In an HCI class I’m taking currently, we’re studying the cognitive science behind the long human history of visual-spatial displays. We’re talking caveman drawings up to the latest in Minority Report-style virtual interactive displays – fun stuff!! <\/p>\n
Here’s an article to soak up if you’re interested in this kind of stuff: The Cognitive Science of Visual-Spatial Displays: Implications for Design<\/a><\/p>\n And here’s some thoughts of my own about that article:<\/strong><\/p>\n More than anything else, this week\u2019s reading of Mary Hegarty\u2019s paper on the science of visual displays made me realize why it\u2019s much easier for visually-minded folks like myself to understand something best when we\u2019re able to interact with a subject on a visual level.<\/p>\n \u201cRepresentations that are informationally equivalent (contain the same information) are not necessarily computationally equivalent\u201d… These are dead on. Whenever I\u2019ve encountered a complex problem, whether facing it alone or in a small group (or mentorship, etc.) I often kick off the process or discussion with something along the lines of \u201cAre there other ways I\/we can look at the issue?\u201d This is helpful in many cases because in representing the object or process with an iconic, relational or complex display allows us to augment our thinking, to enhance our understanding and to bring additional inferences or insights to bear. <\/p>\n Displays allow us to externalize both the storage and the organization of a massive amount of data, freeing up our fragile and limited minds to process that data in different ways. It also lets us explore the relationships between groupings of related elements, i.e. chunking – freeing us to a degree from the limitations of short term memory by compressing these complex associations or concepts into a fewer number comprehensible objects. <\/p>\n I understand the world through my visualizations of it, both in reality and in my internalized efforts to understand the world around me, so my favorite blurb by far was the author\u2019s reference to Stuart Card\u2019s sentiment \u201cUsing vision to think\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an HCI class I’m taking currently, we’re studying the cognitive science behind the long human history of visual-spatial displays. We’re talking caveman drawings up to the latest in Minority Report-style virtual interactive displays – fun stuff!! Here’s an article to soak up if you’re interested in this kind of stuff: The Cognitive Science of … Continue reading Using Vision To Think (a nod to Stuart Card)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,2,19,20,49,21,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.minotaurdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201ctask performance can be dramatically different with different visual displays of the same information\u201d…<\/p>\n