"It's time to embrace visual literacy"
Reading Surface magazine's Annual Avant Guardian Issue this afternoon, I came across to this statement by Toshiko Mori (architect and chair, department of architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design) that I really like.
"It's time to embrace visual literacy," she said.
Speaking of visual design, Primezero English to Chinese dictionary's user-interface is pretty neat (re-discovered via Roddy's site; actually heard from them via Living in China last year). I have never thought of a dictionary (basically a type of search engine) can look like this (user can click on the huge image on the left hand side to learn the Chinese words that the image represents).
I am not sure about the accuracy of its search results as I haven't used enough of it yet. But some functions are quite neat: for any words that you lookup in the dictionary, the system provides several links alongside the lookup results that allow you to google traditional, simplified or pinyin version of any Chinese word(s); or do an image search on Google or Yahoo. I never thought of using Google these ways before but really like the related image search idea.
Amazon's A9 search engine have such implementation too; but I'm more interested in seeing how individual websites make use of information found in major search engines to enrich their sites and find "new" knowledge.
Anyway, I want to make visual literacy one of my learning goals for 2005. Actually, I have been wanting to learn more about how to display (represent) large chunks of information in friendlier visual ways since last year this time given the ever-growing information overload problem I face everyday. I think this may belong to the domain of information architecture and human-computer interaction. But so much thoughts and no action so far. Duh. Really need to find some starting points for learning.
"It's time to embrace visual literacy," she said.
"We judge children on their math and verbal skills, but our culture is so visual that people really get their information from images. The entire education system should be revamped to emphasize visual educations; from kindergarten to college. You can learn the word "spoon" but to look at a spoon communicates so much more and more directly. By looking at the spoon we can read into history, the history of eating, utensils, materials, civilization, culture, habits. Visual information can be easily absorbed, more easily assimilated than rote learning of facts and figures, to quantify through visual means."
Speaking of visual design, Primezero English to Chinese dictionary's user-interface is pretty neat (re-discovered via Roddy's site; actually heard from them via Living in China last year). I have never thought of a dictionary (basically a type of search engine) can look like this (user can click on the huge image on the left hand side to learn the Chinese words that the image represents).
I am not sure about the accuracy of its search results as I haven't used enough of it yet. But some functions are quite neat: for any words that you lookup in the dictionary, the system provides several links alongside the lookup results that allow you to google traditional, simplified or pinyin version of any Chinese word(s); or do an image search on Google or Yahoo. I never thought of using Google these ways before but really like the related image search idea.
Amazon's A9 search engine have such implementation too; but I'm more interested in seeing how individual websites make use of information found in major search engines to enrich their sites and find "new" knowledge.
Anyway, I want to make visual literacy one of my learning goals for 2005. Actually, I have been wanting to learn more about how to display (represent) large chunks of information in friendlier visual ways since last year this time given the ever-growing information overload problem I face everyday. I think this may belong to the domain of information architecture and human-computer interaction. But so much thoughts and no action so far. Duh. Really need to find some starting points for learning.
