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The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.
It’s hard to describe it in words.
So, I use pictures.
Looks like a zit.
(In all seriousness, this is a nice visualization.)
Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking by Alex F. Osborn, 1953
Ellen Lupton in Print magazine:
One of the most influential design educators of the 20th century didn’t teach in an art school. Alex F. Osborn was a Madison Avenue advertising man who invented a collaborative thinking technique called “brainstorming” Today, pretty much anyone involved in creative practice knows how to brainstorm: pose a question and create a big, uncensored list of ideas.
Brainstorming, however is just one of many ideas that Osborn considered in his bestselling 1952 book, Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. Another Osborn technique is known as “Manipulative Verbs,” an exercise that’s used to refine a core idea and then create variations on it. Here’s how: starting with an initial concept, modify your idea by applying different verbs to it, such as magnify, minify, rearrange, alter, modify, substitute, reverse, and combine.
via @DrewDernavich
Mieder (1990) has traced the origin of the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” to Fred Barnard, an advertising manager in the early 1920s. Barnard used these words as a headline when selling advertising in trams. He originally claimed that it was a Japanese proverb, then in a later advertisement that it was Chinese - a literal Chinese translation in his copy lent authenticity. Some dictionaries of quotations now accept Barnard’s claim of Chinese origin at face value, and this idea of ancient Chinese wisdom has inspired researchers who publish papers claiming that pictures are or are not worth a thousand words.



David Hockney on modern vs. medieval perspective, interviewed by Tom Hodgkinson in The Idler #43
I’ll show you something. This is about the medieval world and the difference. I did this diagram twenty years ago. In pictures, we know: that’s the world, that’s the horizon, that’s the vanishing point. The viewer is here, and the viewer is an immobile point. And that, theoretically, is at infinity. If the infinity is God, this and this will never meet. If this moves, then this moves. That’s perspective as we know it. But in the medieval world, perspective is more often the reverse, meaning you could see both sides of the altar. The altar would be like that, not like that. OK, if you see both sides, this means you’re in movement. You’ve moved. That means infinity is everywhere; God is everywhere, including within you.
I could listen to/read Hockney all frickin’ day.
Filed under: David Hockney, perspective
Steve draws the story of the Minerals Management Service.
This series might be the best thing on television right now.
“Beat Map” of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” by Owen Silverwood
Silverwood photographs the light trails of drumsticks playing classic songs.
via Public School via my friend Christy Carroll
On one side of Eno’s scale diagram, he writes “control”; on the other “surrender”. “We’ve tended to dignify the controlling end of the spectrum,” he says. “We have Nobel prizes for that end.” His idea is that control is what we generally believe the greats – Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, Wagner – were about. Such people, the argument goes, controlled their chosen fields, working in isolation, never needing any creative input from others. As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it’s come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius. “We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.”
He pauses, then asks: “I don’t know if you’ve ever read much about the history of shipbuilding?” Not a word. “Old wooden ships had to be constantly caulked up because they leaked. When technology improved, and they could make stiffer ships because of a different way of holding boards together, they broke up. So they went back to making ships that didn’t fit together properly, ships that had flexion. The best vessels surrendered: they allowed themselves to be moved by the circumstances.
“Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.” Eno considers all his recent art to be a rebuttal to this attitude. “I want to rethink surrender as an active verb,” he says. “It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.”
The folks at Duarte Design use sticky notes spread out over eight whiteboards to lay out their presentations.
We had lots of existing slides that we wanted to use as part of the story. So, instead of sketching them out, we printed them out. We discovered something cool, which we pass on to you for free: If you print out your slides from PowerPoint in 9-up, landscape handout mode, they are the same size as small sticky notes!
Filed under: post-it notes, lay it all out where you can look at it
In this 1772 letter, Ben Franklin lays out how his invention, the pro/con list, works:
…my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly.
And tho’ the Weight of Reasons cannot be taken with the Precision of Algebraic Quantities, yet when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less likely to take a rash Step; and in fact I have found great Advantage from this kind of Equation, in what may be called Moral or Prudential Algebra.
Dave Gray mentioned this in our SXSW Visual Note-Taking panel, but I completely forgot until listening to the podcast.
SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking on Vimeo
Dan Roam (Author of “The Back of the Napkin”) gives a complete overview of the history and definition of visual thinking, and a bonus of the history of the human species in 5 minutes.

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