0123708966 - Visual Thinking for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies).pdf

Preface
Th ere has been a revolution in our understanding of human perception that
goes under the name “ active vision. ” Active vision means that we should
think about graphic designs as cognitive tools, enhancing and extending
our brains. Although we can, to some extent, form mental images in our
heads, we do much better when those images are out in the world, on paper
puter screen. Diagrams, maps, web pages, information graphics,
visual instructions, and technical illustrations all help us to solve problems
through a process of visual thinking. We are all cognitive s in this
age in the sense that we rely heavily on cognitive tools to amplify
our mental abilities. Visual thinking tools are especially important because
they harness the visual pattern fi nding part of the brain. Almost half the
brain is devoted to the visual sense and the visual brain is exquisitely capa-
ble of interpreting graphical patterns, even scribbles, in many diff erent
ways. Often, to see a pattern is to understand the solution to a problem.
Th e active vision revolution is all about understanding perception as a
dynamic process. Scientists used to think that we had rich images of the
world in our heads built up from the ing in through the
eyes. Now we know that we only have the illusion of seeing the world in
detail. In fact the brain grabs just those fragments that are needed to exe-
cute the current mental activity. Th e brain directs the eyes to move, tunes
up parts of itself to receive the expected input, and extracts exactly what
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is needed for our current thinking activity, whether that is reading a map,
making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or looking at a poster. Our
impression of a rich detailed es from the fact that we have the
capability to extract anything we want at any moment through a move-
ment of the eye that