Visual Thinking and Shared Understanding

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

One of my favorite conference moments occured at the Computers and Philosophy 2002 conference, where both Bob Horn and I spoke. I sat next to Bob during the other talks and peeked over his shoulder as he took notes. That man is insane. My notes are barely legible scribbles; his are pristine visual diagrams.    (LEX)

A few years later, I got to work with Bryan Coffman at the MGTaylor 7-Domains Workshop. As with Bob, I got to see Bryan’s notebook and concluded that he also was insane.    (LEY)

Visual languages are extremely powerful and totally underutilized in collaboration today. Part of the reason for this is that the techniques seem inaccessible. If you can’t draw a straight line, you’re probably not going to be doodling your notes, much less doing it live on a whiteboard in front of a crowd of people. Tools like Compendium and Mind Mapping are great in this regard, but they represent only a fraction of what’s possible. (In the case of Compendium, I think it’s question-orientation is as important, if not moreso, as its visualization capabilities.)    (LEZ)

When I found out earlier this month that one of Dave Gray‘s mentors was Bob Horn, I told him I had to peek at his notebook. No problem, said Dave. He posts many of his sketches on Flickr.    (LF0)

Dave also told me about an exercise he likes to do at his workshops, which is to ask participants to draw a diagram of a toaster. You can see the results from a workshop he recently did in Toronto. I like this exercise a lot, because it shows the very different ways that people think about a relatively mundane device in a very concrete way. Each of those pictures are clearly different, but they are all also accurate.    (LF1)

This technique is great for building Shared Understanding, and there are all sorts of great variations. You can have people draw, build things, and so forth. Luke Hohmann had us design cereal boxes at DCamp last May that would make people say, “DCamp — gotta buy that conference!”    (LF2)

Michael Eakes recently blogged about a sixth grade exercise, where the teacher asked her students to draw Mickey Mouse from memory.    (LF3)

https://i0.wp.com/www.eakes.org/blog/images/mickeyposter-small.jpg?w=700    (LF4)

Read Michael’s analysis of the variation; it’s fascinating.    (LF5)

FLOSS Usability Sprint III

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This weekend, Aspiration and Blue Oxen Associates are once again co-hosting FLOSS Usability Sprint III, the pre-eminent event for bringing usability to Open Source projects. This year, we’ve moved venues from San Francisco to Mountain View. Thanks to Google and especially Rick Boardman for sponsoring the event!    (LET)

As always, we have a great set of participants, and it should be both productive and fun. What’s even cooler for me this year is that one of my projects, HyperScope, will be a participant. I love it when things converge! The other projects are Drupal, Social Source Commons, Socialtext Open, and Sustainable Civil Society. Really looking forward to it!    (LEU)

Scanning Large Texts with HyperScope

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Speaking of capabilities, while digging up relevant passages in 1984, I really wished I had a digital version of the book so that I could use HyperScope on it. Specifically, I wanted to find the passages that contained the word, “dictionary.”    (LEH)

With a standard Web browser and an HTML version of the text, I would have hit Alt-F, typed “dictionary,” and scanned the surrounding paragraphs of each found instance, most likely scrolling up and down to examine the context.    (LEI)

With HyperScope, I would have changed the View Spec to wi;"dictionary";. This would show me only paragraphs containing the word, “dictionary.” I would then scan each paragraph, and if I found something that piqued my interest, I would Jump to that Item with the View Spec lj, which would show me only that paragraph and its sibling paragraphs (a “plex” in Augment terminology) with the previous content filter turned off.    (LEJ)

If HyperScope had multiwindow capabilities (which it will eventually), I could do each of these operations in its own window, which would allow me to jump back and forth easily between different views of the same document.    (LEK)

This is a great example of how View Specs and Granular Addressability allow you to navigate through a large text easily and effectively in ways that aren’t possible with today’s everyday tools.    (LEL)

Reversing 1984: Augmenting Language

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Brad Neuberg and I were having a conversation about HyperScope earlier today, and Brad said something interesting about language. He said that HyperScope expands people’s vocabulary. He contrasted that to George Orwell‘s 1984, where Newspeak is constantly shrinking.    (LEA)

I loved the Orwell reference, and thought it would be worth rereading the relevant passages. (I ended up rereading much more. It’s such a well-written and engaging book, it was hard to put down.)    (LEB)

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Eidition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language when the language is perfect.” (46)    (LEC)

If reducing vocabulary and narrowing language are prerequisites for diminishing our ability to think, then it follows that augmenting our ability to think results in an increase in our vocabulary. Doug Engelbart always talks about augmenting existing capabilities while adding new ones. You could replace the word “capabilities” with “vocabulary,” and you would essentially be saying the same thing.    (LED)