Visual Thinking and Ideas Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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