my mind on books

Visual Thinking for Design by Colin Ware (Morgan Kauffman-Elsevier, 2008)

p. 12 “What we end up actually perceiving is the result of information about the world strongly biased according to what we are attempting to accomplish.”

Ware discusses aspects of visual perception as they relate to design, based on a model of visual thinking as an active process.

According to this new view, visual thinking is a process that has the allocation of attention as its very essence. … This new understanding leads to a revision of our thinking about the nature of visual consciousness. It is more accurate to say that we are conscious of the field of information to which we have rapid access rather than that we are immediately conscious of the world. (p. 3)

An implication for graphic design is that information display should be designed to support visual queries.

I was interested in the contrast drawn between design for narrative vs design for information seeking:

Information seekers have highly individual cognitive threads that are shaped moment-to-moment by the specific demands of the cognitive process of solving a problem. This process is internally driven. Conversely, the audience of a narrative presentation will, if they are attending, have cognitive threads that are much more similar to each other, although still far from identical because of the variety of their prior experiences. (p. 138)

Summing up near the end of the book (p. 172):

The active vision model has four broad implications for design.

1. To support the pattern-finding capability of the brain; that is, to turn information structures into patterns.
2. To optimize the cognitive process as a nested set of activities.
3. To take the economics of cognition into account, considering the cost of learning new tools and ways of seeing.
4. To think about attention at many levels and design for the cognitive thread.

A review at EagerEyes.org has a more detailed chapter-by-chapter summary.

See also: Author’s website