http://www.kurzweilai.net/visual-strategies Accelerating Intelligence Sun, 19 May 2013 16:37:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/visual-strategies/comment-page-1#comment-30845 Gorden Russell Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:43:18 +0000 http://www.kurzweilai.net/?p=161912#comment-30845 Yeah, that really should be a law. We've all seen really terrible direction sheets. Yeah, that really should be a law. We’ve all seen really terrible direction sheets.

]]> http://www.kurzweilai.net/visual-strategies/comment-page-1#comment-30784 GatorALLin Tue, 04 Sep 2012 16:19:56 +0000 http://www.kurzweilai.net/?p=161912#comment-30784 I just spent a full day installing a new Genie electric garage door opener and wow the instructions horrible! They had colored bags for the different nuts/bolt sets, but on a color instruction sheet there were no uses of color to coordinate when to use them! There were 3 sometimes 4 different languages put together making it hard to follow for any language (imagine if they had just used a different color or flag next to each different language, or just put each language in a separate book). There was no good flow of diagrams and even a few that I later figured our were upside down for the task at hand. I agree that using images to tell a story or teach a point is critical. I work with computer programmers who often write great software programs, but have zero skills in graphic design, so the user interface can be horrible (and why you need both programmers and graphic artists). Sometimes the minds that make one thing so well are the exact opposite to do the other things....that being said both groups need to work together or at least understand the value that images and graphics do to direct users or an audience. A picture tells a 1,000 words... kinda leaves out the other point that there is not just 1 person in your audience, but many different types... I think our brains are better wired for pictures (you never saw a cave man running through the woods reading text or signs to avoid being eaten, so thousands of years of that and suddenly we spend most of our day reading text on a computer screen or looking at a graph that tells only one side of the story, yet a colored graph or 3d graph could tell all the stories at the same time!). I think it is important for scientists to understand that although you may be really good at one thing, it does NOT make you good at everything (hard for really smart people to understand sometimes). and it is often important to understand the value of something and at least making sure you get one guy on your team that can do what you are not good at. No matter how good and cool your data is, if you can't tell that story easily and effectively you can't get your story out or make the change your data needs to. That and every engineer should by law be forced to follow the instructions on what they make, then watch helplessly as another person is made to suffer doing it. If you don't actually make it in person or use your design in real life and test...and test and fail and then test again.... then your not really a designer or engineer, your a draftsman of good paper ideas and bad life designs. I just spent a full day installing a new Genie electric garage door opener and wow the instructions horrible! They had colored bags for the different nuts/bolt sets, but on a color instruction sheet there were no uses of color to coordinate when to use them! There were 3 sometimes 4 different languages put together making it hard to follow for any language (imagine if they had just used a different color or flag next to each different language, or just put each language in a separate book). There was no good flow of diagrams and even a few that I later figured our were upside down for the task at hand. I agree that using images to tell a story or teach a point is critical. I work with computer programmers who often write great software programs, but have zero skills in graphic design, so the user interface can be horrible (and why you need both programmers and graphic artists). Sometimes the minds that make one thing so well are the exact opposite to do the other things….that being said both groups need to work together or at least understand the value that images and graphics do to direct users or an audience. A picture tells a 1,000 words… kinda leaves out the other point that there is not just 1 person in your audience, but many different types… I think our brains are better wired for pictures (you never saw a cave man running through the woods reading text or signs to avoid being eaten, so thousands of years of that and suddenly we spend most of our day reading text on a computer screen or looking at a graph that tells only one side of the story, yet a colored graph or 3d graph could tell all the stories at the same time!). I think it is important for scientists to understand that although you may be really good at one thing, it does NOT make you good at everything (hard for really smart people to understand sometimes). and it is often important to understand the value of something and at least making sure you get one guy on your team that can do what you are not good at. No matter how good and cool your data is, if you can’t tell that story easily and effectively you can’t get your story out or make the change your data needs to. That and every engineer should by law be forced to follow the instructions on what they make, then watch helplessly as another person is made to suffer doing it. If you don’t actually make it in person or use your design in real life and test…and test and fail and then test again…. then your not really a designer or engineer, your a draftsman of good paper ideas and bad life designs.

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