Vizualization on Visual Innovation at VizThink 2009

I attended a session here at the Viz Think conference yesterday, facilitated by Eileen Clegg and O'Reilly's own Robert Schanafelt. The purpose was to collaboratively identify trends in visual innovation, and then, well, put them together in a visual way that helped display the collaboration in a functional and informative way.

Participants were first asked to identify moments of visual innovation on small sticky notes first, from the cave paintings to the proliferation of the iPhone, and then annotate those events on larger notes that would be used independently. This allowed the specific events to be organized in a timeline, while allowing the trends to emerge independently of chronology. Thus ideas across the board could be focused with a visual end-result. Given that the discussion was about innovation in visualization, the experience became noticeably meta.

The system employed in the session allows a safe space for people to come up with ideas in a collaborative way, fostering creativity, and allowing them to be organized in more than the obvious ways. It also allows for an end result that can be used as a jumping off point for future discussions and their iterations. In the hallway here at the conference, there's a mural that Clegg created which traces the evolution of culture and technology from 1925 to present, from the perspective of the life of computer pioneer Doug Engelbart.