Unit 6 Reading

Chapter 7:

As the previous chapter 5 and 6 discussed, understanding how our brain works and its influence to visualization system helps designers have more advantages in convincing and explaining clearly to the audience what the meaning of the design is. 

The process to remember things in our natural world is very simple. There are 3 steps that our brain often process to perceive, cognitive, memorize and retrieve things when we really see or observe things. First, we see thing, the thing what we see will be translated into impulse and transferred to short-term memory. And then it will be categorized and stored into Visual working memory. If we stop here, it means that we just observing the thing and temporarily stored that memory somewhere in our head. If we want to retrieve what we saw yesterday, the long-term memory storage will help us to remember things through what are permanently stored in our head for a long time ago. In the process of retrieving data from long-term memory, our brain will compare the figurative patterns of what we see to the figurative pattern in long-term memory to find a match, because brain can’t use words to “communicate” its working memory storages. On the other hands, that data will be retrieve based on object’s features and specific details structurally from long-term memory. This process is similar to computer memory process.

This section reminds me about the video games I played on PlayStation console. It includes one disc reader, controllers, are memory card (64 or 128Kb capacities). On an adventure game, it will be a long way for you to finish a game. So you have to save that event as a thumbnail (short-term memory) into a memory card for next time playing. The memory card (storage) is considered as our brain; it couldn’t memorize much things and events. And disc reader will retrieve data from disc (long-term memory) to access the event that saved before.

Related to memory, how do we recognize things that we observed before? I infer into 3 steps after reading the book:

Memorize object’s details > Store details in structure > Converge and arrange details which related to each other

At the bottom, “visualization is not something that happens on a page or on a screen; it happens in the mind”. This quote of Robert Spence seems to press the importance of visualization to the designer.

Profile 5:

Cairo had an interview with Jan Schwochow, a German professional infographic designer, who worked for many famous magazines such as STERN,MAX, Die ZEIT, The New York Times, and GEO.

First of all, Jan’s thought in his career is infographics has to be accurate regardless they are statistic charts, maps or diagrams.

He told the process he was doing project about Berlin Wall. Although there are a lot of published infographic about Berlin Wall, but they are all incorrect. Therefore, Jan researched by approaching to Berlin Wall in real and collect books, photos or some correct current information related to Berlin Wall. And the result is that infographic is 2 meters wide placed on the table of a museum. Although it looks simple but on the illustrator file, there are a lot of Berlin wall details. In my opinion, it looks like a part of google map.

He said he had fun when pursuing his own interest that his infographic is dense with a lot of interesting content and details. He always tries to update the information for his graphic as possible with trusted resources.

  
Links:
http://camplab.psych.yale.edu/articles/PDFs%20for%20Website/Woodman2006_VisualCognition.pdf

Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details

Stages of Memory - Encoding Storage and Retrieval

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