Stuart Silverstone, graphics scout extraordinaire and author of Snippets, a digital news service of clips he provides, sent me a link to a wonderful collection of infographics. Some are copyrighted but many are under Creative Commons licenses. Thanks to Francesco Mugnai for assembling these. I especially love this one, called “Inside Dylan’s Brain.”
Click here to see the whole collection.
Merc Martinelli—CEO of a new startup, Verdafero, focusing on green business.—sent me a link to an incredible website that has collected 138 illustrations of sustainability concepts. See Computing for Sustainability’s Visualizing Sustainability, a full panorama from simple to complex, mapping onto every conceivable base map. Here is a sample; visit the website for lots more.
I’ve contended for a long time that a sustainability mindset requires systems thinking, and that systems thinking requires visual thinking—even if the display is just between your ears. You can’t understand relationships if you don’t have some display structure to illustrate the elements that are in relationship. This collection is a great testimonial to that assumption.
Colin Ware provided the keynote at this year’s VizThink conference in San Jose and a follow-up workshop on “How Do Patterns Structure Visual Thinking.” He’s a researcher from the University of New Hampshire and quite academic, but in his talk I found validation for a growing consensus that intention is the key player in perception.
He began with an inquiry into the primary uses of visual language. I took a lot of notes, which you can read here if you click to magnify. But then he went to the findings from his research.
Check out The Grove blog for a post about the tuned up Virtual Learning Center we’ve created in Second Life. Here’s a picture to whet your appetite. It has galleries that cover the full body of The Grove’s work, all accessible by teleport maps from the pier that you land on when you click this SLURL.
