1/27/2005
   slide 28
Visual Thinking and Creativity
•Visual thinking key to creativity in many fields
–Kekule's vision of  the structure of the benzine ring, basis of all organic chemistry
–Elias Howe's nightmare of cannibals attacking, whose spears happened to have holes in their heads à sewing machine.
–Einstein's “train ride on a beam of light” remade the whole of physics and helped remake the whole of science.
•Who knows what more universal and multidisciplinary visual digital literacy will bring?
 Most disciplines, students create only in grad school

pedagogy of visually based classes has traditionally been different. In many academic subjects-esp early on, one learns things and proves that one learned them. (History, math, etc.) Sometimes one gets to comment on others’ creativity, as in literary criticism, but being creative in a field is usually reserved for advanced courses—graduate school in fact. Message is often that only the gifted or super smart can be creative in an areas, such as, say math or engineering or history or biology… research is something u-grads are often not exposed to.

But in visual design (broadly inclusive) one is creative from day 1. This is partially because you need to experiment to learn—much cannot be taught directly—sort of like riding a bike. Also, nature of fields different. Thus involving visual thinking in other fields is not only to bring in a new methodology or avenue of communication, but to actually bring in an unknown, a way of thinking that cannot be pinned down and that requires a leap of faith in its execution that text or math often does not. (esp at early levels).

Nature of field: not so cumulative. A novice could make something as beautiful as a expert. Probably not consistently, but even so—not like math where there’s virtually no chance that you will prove an interesting theorem as a freshman, or, in fact, do anything that hasn’t already been done. This is not the case as far as visual design goes. On the other hand, much more subjective—someone may say it’s great and another qualified person that it isn’t. Not like a math problem that is right or wrong and can be graded by a machine. You cant grade any visual art assignment by machine (at least not yet).


Art and design—students create from day 1. In some ways CS more like studio class then many humanities courses are (tell RISD story: comment on something others have done or make your own work)

Can’t be directly taught, have to do it to learn it—like riding bike.

Who knows what bringing the visual digital literacy into other fields will do?
Possible that bringing more visual thinking and communication, via computer graphics, into more disciplines, will spur new creative thoughts.