Design of a visual thinking environment
Dick spoke on his thoughts for the potential of visual representation as a tool to surface understanding in IS design and more generally. Visual representation employed to facilitate a reflexive understanding of an individual's situatedness. Visualisation may become then another avenue to understanding, through the act of drawing - generative of thinking through - a person creates their own aide for holding firm a constellation of ideas, feelings and emotion which might otherwise remain as disconnected sense; isolated, unrelated, unconnected.
But what of embodiment or movement? Why should we privilege sight and its attendant occularcentrism?
Sight is undervalued! What is privileged is cognition, a particular calculative way of thought. It's not vision which is privileged, rather it is abstraction which is privileged. But of course the slides we use are abstractions; the little figure, the fields. The researcher is forever dealing with these recursive paradoxes...
