Simple Online Video Explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information Design Planning

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.