Visual Extension

What's the difference between Visual Recording, Visual Facilitation, Visual Thinking, Visual Communication, and Visual Learning? how are Visuals used differently in all these names or functions? Do they require different skills of the practitioner using them? Or impact the audience/user differently? This will be topic of this blog. I hope to find others interested in this topic who are willing to share their thoughts, opinions, and tools/usages they've found appropriate.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Improving Problem Solving Through Visualization

This is an interesting video that compared the number of ideas people came up with when using visualization tools vs. discussion. In many other research arenas, especially Cognitive Psychology, images have been shown to trigger new ideas and the ability to come up with more solutions to problems by jumping back and forth between forming/watching images & problem solving. And it seems like the more interactive the image, the better the ability to think through problems is. Many of these studies focus on ability to solve math problems, but it would be cool to see an expansion to other fields....these are a couple of reads in this area:

Imagery and Mental Models in Problem Solving. Yulin Qin and Herbert A. Simon, Carnegie Mellon University. From AAA Technical Report (www.aaai.org), 1992

Dynamic Representation of Financial Ratios: a Design and Empirical Test, by Lin Zhao - dissertation, 2008.