Viz Think 08

Talking about Viz Think 08 (David Gray Blog - Communication Nation) Stephen Few expresses concerns over drawings. The other speakers hired 'they don’t accurately represent the spectrum of visual thinking, and that the list of topics is heavily skewed, primarily toward the use of drawings to record ideas (such as during a brainstorming meeting) or in printed form to explain something, such as a concept or process' (Visual Business Intelligence A blog by Stephen Few).

He express his concerns over visual thinking at Viz Think 08 not just being about drawing in his blog post Not every picture is worth a thousand words (dec 07). He rightly points out that visual thinking should include the exciting ways in which it 'is supported by technology today: information visualization—”the use of computer-supported interactive visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition” (Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think - Interactive Technologies, 1999).

Technologies that created the previous post featuring Julien Bayles Dynamic Clock. I stumbled accross the image featured that I thought was a great spatial visualisation of the aspects involved in visual thinking that I assume is by Stephen Few. Its similiar style to the artist Eboy featured in Illustration Now! - 150 Illustrators featuring some of these technologies that integrate into this visual thinking spectrum such as navigating Virtual Worlds or Video Communication distributed by Utube via what should be featured in the illustration the internet. I particularly like the guy featured in the bottom right, 'communication skills, problem solving & drawing' definetly needed to visually think & design - solve.

But technology does have a huge influence on visual thinking, it allows us to communicate/collaborate ideas accross the world/virtual world instantly it also allows us to catalogue/collate these wonderful & varied abstract data visualisations from notebooks to concept maps.