Visuals and Deep Metaphors
In a previous post, I asked if visual literacy wasn’t a key work literacy skill. I was thinking of it in terms of presenting information visually, but there’s another way to consider the roles of visual literacy–how can visual thinking skills help us develop other important work literacy skills and additional knowledge?
One of my favorite and most knowledgeable experts in the area of visual thinking is Christine Martell of VisualsSpeak. Today she has a really thought-provoking post on using visuals to explore deep metaphors, elaborating on some of the thinking in the book Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumer.
Says Christine:
One of the more interesting articles coming from the publicity for the book was published by the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Newsletter, Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?.
In decrying the lack of what they call “deep thinking” among managers and especially those responsible for marketing, they suggest some things that get in its way. Among them are:
- reluctance to take risk, especially when short-term performance is at stake,
- the fear of disruption resulting from “thinking differently and deeply,”
- the potential psychological cost of changing one’s mind resulting from deep thinking,
- the lack of information providing deep insights on which to base deep thinking.
Christine goes on to suggest that another reasons that managers might not be able to engage in this kind of metaphorical deep thinking is because they lack the visual skills to do so. I tend to agree. Not many of us have learned how to use visual thinking as a way to develop our creativity, problem-solving and other kinds of skills, although there may be changes on the horizon around this, with the advent of organizations like VizThink.
Check out Christine’s post for some great links to visual thinking resources. I’d also love to hear more about your thoughts regarding how visual thinking and visual literacy skills might be a pathway to developing other kinds of work literacy skills.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I have to think about this a bit more. However, I do know my students look at the way in which things are organized on a page (screen) differently than I do.
I think also there are certain expectations about how information is organized on a screen. If you go to the bank for Reconciliation (the Central Bank of Central Banks) and click on a link for one of the central banks, you will be able to find the currency exchange for the local currency, regardless if the site is in English or not. I have done this activity often with my classes, and it is rare that students can’t find the information because of the way the screen and visuals are set up (e.g. flags indicating translations; = signs, etc…).
On the other hand, students have difficulty moving from course to course on LMS because of their expectations about how a course should be set up. Often they have a different idea of where to find important information and the visual representation of ideas.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
How would you say that students look at how things are organized differently than you do, Virginia? That’s interesting.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
The feedback I got from my classes were that my “sites” were too boring. They looked for the visual cues (pictures, colored fonts) to find important information.
More importantly, when I set up my main page for the courses, my students couldn’t find the information (recognizing the icons). When I asked my own kids to find the information (which I thought was obvious in the center alone by itself), they could not find it. They read the banner and then went directly to the menu on the right. I find when I am searching on sites, I tend to read the screen like a newspaper (most important information in the upper right hand corner) while my kids and students (I think) tend to look at the top banner then go to the menus. They also look for icons they are familiar with (i.e. you tube symbol).
July 10th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Virginia
That is so interesting about how younger people navigate a website.
Could there be visual mapping differences between those of us who read books and newspapers in our formative years and with kids growing up today in the digital world?
July 11th, 2008 at 5:56 am
That IS interesting Virginia. I think that Tom may be right that there could be visual mapping differences between those of us who started with print materials and the kids today who do so much reading online. (On a side note–”older” folks seem to need to print out web pages to really understand things, while I never see younger people doing that. They seem perfectly content reading online).
This actually gets at both ideas I was thinking about in terms of visual literacy. The first was that in presenting information, we have to understand and use visual cues more effectively. The second was that channels of information may be getting more visual–less reading and more visual cues.
In the case of your kids and students, it feels to me like their strategies for navigating through a page are less dependent on reading skills and more on using pictures and visuals to guide them. I wonder if this will have the impact of tying them more into right-brained, rather than left-brained thinking? Which may also explain why so many business people (who tend to be analytical, left-brained) see young people as being sort of flaky and all over the place. Maybe it’s just that their right brains are more activated.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:03 am
So I wonder then if the work literacy skill would be the ability to visually map various formats (rather than teaching a standard visual map). When we teach reading,, after all, (especially at the advanced level) we teach students to interpret many genres, giving them a framework for analysis. Is there such a framework for analysis for visuals?
July 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Hi V yonkers
“Is there such a framework for analysis for visuals?’ Good question.
In our work, we use photographs to advance in-depth conversations. We use the same photos but increase the complexity of the question(s) in order to facilitate deeper conversations.
This seems to me to be similar to your example of teaching more advanced reading skills.
I’ll see if my partner can answer your question more specifically.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Virginia,
There are people working on creating frameworks in the VizThink community. Dan Roam’s new book, Back of the Napkin has some interesting ideas, and he put some of them up in his blog http://digitalroam.typepad.com/digital_roam/2008/07/napkin-tools-no.html
Dave Gray is also working on a book, and has put pieces of it up on his blog
http://www.davegrayinfo.com/2008/06/04/q-tools/
Dave’s flikr stream has some really interesting images where he maps out a variety of visual concepts.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Those are good tools. However, I was envisioning a framework that would include how to interpret these tools or using a tool like the periodic table of visualization methods . Using the visual concepts from various genres and being able to learn how to interpret them is more important than creating the visual concepts themselves. To use another analogy, I am very poor at creating different income statements (depending on the situation) or conducting statistical tests on data, but I am very good at interpreting the outcomes, whether I have experience in those statistical tests or ways of calculating financial data or not. As an auditor, I was often faced with different tests and ways of calculating data than what I had learned. I became proficient on interpreting these statements/reports (better than some of the “experts”) because I understood the concepts on which the statistics and financial data was based (rather than being an expert on the format/process).
In looking at “literacy”, learning the words or symbols is not enough. Rather, there needs to be an understanding of what words and symbols are based upon and then apply this to situations in which we may not have experience. So the visual literacy framework needs to have a deeper understanding of how people make sense of visuals in multiple contexts. I feel the periodic table is a good start. However, I would like to see some abstraction of these ideas that can then be applied to multiple/new contexts.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Virgina,
You are raising something I think about a lot, but have not come up with an answer. When I look at how I developed visual literacy, much of it was an experiential process facilitated by thousands of classes in fine arts and design. Dave Gray and Dan Roam also have art degrees.
While there is some theory in art school, you learn to interpret through the critique process. You create something in response to an assignment, bring it to class, and the whole class talks about the work in great detail. What works, how it works, what are the alternatives, what doesn’t work, is it saying what you wanted, what else do people see. Everyone sees something differently. There are themes, but we make meaning of visuals in the context of individual experience. While the same could be said of words, the way visuals enter our brains in large chunks, magnifies the range of interpretation.
My colleague Regina Rowland just finished her dissertation that explored the intersection between visual communication and intercultural communication. She used a combination of the VisualsSpeak tool I developed and graphic facilitation in her study. Her preliminary testing sought to identify words and symbols and how they can be applied, much like you are requesting. After a year, she recognized it was not possible because visuals are understood in a gestalt. Making meaning visually is different than making meaning through words.
The periodic table of visualization methods is a great start, but it focuses on the more linear structured methods. I keep wondering if it is possible to use linear-sequential tools (like words) to really understand (at a deep enough level to be useful) visuals, which are not linear and sequential. Even using charts, graphs, and napkin sketches strips out some of the important elements.
Your questions are really helpful, and I hope you will continue to challenge those of us who are working in the visual communication space to continue to refine the theoretical constructs behind what we are doing. It is especially helpful to hear what you think would be useful.
You may also find the work of Neil Cohen interesting. He is doing formal research on visuals http://www.emaki.net/blog/
March 26th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
As an educator I am very much focused on visual literacy and visual teaching. I found a great network packed with info:http://visualteaching.ning.com