Books & People

back To Overview of Books & People

Books, People

Archives

Book Reviews

 

Book Review: Visual Thinking for Design

Book | Author | Review

By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, SAP User Experience – 12/03/2008

This review takes a personal look at Colin Ware's book Visual Thinking for Design.

 

Book

Cover of Visual Thinking: For Design     

Colin Ware
Visual Thinking: For Design
Morgan Kaufmann, 2008
ISBN-10: 0123708966, ISBN-13: 978-0123708960

Design, Visualization

 

Author

Photo of Colin WareColin Ware is the director of the Data Visualization Research Lab at the University of New Hampshire, where he specializes in advanced data visualization and the application of visualization in oceanography. He has advanced degrees in both computer science and in the psychology of perception. Ware has published numerous articles in scientific and technical journals and at conferences. He is the author of Information Visualization: Perception for Design.
(From book cover, adapted)

Homepage: ccom.unh.edu/vislab/CWBio.html

 

 

Review

Introduction: What Is the Book About and at Whom Is It Directed?

Colin Ware conceived his new book, Visual Thinking: For Design, as "an introduction to what the burgeoning science of perception can tell us about visual design" and thus to help "make us better designers." So, let's first find out what the science of perception can contribute to design.

Active Vision and Visual Thinking

Ware wrote his book because of the current "revolution in our understanding of human perception that goes under the name active vision," which "allows us to think about graphic design issues from a new and powerful perspective." According to Ware, "we can now begin to develop a science of graphic design based on a scientific understanding of visual attention and pattern perception." The concept of active vision sees perception as a dynamic process: In contrast to the old view of having "rich images of the world in our heads built up from the information coming through the eyes, (...) we have only the illusion of seeing the world in detail – the brain grabs just those fragments that are needed to execute the current mental activity." (...) "Our impression of a rich detailed world comes from the fact that we have the capability to extract anything we want at any moment through a movement of the eye that is literally faster than thought. This is automatic and so quick that we are unaware of doing it, giving us the illusion that we see stable detailed reality everywhere." An important prerequisite for creating the illusion of a stable environment is that the one tenth of a second needed for eye-movement is short enough for neuron-based processing that it seems instantaneous.

According to Ware, there is a good reason why the brain creates this illusion instead of simply storing images of the world: "There is a very general lesson here about seeing and cognition. The brain, like all biological systems, has become optimized over millennia of evolution. Brains have a very high energy consumption and must be kept as small as possible, or our heads would topple us over: Keeping a copy of the world in our brains would be a huge waste of cognitive resources and completely unnecessary. It is much more efficient to have rapid access to the actual world – to see only what we attend to and only attend to what we need – for the task at hand."

But how can this illusion be kept alive over time? Two concepts have to be considered here: visual thinking and the cognitive thread. Ware explains: "Visual thinking consists of a series of acts of attention, driving eye movements and tuning our pattern-finding circuits. These actions are called visual queries, und understanding how visual queries work can make us better designers." Attention plays a critical role in visual thinking: "Visual thinking is a process that has the allocation of attention at its very essence. (...) Seeing is all about attention." As Ware states elsewhere: "Exactly how we get the task-relevant information and construct meaning from it is a central focus of this book."

Ware emphasizes that this new "active vision" view requires a revision of how we define visual consciousness: "It is more accurate to say that we are conscious of the field of information to which we have rapid access rather than that we are immediately conscious of the world." Furthermore, Ware introduces the cognitive thread and defines it as "the sequence of concepts that are held actively in visual and verbal working memories, together with the links between them, where those working memories can roughly be regarded as processes of attention." Thus, the cognitive thread helps humans to establish a stable environment over time.

For Ware, "active vision has profound implications for design," which is the subject of this book. As he continues: "It is a book about how we think visually and what that understanding can tell us about how to design visual images. Understanding active vision tells us which colors and shapes will stand out clearly, how to organize space, and when we should use images instead of words to convey an idea."

Purpose and Audience of the Book

As an introduction to the contribution of the science of perception has made to visual design, Ware's book "is intended for anyone who does design in a visual medium and it should be of special interest to anyone who does graphic design for the Internet or who designs information graphics of one sort or the other." I will return to the question of how useful this book is for the target audience later.

Overview

In nine chapters, the book traverses from the simple to the complex, thereby introducing "the key elements of the apparatus of vision and how each element functions" (...) "from the eye and the act and machinery of seeing to the brain and the processes of generating meaning from what is seen." On this journey through the human visual system and brain, readers get in contact with several levels of visual features, visual patterns, objects, and finally scenes. They learn the differences between bottom-up and top-down processing, with attention as a central top-down control mechanism. At the lowest level, the book discusses features and visual search and looks at popout effects. Then two-dimensional space comes in, with textures, patterns, and contours. Next, Ware turns to the perception of color, where he gives special consideration to Hering's opponent color theory. Then he discusses the different mechanisms of depth perception, assigning surprisingly little importance to "real" 3D vision. These mechanisms lead, among others, to the concept of the "where" channels, which allow us to locate objects in visual space. These channels are complemented by the "what" channels, which add meaning to located objects. Finally, scene perception puts objects into a situational context.

Then Ware turns to the higher levels of processing: He discusses visual and verbal working memory, seen as attentional processes, as well as long-term memory and the priming effect, which causes the activation of associated concepts in long-term memory. Transcending the actual moment and adding the time dimension, Ware investigates visual and verbal thinking, the linking of words and images, as well as visual narratives or stories which consist of images instead of words. These narratives capture the cognitive thread, which I have already defined above. Toward the end of his tour, Ware turns to mental imagery, sketching, and its impact for design, and to the development of visual skills. Here he touches on the topic of a book I have previously reviewed, namely Bill Buxton's book Sketching User Experiences. In the final chapter, Ware reviews the concepts covered in his book, presented as a list of 11 items. The twelfth item in the list goes beyond the scope of the book and addresses how the mind controls itself. I will return to this question further down. Finally, Ware extracts four implications for design from his review and discusses these in the remainder of the book: How to design to (1) support pattern finding, to (2) optimize the cognitive process, to (3) support learning and take the economics of cognition into account, and to (4) take attention and the cognitive thread into consideration. The book closes with the question "What's next?" and once more Ware emphasizes the importance of cognitive tools and their design, since he believes most people live in an increasingly artificial, designed world today.

I would like to add that most of the chapters end with a conclusion and occasionally also include implications for design. Where appropriate, design lessons are also interspersed into the text. The book boasts colored figures, and perhaps the following side-note is of interest: Ware decided to apply active vision-based principles to the design of the book, in particular, the principle that related text and images should be in close proximity. He admits that this goal was not easy to achieve in today's publishing practices.

Reading Suggestion

Of course, the natural way of reading a book is to read it from cover to cover. With this book, however, it might be helpful to take a slightly different approach: Reading the review after the introductory preface facilitates your understanding of the core of the book. Thereafter, I would recommend reading the chapters in chronological order because of the natural progression of the topics.

Some Remarks

From Selfridge's Pandemonium to Active Vision and the Question of Control

The active vision model presented by Ware reminds me of the Pandemonium model of vision that Oliver Selfridge published as early as in 1959. The Pandemonium model involves bottom-up processing and consists of lower layers of so-called demons transmitting the neural signals that originate in the retina to higher levels for processing. Depending on the strength of the signal, an image demon shouts and this is transmitted through several layers of demons until it reaches a decision demon who decides, based on the volume of the shout, what the eye sees (see figure 1 below).

Selfridge's pandemonium

Figure 1: Pandemonium (from Lindsay & Norman, 1977)

While the old Pandemonium model is much more primitive than the new active vision model, it does offer an idea of what the latter is about, namely that the neural signal is transmitted in a bottom-up manner through layers of feature detectors that react to patterns of increasing complexity until eventually the object that is projected onto the retina is assigned a meaning. What is missing in this early model is the top-down attentional impact of higher processing stages on their lower equivalents.

Consciousness Illusion and Distributed Cognition

In both models, there is no homunculus or executive to control the situation. In item 12 of his review of the book, Ware addresses this issue by asking: "How does the mind control itself?" He concludes that there is no control center of the mind: Patterns of neural activation result in cascades of firing patterns, which interact with other cascades; this causes a chain reaction of neural activity, which he calls the "cognitive thread" – and that's it!

Personally, I have a problem accepting this process as an explanation of what others call "consciousness" or even "personality." Other authors are, however, well in line with this view. In his essay Solving the "real" mysteries of visual perception: The world as an outside memory, Kevin O'Regan addresses the nature of the so-called "consciousness illusion" and asks how we have subjectively the belief we perceive a detailed impression of the world, while evidence shows that we pick up very little information: O'Regan already points to the solution – "just-in-time processing." He believes (as cited by Ware)"the world is its own memory – we see very little at any given instant, but we can sample any part of our visual environment so rapidly with swift eye movements that we think we have it all at once in our consciousness experience."

While the brain already consists of many independent modules that can process in parallel and in a distributed manner, the term "distributed cognition" can be extended to cover the use of external aids. According to Norman, "the power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained" (cited by Ware).

Is It Really a Book for Designers?

With his book, Visual Thinking for Design, Ware addresses designers of various directions, which begs the question: "Is this really a book for designers?" My simple answer is: "Yes and no." While my basic answer is "yes," here are a few of my reservations:

Does that mean that the book is of no use for designers? Not at all – if you change your focus: It is a book for designers who are interested in the scientific explanations and justifications for what their work. And the greater the knowledge offered by science, the more useful it will be to designers. In this sense, the book actually merits a much wider audience than Ware has originally intended, including user interface designers, who are the target audience of this review.

Understandability

Finally, you might ask whether the book considers physiology at the right level of detail. Ware provides some information on physiology, but not too much. In my opinion, the book could have even been less detailed in this respect, because some physiology confuses me even more than none. Other readers may disagree with me and would prefer to have found more detailed information about physiology in the book. However, achieving the right balance is a difficult task for an author: If you include more physiology, it may become unclear where you should stop. Moreover, such detailed information can distract readers from the information that focuses on processing, which transports the main message of the book. With respect to the target audience of this book, which typically knows little about the physiology of the brain, I would conclude that Ware struck a good balance.

Room for Improvement

In a second edition of the book, I would like a few things to be improved. First, I would like to find a list of references in the appendices. It is difficult to believe this could have been omitted from the first edition, particularly in a book with such a scientific slant. Second, I would like to see an index of the design lessons in the appendices. This is, as I wrote above, a minimum requirement to make the book more useful for designers. Finally, the book has quite a few typos, the number of which should be reduced in a future edition (there is, however, no book without typos).

Conclusions

I have already asked the question of whether this is a book for designers – Ware's target audience – and came to the conclusion "yes and no." "No" because this is not a practical guidebook that can be easily applied to the day-to-day world of design. "Yes" because it is an introductory textbook that explains the science that underpins visual design and demonstrates how this knowledge can guide designers. In this role, the book is not only useful for visual designers, Web designers, and designers of information graphics – that is, the intended audience – but also for a much larger audience. I would recommend it to everyone who works in the HCI and UI design field, as well as to students of psychology, to name just a few possible groups hat might find this book interesting and useful.

 

Afterthought

Cover of Cognition and the Visual ArtsCognitive psychologist Robert Solso published a related book, Cognition and the Visual Arts, in 1994 that I would like to mention in this context. Solso, who authored several books, among others the well-received textbook, Cognitive Psychology, died in 2005, meaning that, regrettably, there will be no update of this book. He described his book as follows: "This book is about the way the eye and the mind see and understand visual art." But for Solso the connection between art (and science) and the mind is more intricate: "Science and art are products of the mind; they are of the mind and yet they are also the mind." And he adds: "Art is more than paint smeared on a canvas; it is a glass in which the human mind is reflected." Thus, whenever the eye and the mind interpret a work of art, they are connected to the mind of the person who has produced it.

Based on the classic view of cognition and perception from the 1980s and 1990s, and starting with the physiological background to vision and cognition, Solso explores a number of aspects of visual perception, such as figure and form, the role of context effects, the role of eye movements, the use of perspective, canonic representations, and even connectionist's network models of vision. Throughout the book, he demonstrates how these aspects have been exploited in contemporary and historic works of art, presenting and discussing numerous examples.

 

References

 

top top