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ART SYMMETRY

Something completely different. The youtube clip below (hat tip to Dave Davison)is a stunning visual mash-up of famous female faces throughout the history of Western Art.

What struck me was the consistency with which symmetry was a critical element in the conception of female beauty. This affinity for an even facial structure and large eyes in fellow humans may be more of a “hard-wired” brain preference than a simple cultural affectation of Westerners.

Who should your spokesperson be ? If they are going to be presenting in visual mediums, then it would help your message if they have a symmetrical face. Your vision is framed more powerfully than any words you may hear.

EMOTION AND LOGIC VISUALIZED

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated has a post up, “Logic+Emotion – moving the needle on the Experience -O-Meter “, featuring the work of Chicago designer and blogger David Armano. I took a gander at Armano’s PPT presentation and was impressed. A wonderful combination of concepts and presentation:

INFORMATION VELOCITY: KNOWLEDGE OPPORTUNITIES OR WHITE NOISE?

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated posted on Linda Stone, who was featured in the HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas 2007 ( which I picked up from Steve at ERMB) Dave wrote:

“Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: “Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)” .

“This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call ‘continuous partial attention.’ Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.”

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention. “

It occured to me from Stone’s use of the term “scanning” that “continuous partial attention” is a behavior that probably has a strong evolutionary base as it would offer obvious survival advantages to early humans who manifested that kind of alert and reactive perception to minor changes in the immediate environment. A behavior that can be relaxed when we are in locales where our need for safety and security are relatively assured norms.

Scanning for information in Continuous Partial attention increases the velocity of information flow to the brain and we would be constantly assessing the value of the given information in terms of “spending” our attention by increasing our focused concentration and going “deeper”. Judiciously practiced, continuous partial attention would yield certain efficiencies in terms of time saved and increased probablity for generating bursts of insight. These would be moments where real learning could potentially take place, opportunities to acquire or, add to, useful knowledge.

The ability to assess information while it is in a dynamic state of flow would appear to be critical. Without that cognitive function establishing the moment for increased attention (and screening out the less valuable flows, the partial attention would come to resemble “white noise” where jumbles of data would represent a stressful, chaotic, environment in which thinking would be more difficult.

Dave is pointing to the development of visualization tools to help bring analytic order to a CPA state. It may be that some day, instead of scrolling through readers or meta-aggregators, we might have montages that we can view and then decide to click an image to read a particular post out of hundreds in just a a second or two; or symbolic ordering systems to classify new posts and articles according to our own criteria. A “visualization before reading” format.

Possibilities abound.

RELATED LINKS:

The Attention Economy And The Net

The Value of Openess in an Attention Economy

Attention Economy

John Hagel

A desktop reference for all visualizers : the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods –Dave Davison

Visual Literacy.org

INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES – Zenpundit

Attention vs. Meaning – Dave Davison

VISUALIZING INFORMATION

First, I’d like to give a big tip o’ the Zenpundit hat to Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated for bringing the following links to my attention. Ever since Critt Jarvis connected the two of us last Spring, Dave has steadily enriched my thinking by introducing me to new ideas and thought leaders, something I much appreciate.

Visualizing information is becoming an increasingly important tool in business, government and education for allowing people to understand, comprehend and manipulate large amounts of data quickly and effectively. Both the Intelligence Community concerned with analyzing threats to our national security and private sector tech companies interested in building Web2.0 applications are diving deepinto visualization techniques. If you use power point presentations for business on an extensive basis may be familiar with the work of Edward Tufte, a leading expert in the field of visualizing information.

In teaching children or adults, I frequently make use of diagrams or have students create their own visual formats in order to get them to integrate concepts and make connections that previously might have gone unnoticed. Some very important aspects of history and some areas of the sciences ( say, modern physics) are counterintuitive – they run against our natural logic of how the situation “should” play out. Practicing visualization of information can bring these non-obvious elements to light, make them more concrete and stimulate students to ask questions.

Combining symbolic visual formats and text also engages multiple regions of the viewer’s brain when they “read” it, possibly making the information more meaningful to a larger group of students with different learning styles.

Below is a table “ A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” created by Visual Literacy.org that gives a comprehensive range of techniques for displaying information that students may find useful for projects in the coming years. While I have loaded the table into slideshare, I encourage you to go to their page because the table there (unlike my version) is fully interactive with examples and descriptions, as well as more easily read ( and can be downloaded as a PDF file).