Digital Roam

Where visual thinkers come from

I like to collect unexpected visual thinking stories. They come in handy during workshops or when I tell people that I make a living by solving problems with pictures and they say, "You do WHAT?!"

That's why I love stories about cosmonauts, Buddhist monks, police officers, aeronautical engineers, consulting company CEOs, theoretical physicists, golfers, astronomers... people who are the last to come to mind when thinking about visual thinking. Because they are problem solvers who don't consider themselves artistic and have no "design" training, they often come up with the most inspired visual solutions.

Someone asked me a couple weeks ago where I find all these people. "Everywhere" was my first answer. "Since everyone is a natural born visual genius, you don't have to look far for examples." Which is true, but here's the real secret: (shhh!) I read "The Economist" every week.

Check it out, from this week's issue alone: (The Economist, April 7th, 2007)

In the science and technology section, page 77: "Computer vision. Easy on the Eyes"

"Given the briefest of glances at a picture, most people believe that they have not had time to recognize anything at all. Ask them whether they saw an animal and they consider themselves to be making a futile guess. Yet those guesses are right much more often than they are wrong..."

And this in the obit, page 84: "Paul Lauterbur"

"The whole history of modern science, Paul Lauterbur once joked, might be written on the basis of papers turned down by academic journals. (snip) His core discovery, of how to get spatial information about atoms in a magnetic field, was scribbled on a paper napkin over dinner in a Big Boy restaurant in Pittsburgh, between two bites of a hamburger."

In what other magazine can you find two completely unrelated stories about two completely unrelated topics... that are really about visual thinking? Love it.

Actually, The New Yorker is almost as good for this kind of stuff, followed a distant third by... BusinessWeek. I have yet to find anything so consistently compelling in the design press.

Where have all the pictures gone?

My former colleagues GK VanPatter and Elizabeth Pastor have created and nurtured a string of influential design think-tanks in the years since I last worked with them. Humantific and the NextD Leadership Institute are all based on their wonderful belief that design provides a way to solve really big problems. I couldn't agree more.

Which is why I was pleased and honored when they asked me to submit an article for their latest NextD journal, to join along with a who's-who list of global design thinkers. Gary and Elizabeth were seeking responses to a recent Bruce Nussbaum BusinessWeek blog (and speech at Parsons) entitled: "Are Designers the Enemy of Design?".

That the original article was brazenly provocative lead to lot of emotion being spilled on the web (well, on 60 pp PDF, actually), and many of the 50 responses were equally provocative, with a lot of interesting writing and insight to be found. 

The only thing missing were the pictures. Since I still think of design as first and foremost a visual discipline, I expected to see at least a few responses containing something other than words. When the issue came out, mine was the only response with visuals. Odd.

For those who want to read all the responses, go here.

For those who want to look at mine, here's a summary: