Your company has long been a great client for me, and it’s nice to hear that people outside the UED group are getting the “solving problems with pictures” message.

Keep spreading the good word!

- Dan

PS: There was a problem of bullet points in the article, which is now fixed so that readers can understand better the 4 elements of the swiss knife.

Georgia — to your fascinating comment that visual language is personal and chaotic, I would suggest that you’re right… But to ok greater degree than verbal thinking us equally personal and chaotic. We’ve just spent a lot more time creating and enforcing rules.

There are also an infinite number of ‘rules’ about how we think visually, they just haven’t been codified yet to the same degree. Then again, ancient Egypt — far and away the most advanced civilization of its time — did perfect a rigorous grammar in their written language of pictures (heiroglyphics).

Lots to think about. Glad to be part of the discussion!

Dan Roam

author of Thd Back of the Napkin

There is definitely an emerging discipline which is all about exploring and conveying ideas visually. We have focused strongly on reading, writing and arithmetic in our school systems, and visual literacy skills have been neglected — just at the moment when we need to process more complex, non-linear information than ever before.

This is why we have so many bad PowerPoints — our schools don’t teach the basic skills needed to communicate well visually.

Dan’s book is a great contribution to this field.

Comfort also comes from the fact that the exostracism of pwp power comes from a corporate environment: aligning boxes to pwp is to creativity what bureaucracy is to entrepreneurship.

however,unless you are an architect, visual thinking is so personal that carries a great deal of anarchy and risk of misinterpretation. Isn’t this why we abandoned it in the first place and passed on to ultrasegmented syntaxed symbolic language? Well, not quite abandoned : I haven’t met anyone yet who writes down “the guy’s face seating infront of me is funny, frowning, has spots, curly hair” for fun and pleasure ….

I see me as a dark red guy, almost black, almost 70 years old.

I’m definitely a black-pen guy, exactly like Vincent.

Thanks for the fish Fidji, extremely valuable.

But what I appreciated in Dan’s presentation is that he is not the type of guy who always puts creativity first on his list of prority, and he definitely acknowledges the need to adapt a picture to differents purposes and audiences. Which is why he describes is “SQVID” framework as a compromise between the right and left brain.

For remote brainstorming, I generally prefer to make a quick drawing, take a picture, and send it to whomever, as it’s much richer (and quicker) than linear text or graphics-tools, and far cheaper then most (tablet-based, etc.) hardware that may come close to producing similar results, but also gives the occasional headache where compatibility & processing is concerned.

I saw a huge benefit in drawing the problems as “rich pictures”. Some frameworks like viable system model (VSM) are also mostly graphical.

I find that especially technical oriented IT people should be tought some of this stuff, because I believe that many IT failures are caused by lack of understanding (communication, values, …). Somehow these are missing when the problem is modeled and drawn in PowerPoint slides, but are there when just using coloured pens and napkins.

Interesting categorisation of visual methods and personalities. I’m definitely a black-pen guy, always drawing/dreaming away, until some yellow-/red-pen people come and correct me And Visio is my favourite software on the computer, so I guess I like talking about the “How”.

In any case, I guess this is another book on my wishlist!