Visual Thinking for Design

Colin Ware

jul 2010 · Elsevier

Acerca de este libro electrónico

Visual Thinking brings the science of perception to the art of design. Designers increasingly need to present information in ways that aid their audience’s thinking process. Fortunately, results from the relatively new science of human visual perception provide valuable guidance.

In this book, Colin Ware takes what we now know about perception, cognition, and attention and transforms it into concrete advice that designers can directly apply. He demonstrates how designs can be considered as tools for cognition – extensions of the viewer’s brain in much the same way that a hammer is an extension of the user’s hand. The book includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams.

Experienced professional designers and students alike will learn how to maximize the power of the information tools they design for the people who use them.

• Presents visual thinking as a complex process that can be supported in every stage using specific design techniques
• Provides practical, task-oriented information for designers and software developers charged with design responsibilities
• Includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams
• Steeped in the principles of “active vision, which views graphic designs as cognitive tools

Calificaciones y opiniones

This is a great book for designers who aspire to support their work on a more scientific basis (in a broad sense), not only on aesthetic grounds. Yes, it is not a light reading, full of flashy and trendy pictures and little text, such as we may be used to find on most design literature. You need to use your school background on the nervous system and the brain to relate the neurobiological processes described, which are slowly becoming understood. Nevertheless the book is clear and precise enough to guide the reader through a series of issues, some of them had been approached before, for example by Rudolf Arnheim (who related visual perception in an artistic context with psychology) yet find much more solid and scientific arguments. The author takes us through a step by step complexity of physiological phenomena, that builds an iterative route of a growing complexity. Colin Ware now helps to relate visual perception to everyday cognitive processes and thus have a knowledge that can be applied on much more ample grounds. As a university teacher of design and education this book has been a great support for my design research course. The knowledge that is brought together in the book can serve as part of a conceptual framework for information design, data visualization, interface design, etc.

Acerca del autor

Colin Ware is the world’s leading authority on the perceptual principles underlying the effective design of information displays. He combines interests in both basic and applied visualization research and he has advanced degrees in both computer science (MMath, Waterloo) and in the psychology of perception (PhD,Toronto). He has published over 160 articles in scientific and technical journals and at leading conferences. Many of these articles relate to the use of color, texture, motion and 3D displays in information visualization. His approach is always to combine theory with practice and his publications range from rigorously scientific contributions to the Journal of Physiology and Vision Research to applications oriented articles in ACM Transactions on Graphics and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Fledermaus, the leading visualization software used in oceanography, originated in software developed by him and his graduate students.