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Jay's Blogs After February 26, 2002, quotes appear in boxes like this one. |
Research on Visualization
Nonverbal communication, right-brain processing, mindmaps, art-talk, symbol processing, semiotics
Sunday, February 03, 2002
posted by jay cross on 11:12 PM |
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Concept maps are cool. They appear to be mind maps on steroids. For one thing, the links themselves are labeled, e.g. X leads to Y, X includes Y, X hinges on Y, etc. Also, it's more natural for a node to have multiple antecedents. NASAs concept maps for the Mars expedition are the front-end for an incredible amount of information: papers, links, second-level maps, etc. What a nifty tool. I will explore using concept maps in internettime.com.
Great example of how visuals show relationships and get the mind's wheels to turning.
The three of us are going to put together an eLearning Forum session on visual learning for April 20.
The information content of a visual program (or any diagram) might be more dependent on the author than on properties of the notation. It still seems plausible that this is the case, but future experiments must be more cautious in controlling for experimental demand factors. ...a picture is worth 84.1 words.
It's a bizarre concept. At a time when there is almost universal agreement on the importance of education, both for individual well-being and for national economic prosperity, how on earth can we think of people as overeducated? To compete successfully in the global economy nations must provide high quality goods and services, produced by a highly-skilled workforce. To survive in today's knowledge-based society, an individual must be well-educated, and capable of continually updating his or her skills in a process of lifelong learning. For more than a decade, the complaint in Britain has been of insufficient investment in education and training. So how could anyone argue we are investing too much? Of course they're not--or at least not in the way you might think. But there is an argument for saying that "overeducation" is a serious problem in the UK, and that this phenomenon should lead to a reassessment of the way resources are used for education and training. Is overeducation a real problem? How much is too much? This is from Fathom, which makes it difficult to point to. The original appeared in CentrePiece, The Magazine of Economic Performance.
In his book Art is Work, the graphic designer Milton Glaser states, “The act of drawing has nothing to do with being an illustrator. We draw because it enables us to see.... Drawing is the path to observation and attentiveness.” The key phrase here is “to see.” How many times have you encountered something like this? You are involved in a meeting and you have difficulty absorbing what the meeting leader is actually saying. At the end, someone asks, “Did you understand?” Your body language may say, “yes” with a hesitant dipping of the chin, but your mind nods left to right and right to left realizing you didn’t understand at all. If you could only see what was being said. If you could only see the criteria being addressed. If you could only see the ideas being relayed. Drawing allows you to see and provides a tactile relationship between subject and interpreter. Drawing can be described as making adjectives of nouns (data). Drawing toggles between what is and what can be. With a few quick strokes, you can capture multiple views of a concept and crystallize possible solutions. Drawing is conversation of minds over matter: you can see what is being thought and said
This is an interesting collection of navigational icons on a Dutch site on the History of Childhood and Education.
Many of the people who design websites had a problem with this. They prefer control to interoperability. In the early days, the David Siegels of the world used "single-pixel" gifs, images of text in lieu of the characters themselves, and other sleight of hand to try to grab back the level of control graphic designers exercise over printed material. Siegel told us that Creating Killer Websites meant mimicing books. Siegel named his company "Verso," which means left-hand page, a decidedly print-based term. As presentation on the web matures, designers returned to purity of form. Better that pages be usable on screens large and small than look fantastic on one size of screen and crappy on others. And then along came Cascading Style Sheets. I like being able to specify fonts and colors and what-not in one place rather than throughout a site. But I HATE sites that specify absolute font sizes. Why does a designer presume that I want to read fly-spec type or gigantic letters? Font size should be relative. Otherwise, a webpage is not user-friendly. I like to sit about a yard from my monitor. This position leaves real estate on the front of my desk for papers, makes it easy to look at the redwood trees through the window, and keeps my brain out of the reach of radiation. That's my privilege. And when View/Text Size/Large is deactivated because the person creating the page I'm trying to view, the word "jerk" springs into my mind.
The Digital Photograph Handbook by Simon Joinson Reminds me that I need to find and get used to the 50 mm setting on the new camera. Joinson has a totally different take on things from Smith (below). Not only does he encourage cropping, he's fully in favor of altering images by, say, dropping in the sky from one shot into the foreground of another. Joinson takes a more expansive view of the rule of thirds -- using it to define the horizon, up & down, etc. Designing a Photograph by Bill Smith, 142 pages By placing a camera between yourself and your subject, the experience changes radically. The photographer becomes an observer, no longer a participant. When the camera user attempts to be as much a participant as an observer, the image suffers. The responsibility and awareness of the photographer is to sense, to feel, and to capture on film the beauty and the emotion while being detached enough to view it in its entirety. Scan the edges of the frame before clicking the shutter. Figure & ground. Look before you see. As I look around a room or walk down a street, I constantly frame images in my mind. Whenever I pick up a camera, I am aware of a certain electricity that seems to run through me. An inner strength seems to make me quicker, more intuitive, and more aware of what I see. At the same time, a certian deadening of my awareness filters out anything not relevant to the shot or scene before me. I cross streets and move through crowds with a total lack of conscious thought. To me, photography is a great amusement that generates a response unlike anything else. Smith is a purist on, of all things, cropping. He feels you should crop with the camera, not afterward. In fact, he takes pride in composing the optimal border before pushing the button. Whew! That's certainly not how I view photography. My stance is "whatever it takes." switching directories 9/15
Infographics of terrorism
The Passing of the Age of Science. In the emerging era, you still need the rigor of the scientific approach, but that alone is not nearly rich enough for the panoply of wicked problems that face us in our organizations and as a society. The problem solving process is now primarily social, rather than individualistic. The process goal is a solution that works and can be embraced by all of the stakeholders, not “the right answer.” In this environment, a new set of tools is needed to help groups create shared understanding, shared meaning, and shared commitment. VIMS is such a tool. Visual Issue Mapping System Visual Issue Mapping System (VIMS) is based on three fundamental ideas: Pattern of cognitive activity of one designer -- the "jagged" line The natural pattern of problem solving behavior may appear chaotic on the surface, but it is the chaos of an earthquake or the breaking of an ocean wave -- it reveals deeper forces and flows which have their own order and pattern. The non-linear pattern of activity that expert designers go through gives us fresh insight into what is happening when we are working on a complex and novel problem. It reveals that it is not a mark of stupidity or lack of training that we seem to "wander all over." This non-linear process is not a defect, but rather the mark of an intelligent and creative learning process.
Innovative when it came out, I think a good web page delivers the same wallop or more if well designed.
This is bare-bones, no-budget instruction. Low-res photos of wooden dummies talking. I'm so tired of hearing how we're waiting for broadband in order to make learning effective. Heh! I'm not convinced. Here's Take Three.
I'll need to experiment with lighting, backgrounds, etc., but this could be a gas. A play, right here on my own personal stage. I could even intersperse myself -- no model release required -- interacting with my wooden buddies. Here's their debut.
The Atlas of Cyberspaces is really special. Oodles of images of the net(s).
Nice animation example: How Routers Work. Less text would make it communicate even better.
Shapeshifter at Electric Sheep Make your own Modrian (I did.) On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments Bob Spence: The Acquisition of Insight Nose Pilot, an artistic tour de force
Internet Industry Strategic Alliances, Joint Ventures, and Other Partnerships. It's alive! Alpha Studio's Graphic Facilitation & a wonderful graphic of the Tufte seminar. I must add this to my page on Design.
Navigate with The Brain What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context. Consensual hallucinations require considerable preparation. Maps are a shared version of reality. Once the infrastructure to share reality is in place, maps will flourish. Until then, maps of the Internet will be cartographic fiction, the creative musings of poets rather than shared constructions of reality. I plan to spend a LOT of time navigating this site. Wow.
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