Intention Guides Visual Perception
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.


“How has all your traveling affected you?” Vanda asked in our coaching meeting this Monday afternoon. She was aware of how extensively I’ve been moving around this year, just back from Asia, in Europe much of the Fall, and now heading to the East coast.
