The Eyes Have It

A Fibonacci Fountain

Useful and insightful paper by Jay Cross of Internet Time Group exploring the importance of the visual as opposed to the textual.

“It’s right before our eyes, but we’re so habituated to it that we can’t see it. We’ve confused reading and writing with learning. Most lessons are linear and verbal. Most books do not contain a single illustration. On the web, one highly-regarded but seriously misguided guru maintains a large website on usability (of all things) that contains not one picture. eLearning lessons abound with garish, meaningless clip-art. Schools devote years to teaching students to read and hours on developing their visual intelligence.

In a world that is increasingly concerned with speed, we force learners to read words that they must repeat in their minds in order to decode them and process them associatively. You can grok a picture but not a block of text.“

A great piece if satire from The Onion that illustrates the point of Envisioning Learning (see above posting).

Short article on the Design Management Institute website by By Ken DeLor (President, The DeLor Group) briefly outlines how the pharmaceutical industry is beginning to realize that developing a strong a visual identity for their products is crucial.

“Development of a visual identity for a pharmaceutical product historically has been a low priority, with scientists often naming the product and a visual identity coming as an afterthought, with little impact other than appearing as a “bug” at the bottom of a print ad.”

“This website explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising, or “Madison Avenue,” as the latter is colloquially termed. The Medicine and Madison Avenue Project presents images and database information for approximately 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines.”

If you are in the Philadelphia area, you might want to check out Mammoth Scale: The Anatomical Sculptures of William Rush — an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wistar Institute.

The size of Rush’s anatomical sculptures stems from the popularity of the medical lectures Caspar Wistar gave as chair of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Teaching classes with as many as 500 students, Wistar found it impossible to demonstrate minute anatomical structures to his large audiences. He commissioned Rush to create the oversized models so that his lectures would be understandable to everyone who attended. Rush’s anatomical sculptures are democratic objects, designed to allow greater numbers of students to attain professional expertise.

Slightly off-topic diversion by Michael Ward from McSweeney’s.

A dermatology image atlas from Johns Hopkins University that has more than 2800 images. Although it’s a great resource, it’s not for those who are easily rendered queasy. The image to the left of a typical child’s water-based tattoo is one of the tamest on the site. At a previous job, I ruined more than one lunch by accidentally stumbling across the wrong image in a dermatology textbook while working on projects related to an anti-baldness medication. Sometimes visual communications shouldn’t be quite so visual.

This site is particularly notable because it has an unusual graphical user interface that’s actually a graphic. Rather it’s a homunculus that assists in finding images related to a particular part of the body. Worth a visit just to give this a spin.

A tutorial created by the High Performance Scientific Computing (HPSC) project at the University of Colorado at Boulder with a grant from the National Science Foundation. Although it’s getting slightly dated, and is written for programmers using high-octane number crunching packages like MATLAB, it is possible to find some useful insights into scientific visualization and human perception hidden among the exercises.

“The eye is not as sensitive to blue as it is to other colors. First of all, most cones that receive short wavelengths (like blue and indigo) are on the edges, not in the center, of the retina. Secondly, the lens absorbs part of the wavelength light. Finally, the short wavelength cones that are distributed over the surface of the retina are far apart, due to their low number. For these reasons, small blue objects are hard to see and blue objects on a black background are almost impossible to see. The more one tries to focus on blue objects, the more they tend to disappear.”

“Fifteen anonymous medicine cabinets, seven artists, one doctor, the result? Shelf Life” - an exhibition mounted by the Two10 Gallery. Fifteen medicine cabinets, with annotations by the contributors and several artisitic interpretations exploring the the concept. Additional comments by a healthcare professional. “Shelf Life disentangles some of the myths behind our home healthcare.”

I think the PDF version of the show’s catalog is actually a better experience than the flash-based online, interactive version.

“The artists all refer – either directly or indirectly – to the themes of loss and memory that suffuse so many of the anonymous essays written by the owners of the ‘real’ cabinets. Perhaps the potency and power of medicine cabinets lies in the fact they not only contain products intended for bodily use – and thus signify the intimate, personal and sometimes painful – but because the odours and scents held within stimulate the autobiographical memory. Long after we have forgotten the face, the word, the event, or the image, the smells in our medicine cabinets will remind us of times long past.The medicine cabinet is our door to the present, past and future.”

The importance of images to the communication process is one of the recurring themes of this blog. The single image responsible for communicating to me the greatest number of important messages, with the greatest clarity and power, was the ultrasound image of my first child. What had been an abstraction suddenly seemed very, very real. That message was conveyed by an old-fashioned, black and white, two dimensional, “is that an arm or a leg” type ultrasound. I can only imagine how powerful the impact of first seeing my child in one of these 4D ultrasounds would have been. I wonder how useful they are as a diagnostic tool.

It’s the Story, Stupid: Don’t Let Presentation Software Keep You From Getting Your Story Across by Doc Searls.

One of the best primers on how to create and give quality presentations (in spite of PowerPoint) that I’ve ever seen. Lots of great stuff here although some of the recommendations aren’t of much use when presenting conservative material to very conservative audiences.

“Presentations are as much about slides as poetry is about handwriting.”

ISOTYPE = International System of Typographic Picture Education

Useful information design ideas from the mid-twentieth century.

“The ordinary citizen ought to be able to get information freely about all subjects in which he is interested, just as he can get geographical knowledge from maps and atlases. There is no field where humanisation of knowledge through the eye would not be possible.” Otto Neurath, Autobiography.

This site includes “examples of ISOTYPE designs in action” and a bibliography.

Side note: It’s interesting that they would include Tufte in this bibliography. It’s my guess that, as beautiful as these charts are, Tufte might use some of them as examples of “chart junk“.