Visual Thinking basics
In this 20-minute video Dave Gray shares some basics of visual thinking that will get you up and running in about 20 minutes.
Attribution:
In case there is any doubt, the visual alphabet is freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This means you can use it in any way that you like and share it broadly, so long as you credit the source @davegray or xplaner.com
How to know what to draw
Once you have gained some comfort with drawing, the next question is, “Now that I know how to draw, how do I decide what to draw in order to best convey my ideas? In this video I share a simple three-by-three matrix that will help you determine the best way to approach drawing an idea.
How to know when to draw
Not every situation is improved by drawing. Sometimes writing is enough to do the trick. Someone once said, “writing is thinking.” That’s true, and drawing is thinking too. But when to do which? Here’s a conversation with my friend and learning expert Marcia Conner about exactly this question.
How to Make Toast
Object of play
You can use the Draw Toast exercise to introduce people to the concepts of visual thinking, working memory, mental models and/or systems thinking. This also works as a nice warm-up exercise to get people engaged with each other and thinking visually. Plus, it’s fun!
Number of players
Any number of people can play this game.
Duration: 10-15 minutes.
How to play
On paper or index cards, ask people to draw “How to make toast.”
After a couple of minutes, ask people to share their diagrams with each other and discuss the similarities and differences. Ask people to share any observations or insights they have about the various drawings. You are likely to hear comments about the relative simplicity or complexity of the drawings, whether they have people in them, how technical they are, how similar or different they are, and so on.
Depending on why you are doing the exercise you may want to point out the following:
- Note that although the drawings are all different, they are all fundamentally correct. There are many ways to visualize information and they all enrich understanding rather than being “right” or “wrong.”
- Although the drawings are different in content, they tend to be similar in structure. That is, most drawings of mental models tend to contain three to seven elements, connected by lines or arrows.
Strategy
The main point of this exercise is to demonstrate the power of visual thinking to represent information.
Visualizations of this kind tend to be easily understandable, although they are visually as rich and diverse as people. Pictures can be fundamentally correct even though they are quite different. There is no “one right type” of visualization.
When people visualize a mental model, they usually will include 5-7 elements, linked together by lines or arrows. The number of elements tends to correspond to the number of things people can hold in their working memory, also known as short-term memory (See The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two for more information).
This is also a nice warm-up exercise that is fun and gets people talking to each other.
There is an excellent TED talk by Tom Wujec which you may want to watch in preparation. It may also be useful to show to the group in sessions as a way to share insights after the exercise.
The Draw Toast exercise was created by Dave Gray
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https://youtu.be/cDA3_5982h8?feature=shared