Visualism
From GPWiki
Monday 08 of February, 2010
Visualism
See Visualisation
See Applied Visualisation
See SVT Live
See Structured Visual Thinking
See Visual Thinking
Business is also desperate to do the right thing, prove everything with facts and avoid risk in any way. This means we have to strike a balance between superficiality and analysis paralysis.
Getting this mix is hard and requires changes to mindset. It requires that accountability and responsibility for due rigor is in place and a trust in the methods deployed. Creating an image of simplicity requires a deep appreciation of that underlying complexity.
Visualism is not a steady or readily available trait in business today. We are very proud to have some major converts to the cause in our clients and we can begin to see new examples emerging every day. See also References
Observe also the rapid charge for great industrial and information design led by companies like Apple and Facebook, new thinking in interface and channel experience design by retail, automotive and visible response to consumer centric pressures everywhere.
The Definition
See SVT Live
- A theory advocating the context, sense, or impression of what we see and what we want to convey - visually.
- The principle or habit of or belief in visualisation.
- The pursuit of the visual and simplicity rather than complex or overly written form of narration
- The doctrine that only visual things are readily translateable by all
Indivisualism
Some examples of the theory as applied within our work.
Visual Explanations of Ideas
Companies that recognize the strategic value of design know the power of design lies in communication. These companies and their processes include designers and design artifacts when communicating or developing a vision. Especially early on in the product development process, design artifacts are able to create buy-in for a product vision, provide market context, or illuminate data, processes, goals, and the impact of decisions.
Though Dynamic Diagrams’ end results tend to skew toward being almost too “visually refined” (people often assume visually refined means locked down, which can negatively impact collaboration), their list of how visual explanation contributes to your bottom line is well worth a read - especially for designers looking to apply their skills toward communicating strategic direction.
The Main Threads"CHANGE THE WAY THE 21ST CENTURY ORGANIZATION THINKS & WORKS" - DON'T SOLVE THE WRONG PROBLEM REALLY WELL! - ENTERPRISE CLIENTS - BUSINESS CHALLENGE - 10 WORDS OR LESS - MAKING MEANING - THE PIXAR OF CONSULTING - 21st CENTURY TOOLS and PHILOSOPHY & TECHNIQUES - THE 24 CONVERSATIONS
See Language - Integrative Thinking - Pattern Recognition
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Visual explanation benefits the bottom line
“Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.” - Jeffery Veen, 2000
- By allowing quicker and better decisions. When an organization considers its strategies, a visual explanation can reveal the nature of a problem or opportunity in one view, leading to faster consensus among executives and a more decisive response about what to do next.
- By clarifying organizational and project strategies. Confusion among an organization’s different units and teams can lead to redundant and counterproductive efforts. A visual explanation crystallizes strategies in a presentation that all personnel can understand.
- By revealing the value of a company’s products or services. For complex or highly technical products and services, a visual explanation can clarify how a product or service actually works and how it benefits its users.
- By exposing anomalies in the data. A visual explanation can reveal unexpected problems or opportunities simply by showing existing information in a new way. This gives organizations an edge in achieving efficiency—or in breaking away from the pack.
- By creating inspiration. A visual explanation creates a vision of what a company or its ideas could be; a vision draws funding and support. That’s a simple equation.
Interface Design
For instance, a macro-level pattern can be utilized to unify a suite of products with common functionality. Patterns are used to effectively design a consistent way to access modules within a set of any applications. Though each application was designed for a specific audience and domain (airport ground traffic, radars, ground-based sensors), they shared many common tasks such as: monitoring of real time activity, reporting on archival data, individual unit control, and more. As a result, a number of underlying frameworks could be utilized across all the applications in the suite.
At the micro-level, interface designers can utilize patterns for design details such as the visual representation of icons. An awareness of commonly used visual symbols (within Web sites and applications) allow us to take advantage of user expectations built up through repeated viewing.
Though the scenarios shown do not represent a specific visual representation they do help to illustrate that even when leveraging a commonly understood symbol, icons and stories can still be unique and reflective of the personality of an interface. In other words, using patterns as the foundation for design decisions does not mean that all your application designs will work (or look) the same way.
Information Design In Action
Documentation, after all, takes time. Internal design organizations within large companies are often moving too fast to keep records of their work. Consulting firms and studios, on the other hand, are always crunched by scope and rarely have extra “paid” cycles to devote to documentation. Given these constraints, it’s important that any effort allocated to documentation pays off.
Successful documentation is:
- Actionable – the target audience can put the documented concepts to use easily and quickly. Their needs are reflected in the structure of the information. This, of course requires the author of the documentation to understand the needs of their audience. Surprisingly lots of design documentation is written by the author for the author but - like any other design process - user needs should be a key driver for documentation.
- Extensible – Web companies release product enhancements every few months if not weeks. An extensible documentation system can change with the product.
- Systematic – thinking of documentation as a multi-layered system affords the benefits of componentization. Components divide design concepts into manageable chunks that can be compiled in various ways (often outlined as systems or frameworks).
- Concise – an effective documentation communicates quickly and without ambiguity.
A series of Images
These images illustrate the flexibility of taking single symbols from the Structured Visual Thinking frameworks.
