Artist's perspective analysis

Texture Gradient

St.Jerome in his Study with Perspective Lines

St.Jerome in his Study with Perspective Lines

The Simplicity Cycle - A manifesto

ChangeThis :: The Simplicity Cycle: by Dan Ward:" Most cliches find their origin in truth, and 'less is more' is one that rings true . Dan Ward succinctly shows us that increased complexity does not inherently equal increased goodness and instructs us on how to walk that fine line while still innovating."

I found this 17 page(short and to the point) Manifesto on
Change This to be a superb exploration of the iterative design process which I believe applies very well to the use of Thoughts Illustrated Graphics as "impressionistic"interpretations that distill complex thoughts into holistic images that can then be iterated into more simplistic models.

I will create a series of posts to further illustrate what I mean.

You have to download the pdf manifesto from the Change This link.ChangeThis :: The Simplicity Cycle

visualcomplexity.com | The Big Picture

visualcomplexity.com | The Big Picture A Live Plasma display

MacroVU Homepage

MacroVU Homepage
More about Bob Horn's work.

Bob Horn's book on Visual Langugage -an excerpt

VLBook HowEye

Bob is a professor at Stanford, member of the Global Business Network, and graphically facilitates/records a wide variety of meetings.

Thoughts Illustrated (TI) at work in group settings

My first experience in the use of TI techniques was its use in facilitating the acceleration of design, development and action in groups of 10-50 persons, where the illustrator accelerates group cohesion and rapid iteration of ideas and concepts to complete complex work by synthesizing(visually interpreting) the ideas and concepts being generated in real time by the diverse working groups. This experience was coordinated by a design practitioner experienced in facilitating high performance teams and the power of TI visualization to support the process.(See example by Eileen Clegg above.)

What began for me at the Knowhere Store in Palo Alto in 1997 where the process was integral to the work of Matt and Gail Taylor in their Design Shops, and led over time to my use of the process in facilitating early stage company due diligence, and strategic alliance development, and finally in the partnering with Ernst and Young in the establishment of the VentureStream Accelerator facility and practice - has convinced me that not only is the TI process useful in applications such as those in my previous posts on the use of TI for thought leaders and their written or spoken media publications, but even more useful when applied, as has been my experience, in the work of teams in all types of organizations, from startups to large enterprises.

It now appears to me that the "book" on TI needs to be written - from a case study and story telling basis, there is a wealth of knowledge that can be distilled and published for public consumption and consulting practice development - and that writing about and exhibiting the power of TI in blog, podcast and book form can provide powerful examples of the TI process in action.

There exists an internationally distributed cadre of graphic facilitators and knowlege creation enablers experienced in the use,and convinced of the value, of TI from several decades of practice who can be called upon to provide the necessary talent to undertake the building of a successful TI-based microenterprise network. Their cumulative skills and experience when coordinated as a group practice is world-class.

I have talked about this concept with many of the above practitioners, and believe that there is a way to engage them in collaborative projects where their specialized experience can be marketed in a manner that at present none of them seem to have developed on an individual and small group basis.

We need to write the book - and it probably should be a collaborative open source project in which illustrations from each of the collaborator's experiences would provide the narratives and allow for repurposing and exponential improvement via the work of as many talented collaborators as can be recruited.

Thoughts Illustrated
an open source creative commons publication

Now is the time to begin writing it and further developing the microenterprise network to support its acceptance and implementation in advancing the practice of high performance work groups in all settings.

I will work over the weekend to think through the principal collaborators who should be invited to join in this work and post the listing here early next week along with the invitation to them to join in the writing and publishing effort.

Joi Ito was the catalyst for an example of this Open Source publishing process in Extreme Democracy,later edited and published by Jon Lebkowsky.
Amazon.com: Extreme Democracy: Jon Lebkowsky, Mitch Ratcliffe: Books

TI for Book Authors and Publishers

This use of TI encapsulates the concepts of tags, chapters, table of contents and similar book organizing methods to offer the reader a preview, postview and "post-it" notetaking capability that can be presented as:

• a poster view of the book included within the book jacket, can include just a url or a tipped in DVD with "director's cuts", author or related blog links and other resources.
  
• a poster view of the book as a book review component for electronic publication with image related clickable links to key concepts, clips, soundbites
• a poster view of the book to be used in conjunction with a blog site where the poster is published to the website of blog and is used to query via clickable graphics techniques, either audio recording of the book, audio podcasting updates.
• a poster view of the book for inclusion in a flickr like poster collection or group for community or individual recognition/recall and added value taggging

How to Save the World: Dave Pollard's prediction on the next big thing in the blogosphere "Blog-Hosted Conversations: planned, edited conversations on a particular topic hosted by and transcribed on a blog or website"

This is the formula for Thoughts Illustrated- Here is another clip from his post: "But the indexing challenges remain: how do you put 'placeholders' in multimedia streams so that readers can hear/view only the section with the search keywords, in such a way that the context of the surrounding discussion isn't entirely lost? And what do you do when the real value of the audio or video isn't in the words themselves, but in the interaction, the images, the media integration itself? As bandwidth cost approaches zero, how much longer will we be satisfied essentially limiting our searches to the written word?"


this is our challenge.






Here's a link to an example from Peter Durand at Pop!Tech visualizing the speech of Malcolm Gladwell.

Alphachimp Tour: Graphic Facilitation

Thoughts Illustrated blog - first example: the thoughts of Doug Engelbart

The concept of providing a holistic image to explain memes/thoughts/presentations/books is the basis for this Thoughts Illustrated blog.

The image is created as a graphical interpretation or synthesis either in real-time as the speaker (s) talk or in postproduction as a visual image connecting the key elements of the speech/book/presentation as a completed whole - but one which can be either "played back" in synchrony with the audio, or used as a graphical interface allowing the "listener" to select portions of the image of special interest, which will automatically link to the speech /resource link segment. the same process can be driven by a tag cloud selection or a concept map that is visually registerable with the master image










this link will take you to the conversation with Doug but the image is not presently in real time form so that it will follow the speech.
IT Conversations: Doug Engelbart - Large-Scale Collective IQ


The typical method of creating a playlist for an iPod or other mp3 player requires the listener to manage the playlist creation-downloading of audio using a lap top or desktop computer where the playlist file is stored on the user's hard disk or in an iTunes repository which automatically uploads the playlist and recorded audio to the iPod which then can be used in portable mode.

Since the user playlist management requires the use of desktop or laptop with full screen capability, the TI blog post can make use of "sound bite" segments clipped from the full speech, a rapid time lapse playback of the holistic image, use of the image as a clickable interface to the soundbites and/or to hyperlinked resources related to the "tage" underlaying the graphical interface logic (i.e. x/y coordinates for regions of the image) and the same procedure can make use of a tag cloud related to the speech/book/presentation and/or image.

Video and still frame clips can also be linked to the image as well, so that a full range of resource linking can take place on the landing page of the Thoughts Illustrated site.

Advertising copy related to the above process can be displayed in realtime as the user clicks through the content. Statistics on users profiles can be gathered as well.

The above process is designed to make the playlist management process more effective and useful for the user, providing pre-listenting guides, abstracts, soundbites, images etc. with the user being prompted to decide whether or not to download the entire related audio/video file to the playlist and thus to the iPod, iTouch or iPhone

Consideration can be given to provide iPod compatible (small) images and other visual cues to playlist management, but the fullest visual experience would be available to the user on a larger screen display than is possible on the smaller mobile unit screens except when the mobile is connected directly to a large monitor or TV display.

In this manner an enhanced TIVO-like playlist management process provides short clips, absracts and other text/graphic/audio elements that enable the user to make better decisions about what to download to their playlists.

This interactive audiovisual experience can be recorded at the user's playlist managment history level - i.e A9 history which includes graphics as well as text query responses.

A newer concept has been introduced by David Armano to describe what he calls the Digital Life Stream