Story: The Intersection of the Visual and Verbal

Be part of a new Professional Visual Thinking Community

For anyone interested in visual communication, there is an exciting development. VizThink, a new visual thinking community is kicking off a global community with a conference in San Francisco Jan 27-29, 2007. I am one of the people who will be facilitating a session at the conference. Dave Gray over at Communication Nation: VizThink takes off! has a whole list of ways people are getting involved.

Tom Crawford is the CEO of the new organization, and he posted this on their blog the other day:

Who are visual thinkers? Anybody who uses any of the visual arts for learning or communication. Easy said, hard to picture.

He also posted his first pass at creating an image of what the community might look like, seen below. Tom comes out of the gaming and computer programming worlds, so it is no great surprise that he conceived of this challenge in nice neat rows of boxes.

Ok, so it’s an understatement to say this didn’t work for me. I immediately felt my creative identity threatened by being put in a box. At the same time, I greatly appreciate Tom’s ability to break the pieces into segments and sort them. And I know someone who creates an image like this will be really good at organizing the conference. The details will be taken into account, which always makes it nicer for a facilitator.

It also got me thinking about other aspects of what it means to form a visual thinking community. After all, there isn’t a profession called ‘Visual Thinker’. For the purpose of thinking through this challenge, I decided to focus on the group of people who are facilitating at the VizThink conference as representatives of a visual thinking community. What is it that ties us together?

Do we all use visuals as a means to get to the story?

It’s not just about the visuals, it’s how the visuals spark or enhance the story. We live in the intersection between the visual and the verbal. But we each come at it from a different entry point.

I don’t have the answer any more than Tom does, but I do have some ideas to add to the mix. I’m confident the vision will emerge from the dialogue, in the spaces between us all, in the emerging visual thinking community.

Exercises in Visual Thinking

A graphic from Ralph E. Wileman’s book, Exercises in Visual Thinking, kept popping into my head. It’s about the relationship between the abstract verbal and the concrete visual. You can click on the image to see it large enough to read it.

In the original chart, the verbal to visual is depicted as a continuum with a top and bottom. What if we looked at it as a spiraling pathway? I then created a spiral of visual techniques, then one of methods.

Each person enters the story through their method, from a different place in relationship to the visuals. I have put the names of people on the spokes, since community is about the people. I admit that I know more about what some individuals do than others, so I may not have everyone placed quite right. And I selected the aspect of the work that I was familiar with.

So this raises another round of questions:

• Where do all the other related areas Tom identified fit? Or do they?
• This is words and lines, what are the other visual elements a depiction would need to truly represent the range of professions in the community?
• Is it about story for others? Or am I bringing too much of my own lens?
• What else am I missing?

I toss it back to you Tom, and the rest of the VizThink community.