit the number of scenes to less than 20. So, I created a simple storyboard template in Photoshop of 10 little boxes for the visual component and space underneath each for the script. This was based on the storyboard templates that Lee and Sachi LeFever used in their VizThink session. So, I ended up with two pages for all my storyboarding. As you can see in the photos of them below, I've still got some empty boxes.

Page 1...

Page 2 ...

I'm not sure any of that will make sense to anybody but me, especially given my sloppy handwriting and amateurish drawing skills. I've obviously still got a bit more work to do to come up with visual ideas for a few of the boxes, but I've had some ideas on some of them since scanning these.

The next step will be to go into production mode. I've already started thinking about how I'm going to do each scene. I think I mentioned in the last post about this that I don't plan to use the "paperworks" approach that Lee and Sachi use. I'd like to try a digital version of that, using tools like Adobe Photoshop and Flash and a screen capture tool called iShowU. The whole thing could be done in Flash, which would be an excellent tool to use if I wanted to do a highly polished and refined version. But, I want to keep the production time down so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit on production values. What will be interesting to see is if that sacrifice turns out making it just look really cheesy or if it ends up being similar to the lighthearted and fun but educational style of the CommonCraft productions but digital. As a side note, I don't think I'll try to mimic the "booos" and "yeaahs" that they do. It works for them because that's who they are. I don't think it would work for me. In fact, I think a lesson to learn in this process will be like any writing or artistic endeavor - finding your own voice and style.

Regardless of the outcome it should be fun to work on and I'm hoping I'll get the chance to start on some of it this week. Realistically though, I'm guessing that it's going to take at least 20 hours for the production phase so I doubt I'll have it available for show and tell here very soon. But, I definitely do plan to show it here once I've got it complete.

Scientific Visualization Example

2008-02-22T16:23:00.000-10:00

Another discipline of visual thinking that I think is really cool is scientific visualizations. I'm on the Apple RSS feed and that had a cool article about scientific visualizations being done at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The article is essentially a Mac promotion piece, but it has some interesting observations about visualization. The AMNH executive producer states that they view themselves as "translators for the public." I like that concept, using visual explanations to translate complex data into understandable messages.

The article also has a link to the AMNHs website to the arctic sea ice visualization video. Pretty powerful method of communicating. Reminds me of some of the examples in Tom Wujac's VizThink presentation New Technologies in Visual Thinking (way down near the bottom of the page you can see the video of this presentation).

VisualThinkScape

2008-02-21T12:21:00.000-10:00

It's becoming painfully obvious to me how ignorant I am about the visual thinking world. Searching for terms about mapping information space I've come across all sorts of terms I wasn't aware of that relate somehow to what I'm looking for but don't seem to quite characterize it exactly; cybercartography, data visualization, information visualization, to name a few. More and more I'm wanting to find a concise overview of all terms and definitions related to visual thinking - a visual thinking taxonomy.

I've found bits and pieces and attempts at it. The Conference Topics image on the VizThink home page looks like it was an attempt to capture some of the concepts related to visual thinking. To me, this graphic seems to be about defining what you can apply visual thinking to. Ok. Great. That's important. That's one way to classify the visual thinking world.

I've also found visual definitions of methods of visual thinking. The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods at Visual Literacy is a pretty nifty interactive visual. Another nice piece of the puzzle.

There's another perspective of the visual thinking landscape that I'd like to see though and that's a kind of taxonomy of the disciplines that fall under the visual thinking umbrella. The closest metaphor I can think of is of engineering. In engineering, there are several disciplines; mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, etc. All of them use the language and tools of physics and math, but they all deal in different (though often overlapping) realms.

What would a similar taxonomy of visual thinking disciplines look like. Brainstorming last night, I came up with the following so far: information graphics, data visualization, information visualization, mind mapping, graphic design, graphic facilitation, graphic recording, cartooning, animation ... I know there are more, but my ignorance is getting in the way.

Hmm. Creating relationships, and groups and hierarchies among all these things related to visual thinking seems like a job for some kind of visualization method. Since seeing the SpinScape demo at VizThink, I've been wanting to come up with a mind mapping project to try out in SpinScape. Why not try this. So, if you were at VizThink and got the SpinScape closed beta pass and want to help define this structure, log into SpinScape and contribute to my Visual Thinking Taxonomy map. It's just a rough draft at the moment. Feel free to add, move, rearrange, etc.

Surveying the Information Space Mapping Terrain

2008-02-20T10:31:00.000-10:00

Following Monday's blog post, I spent some time reviewing the websites that I linked to and exploring a little more. I was a bit disappointed with what I found exploring the Cybercartography thread. It seems to be very closely tied to real world geography, which is all well and good, but not what I'm looking for.

The Atlas of Cyberspace has some examples that seem to more closely match the kind of thing that's intriguing me. Particular examples include the "ET-Map" - a multi-level category map of the information space of over 100,000 entertainment related Web pages listed by Yahoo!, Kartoo, and WebMap.

What these have in common is that they map, or maybe chart is a better term, non-geographic things, relationships of data and information. (I'm beginning to think that map is probably the wrong term to use with this concept, since the term map is so closely tied to representations of geographic space like the earth, moon or sky).

If you're having trouble understanding what the hell I'm rambling on about and trying to discover, well, so am I. But, my wife sent me a link to an article that's maybe the best example so far of the type of visual depiction of information that's intriguing me and that I'm trying to find examples of.

On the Boxes and Arrows website there's an article titled, "A Map-based Approach to Content Inventory," by Patrick Walsh. Patrick needed to visually depict the content of his Intranet. Understanding the content and relationships between content was getting unwieldy. A perfect opportunity for a visual thinking graphic. What Patrick came up with was a map-based representation of his Intranet. The map is based on subway style maps showing nodes and connections. Aha! It's mapping and it's mapping an information space. There's really no geography associated with it. It's just information. So, if you're at all interested in this thing I'm calling mapping information space, check out this article. If you've seen any examples similar to this, it would be great to get some feedback. Just post a comment to this blog.

Mapping Information Space

2008-02-18T11:53:00.000-10:00

At the recent VizThink conference, I attended a couple of breakout sessions on mapping; Bruce Daniel's "VizMaps: An Alternate Approach to Describing Where" and John Grimwade's "Mapping the Possibilities."

At the time, I wasn't really sure what attracted me to these two mapping sessions, but reflecting upon it now, I think I was hoping that one or both might delve into the realms of non-real world mapping. I was having a tough time putting my finger on what that meant, what my expectations from these sessions had been, and what more I wanted out of them and it occurred to me that what I was after was something I'll call Mapping Information Space.

I've been working in computers as either a computer systems analyst, programmer or web developer since 1994 and over those years I've dealt with the design of computer systems and had to "map" data and information flow, processes, interactions between user and system, etc. Most of these have had at least some visual explanation component to them.

In all those years I was making diagrams of information flow, human-computer interactions, and what-not, I never really considered it to be mapping. But now that this vague concept has been forming in my brain since VizThink, I think that's exactly the right term. So, in an effort to try to discover the information space mapping terrain, I want to do some research on the subject and document it here in this blog. And, who knows, maybe I'll be able to find out enough and find enough experts and interest to recommend it as a topic of VizThink '09.

To start things out, I Googled the words mapping information space. This resulted in 21,900,000 results. One of the first on the results page is this site called, An Atlas of Cyberspace. I've only skimmed it a bit so far, but looks like interesting stuff.

Another of the results I found is a book titled, "Cybercartography Theory and Practice." It appears to define cybercartography as "a new paradigm for maps and mapping in the information era. Defined as 'the organization, presentation, analysis and communication of spatially referenced information on a wide variety of topics of interest to society...' " Hmm. Looks like cybercartography might the the 'official' term for what I'm looking for. There's even a Wikipedia entry for it.

Ok. Enough for now. Time to go exploring and see what else I can find.

Online Video Explanations - Take One

2008-02-17T18:00:00.001-10:00

Finally got some time this weekend to get back to getting "vizzy." I came away from VizThink '08 with a long list of visual thinking projects I wanted to get working on. One was online video explanations, inspired by Lee and Sachi LeFever's breakout session. I brainstormed a list of potential subjects to do and decided on one. I thought it would be interesting to try to follow Lee and Sachi's process and post the progress of that here.

The first step I wanted to do was to develop an outline of the first video project. So, I grabbed a pad of paper and headed out to the lanai to work in the sunshine and get away from the computer. My first inclination was to make a bulleted list outline. But then it struck me. Hey, I should do this in visual language. So, I reconsidered my approach and opted to outline my ideas in a mind map.

Before getting to the mind map that I came up with, I should preface it with a disclaimer. I don't claim to be very literate in mind mapping. I only know about it through my wife who does it quite extensively. So, I'm sure this doesn't jive with the International Mind Mapping Standards Institute rules of mind mapping, but it was useful for me to get my ideas down on paper. And, I like it a lot more than just a bulleted list. So,without further ado, I present my mind map of my first online video explanation project.

Getting all that down on paper helped to crystallize some thoughts. I realized immediately that I will probably have to break this topic up into a couple of different videos. But, I took a stab at starting a script anyway. I'm not going to share the script here, since I wrote it out by hand in a notebook and I don't want to transcribe it into the computer. Too laborious and it's just text after all.

My next step will be to go through and revise and edit the script. That's probably going to take a few iterations. Once it feels like the script is close, I'll move into the storyboarding phase. My plan is to do that by had on paper and share that here.

Too Busy to Get Vizzy

2008-02-16T12:48:00.000-10:00

Wow. It's been over two weeks since VizThink. My goal was to stay involved with visual thinking every day. Sadly, I've been too busy to get "vizzy," (my nickname for getting involved with visual thinking). Lots of stuff I want to pursue; some book reviews, comments on the VizThink site, thoughts on visual explanations, online videos, visually mapping information space, and more. Hopefully with a three day weekend I'll have a chance to work on some of that.

Mapping the Possibilities

2008-02-12T13:26:00.000-10:00

For Tuesday afternoon's breakout session, I attended John Grimwade's "Mapping the Possibilities." I arrived early while John was still setting up and testing. He expressed relief that someone had shown up for his session and echoed that each time a few more people entered. He needn't have worried as his session was pretty full.

The majority of John's session was a multimedia showcase of some of his wayfinding graphics with lots of explanations and stories accompanying them. Pretty interesting stories and I was impressed with the clarity of John's portfolio, of both wayfinding graphics as well as information graphics.

While I don't have a lot of notes of John's session, I have to credit John with driving home a concept that Lee and Sachi LeFever had mentioned. I had noted it in there session, but John's examples and discussion cemented the lesson. That lesson is, to distill the message down to the really important stuff, the essence. Boiling or distilling it down to the essentials was such an important lesson for me that it was what I put on the second 3 x 5 card in our final exercise of the general session.

Toward the end of John's session he suggested a hand's on (or maybe feet-on would be a better description) exercise of walking from a hotel room back to the classroom and developing a wayfinding graphic for that. I thought that sounded like a great idea, but I was so tired that I opted to wayfind myself to my own room and take a nap.

Regardless, fine job John! Thanks for distilling it down to the essence!

Solving Explanation Problems with Simple Online Videos

2008-02-08T12:29:00.001-10:00

By far the session I was looking forward to most was Lee and Sachi LeFever's, "Solving Explanation Problems with Simple Online Videos ." Sometime back before VizThink when I was checking out the sessions, I checked their CommonCraft website and watched some of their videos. Absolutely Brilliant! If you haven't checked out any of their simple online video explanations, go to their website and check them out.

I had a feeling this session would be popular so I headed up early after lunch. Good thing I did since their session got packed. They've got a review of VizThink plus a couple of photos from their session on their blog.

Lee did the majority of the speaking and explaining in the session and started out with a bit of a background into how they got started. Basically, he had an "aha" moment while sitting though a presentation where some guy mentioned RSS. Someone asked what RSS was to which the guy replied in arcane tech-speak. Lee realized that while what the presenter answered was correct, it didn't help the questioner understand. There was a disparity between what was heard and what matters.

Lee mentioned the concept of the "Curse of Knowledge" from Chip and Dean Heath's book, "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." In essence this means, that with so much knowledge, a lot of experts give overwhelming amounts of information in explanations and if someone doesn't "get it" they just pile on more information.

All of this was a prelude to the discussion of the elements of explanations as Lee and Sachi incorporate in their online videos. These elements of explanation, I think, are probably the key to Lee and Sachi's success and I think are also applicable to other mediums of visual communication such as drawing. By focusing on the explanation and the story rather than the video or the drawing, you're able to distill the message down to it's essentials and in the end, communicate better.

In discussing the elements of explanation we discovered a process and several constraints that make their work successful. The first step of the process (as I understand it) is to identify the "Big Idea." This is the theme or the big problem that is going to be explained.

Next step is to identify the "Why should I care?" from the viewers perspective. Show the pain that is caused by the problem. In their RSS video example, they show the pain of having to go out to a bunch of your favorite websites and look to see if there is anything new. This the pain. This is where the "booooo" comes in. Other elements, show real world examples, show relief, show results. Match up what is heard and what matters.

After they've identified these elements of explanation, they next set about to write the script. They "create a linear experience" with their scripts and try to limit them to about 20 sentences.
After scripting, they move into the storyboarding phase, sketching out the scenes in little boxes on paper, limiting it to 12 scenes/slides maximum.

Only after all this is done do they move into video production mode where they use drawings and paper cut outs to "act out" the script and storyboard. They've imposed constraints on themselves here too; using simple characters, no faces are used (maybe a smile or frown, but no eyes and nose), focus on simplicity, take away all noise focusing on the big idea, no music is used and the time limit on the final edited video is 3 - 4 minutes.

They've got a simple set up, with a video camera and tripod aimed at their "stage" on the floor, using construction lights from Home Depot for lighting. Editing is done on their Mac using Final Cut Express.

After explaining this process, they introduced the hands-on activity which was for each table to identify a problem, develop the explanation elements, write a script and then a storyboard. I think the table I was at didn't get a solid enough focus on the big idea and concept and we subsequently stumbled in the script and storyboard. To, me that proved the point that you really need to have a solid, concise concept and idea before proceeding.

At the end of the session, several tables got up and acted out their storyboard, holding up their individual storyboards as they read through their script. Some did a great job and the audience joined in with "boooos" and "yeaaahhhs" where appropriate.

So, a really fun, interesting and informative session. I came away from it convinced that I need to incorporate some simple online video explanations in my work and feel that I have the basic knowledge to do it. The challenge I face is forcing myself to take the time to do it. I'm a freelance web developer and I find that I'm constantly having to explain certain things over and over again to clients, like how search engines "see" web pages and optimizing web sites for search engines. So, that will be the basic concept, the "big idea" around which I'll do my first video. Might be good fodder for this blog as I go through Lee and Sachi's process to share each stage. We'll see. Regardless of how it comes out, kudos to Lee and Sachi for a great session. Thanks guys!

VizMaps: An Alternate Approach to Describing Where

2008-02-07T13:26:00.000-10:00

My Monday afternoon session was Bruce Daniel's VizMaps: An Alternate Approach to Describing Where. I'm not sure why I chose this session since I don't do any map-making, perhaps because I've always loved looking at maps. Regardless, it turned out to be a fun and informative session and I'm glad I went.

Reviewing the session page on the VizThink site it looks like Brandy has already provided a short overview of the session. But I'll add a little to clarify.

Prior to walking us through the hands-on activity, Bruce recounted to us an experience where his grandmother (I think) drew him a very simple map to get from her house to a train or metro station. The map had no words, only a few icons signifying relevant things along the way such a stop sign, a McDonalds, train tracks. This turned out to be an epiphany of sorts for Bruce and the inspiration for the subsequent exercise.

To start out our activity Bruce had each of select a to and from location then close our eyes and visualize the journey from point A to point B, taking special care to notice details like color, texture, even smells. From there we drew our maps. My map below is my attempt at vizmap from home to the beach, passing stop lights, a high-school football stadium, driving through sugar cane fields, past K-mart, past a pond of brackish water, driving near the airport and arriving at the beach.

After drawing this map, we each teamed up to show our map to a fellow student. In doing so, we all inevitably found errors or things we'd change.

It was a fun exercise and I think illustrated or reinforced visual thinking as a tool in describing how to get from one place to another. We don't need lots of irrelevant, satellite-level details, only the path that is relevant to our goal.

Thanks Bruce!

VizThink General Session Videos Posted

2008-02-07T11:31:00.001-10:00

Videos of the general sessions at VizThink08 have just been posted on the VizThink website.

Monday Morning General Session

Monday Afternoon General Session

Tuesday Morning General Session

Tuesday Afternoon General Session

Since these are posted it doesn't make much sense for me to blog about those. I'll try to get a blog about my Monday afternoon breakout session posted later today or tonight though.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Business Problems with Pictures

2008-02-05T15:44:00.000-10:00

For the Monday morning breakout session I chose Dan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Business Problems with Pictures." This turned out to be a well-attended, lively, active session. The hook for this session was, you're in the airport lounge after VizThink and someone asks why you're in San Francisco. What do you tell them, or better yet, what do you draw. Through a set of hands-on drawing, anecdotes and stories, Dan laid out for us a visual communication tool set to tackle visual communication scenarios.

Appropriate to the title of the session, as well as Dan's forthcoming book, Dan distributed napkins to all the tables in the room, with the intent that we would be drawing on them. Our first exercise was a self-assessment of five questions intended to rank ourselves on a continuum of how "visual" we are. For example, the first question was, "I'm in a brainstorming session in a conference room that has a big whiteboard. I want to:"

1. Go to the board, pick up a pen and start drawing circles and boxes.
2. Try to decipher whatever is already on the board.
3. Go to the board and start writing categorized lists.
4. Add a little clarification to what's already up there - you know, to make it clearer.
5. Forget the whiteboard - come on here, people, we have work to do!
6. I hate brainstorming sessions.

After the answering all the questions we summed up the answers to rank ourselves on a scale from a "Hand me the Pen!" kind of a person on the left end of the spectrum to "I can't draw, but..." in the middle of the spectrum, to "I'm not visual" on the far right.

Dan made a point that a lot of executives he works with fall on the right side of the continuum, but they have some great insight and can often add great clarity to visuals.

By the way, I'd love to copy the hand outs with all the questions from this exercise, but it is copyrighted so I'll try to just summarize and point you to Dan's book, which I'm looking forward to getting.

From there we moved on to the next exercise, discovering our tool set. Time to draw on napkins. After trying to draw on the napkin however, I found that they don't take the ink very well so I outlined a napkin on my VizThink pad of paper and used that instead. Below is the result of what we ended up drawing, I'll explain the process below.

First step is to get over the stigma of having a blank sheet by drawing the little smiley face in the top corner and the "My Problem" in the bottom left. Next was to draw the outline of the Swiss Army Knife that you see in the middle of the page. The remainder of the session would be to explain the various blades (tools) we have available to us to solve business problems with pictures.

Here's where I really wish I had taken better notes. But I'm banking on a lot of this being in Dan's book. The first three tools available to us is the set at the top. These are our eyes, to see the problem, our mind's eye to visualize, and our hands to draw.

Using these three tools we get the next four tools, to Look at what is out there, to See things like emerging patterns to Imagine how those patterns might be manipulated and to Show what we See and Imagine.

Next up in the tool set, five focusing questions. This is the corkscrew at the bottom of the knife with the unruly acronym, SQVID (Simple, Quality, Vision, Individual and Change (think of the Greek letter delta which signifies change to get the D)). The explanation of this tool set will be the most challenging to describe - it was very visual and I can't remember all the elements. But here goes:

Imagine you're walking on a tropical beach in the south Pacific where the islanders are very friendly but don't speak English. You see an islander walking your way and as you pass, he greets you and offers you a strange-looking fruit you've never seen before and invites you to eat (I immediately thought of Rambutan).
You try the fruit and it's delicious and you want to communicate your favorite fruit - an apple. You happen to have your sketch book with you. What do you draw to visually communicate the apple experience to your islander friend?

First, you draw an apple:

Hmm, not good enough, he needs to see that apples come from trees:

Nope. Still not good enough, he needs to see that apple trees are in orchards:

In these three sketches, we've drawn a qualitative representation of the apple from a simple single apple to more elaborate set of apples in an orchard. This is the S of our SQVID corkscrew. (Stay with me here, this will lead into the last set of tools - the five focusing questions - that are the last set of tools on our Swiss Army knife).

But we realize that we're still not really communicating the apple experience, even with these visuals. Here's where I'm forgetting a few more examples that Dan led us through. Another set of visuals aim to represent the quality vs quantity dimension - the Q of our SQVID.

Another set of visuals represents the Vision vs Execution - the V. This is one I remember. What if we wanted to envision the ultimate experience of an apple. To me, that would be apple pie. I'm sure all apples out there aspire to be part of an apple pie. (For Dan's exercise we used the example of a caramel apple - but I think that pales to the apple nirvana of apple pie). Anyway, so you could draw an apple pie to show your friend the ultimate vision of apple-ness:

But wait. That doesn't communicate anything about how to make an apple pie, so we might draw out some diagrams and flow charts of the apple pie making process - the execution of the vision.

Hopefully you're getting the idea. There are multiple dimensions or facets about problems that dictate how we communicate visually about that problem. And the nature of what we see as the problem will naturally dictate the best ways to show, aka communicate visually.

1. If what we see is a "who/what", a qualitative representation such as a portrait is appropriate.

2. If what we see is a "how much" kind of thing, that's a quantitative representation and is best shown with charts.

3. If what we see is a "where" kind of problem, use a map.

4. If it's a "when" kind of issue, a timeline is appropriate.

5. If it's a "how" issue - a flowchart would be good.

6. If it's a "why" issue, it's an issue of deduction and prediction and maybe a multi-variable plot would be best.

So, if you haven't already picked up on it, this is describing our last set of tools on our Swiss Army knife, the old "who, what, when, why, where and how," that we all learned in grade school.

That's the essence of it. At the end of the session Dan provided some examples of real world messy business problems for real world companies that he's solved problems for with pictures. Issues like global warming, product design, globalization.

In my opinion Dan did a fantastic job. I'm just sorry I can't do it justice with this summary. I'll definitely be getting Dan's book, The Back of the Napkin, when it comes out. Maybe I'll do a book review here. If you want more information about Dan, check out his website, www.DigitalRoam.com.

Bob Horn Interview

2008-02-04T19:25:00.001-10:00

Here's a photo of Bob Horn being interviewed by Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson. Thanks to my wife Karen for providing the photo.

Karen also did a simple quick mind map of the interview. Here's that:

Dave Gray General Session

2008-02-04T19:20:00.000-10:00

Here's more details on the Dave Gray drawing exercise in the Monday morning general session.

Monday Morning General Session

2008-02-04T13:07:00.000-10:00

So, picking up where I left off with the last post - summarizing the sessions. First up, Monday morning general session. My first inclination was to just write about what happened. But wait! I'm supposed to be trying to re-awaken my inner visual thinker. So, I better do some drawing. Here we go...

The top half of this image shows what I'm calling the "Tom Crawford Table Scramble." Just as everyone had sat down and quieted down in the first sesion, Tom reminded everyone that one of the main purposes of the conference was to network. So, he asked everyone to get up and relocate to a new table and introduce themselves to their new table mates. Now, being a consummate introvert, I cringed at this. But at least my wife Karen (also an introvert) was with me.

A few minutes later, once everyone had done this and settled down again, he did again! Get up. Relocate. Reintroduce. Now, I have to say I appreciate the effort he was making, but the introvert in me was starting to get pretty annoyed. There's gotta be a better way. There needs to be special "Networking for Introverts" exercise for those of us who aren't really comfortable with the socializing. Anyway, enough of that.

Next on the agenda was Dave Gray's presentation which is represented in the bottom half of the image above. Dave's argument was that any 5 year old can draw. We were all 5 year olds at some point, therefore we can all draw.

To demonstrate, he led everyone through drawing some simple building blocks of drawings, which are shown in the drawing above. Then he had as draw (or attempt to in my case) a baseball player at bat. Then he discussed the concept of "Egyptian Perspective" where things don't have to be drawn to correct perspective for our brains to "get it." We can draw the top of a table, draw legs of the table from side view and draw items on the table as if from side view. It won't be a work of art, but it will be able to communicate the intent.

Next up was the Bob Horn interview with Cliff and Nancy.

Though it was an interesting discussion, sadly I didn't take any notes. I'll see if I can find any better coverage of that and link to it if I can.

The last activity of the morning session was to have everyone pick an everyday item you'd find in store. The idea was to start assembling a visual language library of objects. Matt Homan from Xplane led the activity and drew an example of a blender. Being the incredibly creative person I am, I could think of nothing else to draw, but a blender. So, there's my blender.

VizThink Summary

2008-02-02T14:27:00.000-10:00

By the second day of VizThink, my brain was already overloaded with new information and I found myself confusing elements of different sessions. How can I remember what's happened and keep it all sorted out? What better way than with a kind of graphical summary of the sessions I attended. So, Tuesday evening I sat down to visually map that out. Here's the result:

In addition to general sessions, there were 2 break out periods each day, each with about 8 different sessions to choose from. My choices for breakout sessions were:

Monday Morning: "The Back of the Napking: Solving Business Problems with Pictures" with Dan Roam.

Monday Afternoon: "VizMaps: An Alternate Approach to Describing Where" - with Bruce Daniel

Tuesday Morning: "Solving Explanation Problems with Simple Online Videos" - with Lee and Sachi LeFever

Tuesday Afternoon: "Mapping the Possibilities" - John Grimwade

Over the next few blog posts, I'll go into more detail about each session - both general and breakout.

VizThink 2008

2008-02-02T13:30:00.000-10:00

Just got back from the VizThink conference a few days ago and trying to figure out what's next. My original intent in going was to see if I could pick up some visual communication tips for websites (I'm a freelance web developer). I wasn't sure what to expect from the conference, but something happened that I really wasn't expecting.

The energy level was pretty high as 390+ visual thinkers congregated to learn, grow and share visual learning and communication techniques. What I wasn't expecting was that beginning on the first morning, the conference awakened the long-dormant visual communication inclination in me. After two packed days of general sessions and break-out sessions I found myself energized with the goal of trying to incorporate visual thinking and visual communication into what I do.

In the last general session on Tuesday, Matt Homann from XPLANE, led an exercise where he had everybody respond to three questions: 1) Why am I here? 2) What have I learned? 3) What am I going to do next? He asked that everyone answer in a pseudo-haiku of 5-7-5 words ( I thought a true haiku doing 5-7-5 syllables would have been more interesting, but ...) Anyway, here's my responses written down on 3x5 cards:

Now that I've been back home for a few days, I'm still trying to figure out #3, how to apply. The main idea I've had so far is that I need to try to keep the "VizThink Buzz" alive by doing something with it daily. Being a web guy and a blogger, the only idea I've been able to come up with so far is to blog about it. This blog is the result.

So, my intent over the next few posts is to write some blog articles about some of the sessions I attended, hoping that will keep the spark alive.