Engaging Visuals - some samples
Harnessing Visuals for Better Learning and Engagement
Visuals can play a powerful role in learning and engaging communities.
Over the years, I have researched and designed hundreds of visuals for clients or myself including concept models, diagrams, views of data, process flows etc. [I designed, photographed and created everything on this site too].
Sometimes these have been used as part of a final vision for the future, or used as learning resources in courses and programs.
Often I have developed them as part of research when working on innovation projects or when working with subject-matter experts to understand their world of work.
Client: The City of Calgary
Visual: A Conceptual Process Flow showing the the sources of Calgary’s water, its flow through the City, and then return to the rivers. [note: this diagram was created during the construction of Calgary’s third wastewater treatment plant “Pine Creek’]
Representational Redescription
One powerful concept behind a good visual is that it is a representational redescription (or redescription) that allows a learner or audience to understand the same content in a different way.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith developed the idea that children (and adults) come to understand a subject or domain at first implicitly / tacitly - for example when learning math or piano.
Eventually, understanding becomes more explicitly accessible and can be directly thought about and shared with others.
Language or visual models can be created which make learning easier or integrated. For example, music notation can be shared with others and forms one powerful scaffold for learning.
“Representational Redescriptions”
“A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other. …
Particularly when it comes to matters of instruction - be it in an elementary school classroom or a management workshop - the potential for expressing the desired lesson in many compatible formats is crucial.”
Howard Gardner in “Changing Minds”
What are Engaging Visuals?
So, visuals are one form of redescription that helps learners enrich their understanding of a topic or help community members understand issues and engage in shaping the future.
To me, an engaging visual is well-researched and designed with the goal of engaging learners or community members together in some way (this applies to an audience member or audience as a whole).
It invites participation.
Although “engaging” is in the eye of the designer and learner, “Engaging” can include:
Supporting a learning process or the giving and receiving of feedback
Explaining a concept or process or concept model more clearly, more quickly
Spurring debate between those viewing the visual
Acting to clarify thinking about the world of work or a domain during research
…
“Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.”
Edward Tufte
In the end, an engaging visual is a mix (or visual confection as Tufte says) that includes compelling goals, deep structure, learning smarts, and visual smarts.
To illustrate, an example of visual smarts is the use of a grid to help design the layout of a visual - whether standalone or part of text.
I worked with one of Calgary’s water experts to develop this visual in support of a pilot on modular learning materials using reusable content chunks. The following example shows how a simple two-column grid helps clarify and focus content (in this case showing two examples of what a Pressure-Regulating Valve (PRV) is).
Some more engaging visuals…
Client: The Council of Presidents of the Public Universities, Colleges, and Institutes of Alberta
Visual: A Storytelling visual about how the Presidents and invited guests see e-learning in Alberta at the time of the project. Look at the top right of the chart. e-Learning green can be seen to fit institutional mission now and in the future - but if you look a little to the right, you can see the red saying a plan for e-learning does not exist and the Alberta government’s role is not clear either. Comparing the green and red of these points is surely worth a discussion (and it was in a workshop with all the Presidents and Guests).
From This
To This
From This
To This
Client: Suncor Energy
Visual: When employees become New Leaders at Suncor, an important part of the position is using the Enterprise Resource Planning software (SAP) to manage their area. Existing training for new leaders included a basic PowerPoint that was heavily text-based. Analyzing the situation led to a strategy of creating a six-page visual handout that employees could take away at the end of training. The visual handouts helped quickly convey key aspects of how Suncor’s SAP system worked and the tasks that new leaders were expected to perform with it.
Client: Personal
Visual: Part of a poster for a student-run colloquium on social media and learning.
Client: The City of Calgary, Water Services, Learning and Employee Development
Visual: A Process Flow for the instructional design process used by Learning and Employee Development. This map of ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation) was used to communicate with clients about the process for course or program design as well as the typical commitments of time and effort.
Clients Various: The City of Calgary, PennWest Energy, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT)
Visual: Sometimes a simple visual will communicate more quickly than several paragraphs of text.
Client: Bow Valley College
Visual: This concept model quickly showed the key aspects of Bow Valley’s vision for the redevelopment of their City Centre Campus. This model was presented to the Board and used to build support, after lengthy consultations, with faculty and staff. The brief business plan I drafted grew to a $135 million campus redevelopment and huge efficiencies in building use (through the hard work of Bow Valley leadership, faculty, staff and learners).
Client: A Personal Project
Visual: How do you convey years of solid research as simply, clearly, and quickly as possible? These two pages show a research project looking at how a group of students learned to share and analyze their own critical experiences. Donal, a bright spark, was my friend and colleague. The first page shows the research process . The second page shows the findings. The finding and description of the two inter-related spirals is a key aspect to keep in mind for groups involved in change processes.
Client: Personal Project
Visual: Competency-Based Education (CBE) is becoming popular in business, k-12 education and post-secondary education. The past president of the University of Calgary has said the most innovative new form of University education is that provided by Western Governors University - which uses Competency-Based Education to support student learning. My challenge was how to convey the learning theory roots of CBE as briefly as possible. Here are two pages showing one root of CBE - Bloom’s theory of “Mastery Learning” with its clearest description from 1968. The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) also used Bloom to help design their new learning model in the mid-1970s.
Client: Personal Project
Visual: Initial concept diagrams on learning in complex social-technical systems - based on work from my research sabbatical. My goal was to simply and clearly communicate two common ways of thinking about learning in these types of systems [please note the sources for some of these diagrams are not listed].
Client: Standing Stones Consulting Ltd. (my previous company)
Visual: Two versions of the same value chain. The Council of Presidents (COP) of Alberta’s post-secondary institutions hired Standing Stones to help them evaluate and then create a vision of e-learning business models. I had previously created a map of the e-learning value chain that we then used during the COP project to help them understand various business models through the value-chain or activities which added value for learners and the institutions.
With the value chain mapped out, we were able to more clearly show how different business models for e-Learning worked. Our final recommendation to the Council of Presidents was to consider creating a regional consortium in Alberta for all post-secondary institutions.
SAIT, using Alan’s e-Learning Value Chain (with permission) to structure their student services, went on to win the 2005 Award of Excellence & Innovation in Student Services from the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education.