The document explores visual thinking as a potent strategy for problem-solving and creativity across various fields, emphasizing the role of imagery and mental operations in thought processes. It highlights the importance of flexibility in thinking, the integration of visual and verbal reasoning, and the active engagement of imagination and drawing in discovering solutions. Examples from notable figures illustrate how visual thinking has led to significant scientific advancements and creative innovations.

1. Visual Thinking
April 2013 Spring KMD Introduction
to Media Design
Adrian David Cheok

2. What is Thinking?
• Thinking:
– Pervasive - most of waking and sleeping time
– Physiologist - muscle tone plays important part in
mental functioning
– Neurologist - entire nervous system (not just
brain) is involved in thinking
– Thoughts are directed by emotions and
motivations
– Vitality of your thinking is intimately related to the
state of your physical health

3. Vehicles of Thought
• Talk to yourself, with inner speech
• Mentally pictured an image
• Draw a diagram
• These are “Vehicle of Thoughts”
• A vehicle is a representation of thought - a
result of thought

4. Operation
• Remove extraneous details
• Simplify essential elements
• Reformulated essential elements
• We think by performing a number of active
mental operations

5. Levels
• Operations are usually chosen and performed
below the level of consciousness
• Levels: some of our thinking occurs
above, and most below, the level of
consciousness

6. Three conditions
• Three conditions that promote effective
thinking:
• Challenge (Deeply desire to change)
• Information
• Flexibility

7. Flexibility
1. Easy access to subconscious as well as conscious
levels of thinking (think when you take a walk, in
the shower, sleep, etc.)
2. The flexible visual thinker should be proficient in
a variety of mental operations and be able to
move freely from one operation to another
(analysis, synthesis, induction, deductive)
3. Free choice of vehicles, move flexible from one
thinking vehicle to another
(language, mathematics, sensory
images, feelings)

8. Visual Thinking for Creativity

9. • Thinking Visually: A
Strategy Manual for
Problem Solving
• By Robert McKim
• Published by Dale
Seymour Publications,
1980
• ISBN 0866514236,
9780866514231

10. Quick Poll
• Are you from visual profession background?
(e.g. design, architecture, mechanical
engineering, artist)
• Are you from non-visual professional
background?

11. Thinking Visually
• Usefulness to everyone
• Designers and engineers
• Potent utility for problem solvers in fields such
as law, psychology, business, or education,
where thinking is often unduly constrained by
the limits of language.

12. See/Imagine/Draw
• Visual thinking carried on by three kinds of
visual imagery
– images we see (not the things themselves we are
seeing);
– images we imagine (and dream);
– images we draw
• Visual thinkers use all three kinds of imagery:
interactive imagery

13. Interactive Imagery
• Visual thinking is
experienced to the fullest
when seeing, imagining,
and drawing merge into
active interplay
– See a problem from several
angles
– Imagine alternate solutions
– Draw sketches
– Cycle between perceptual,
inner, and graphic images
until the problem is solved.

14. Seeing and Thinking
• Visual thinking is obviously central to
architecture, design, and visual arts. But it is
important to other disciplines such as science,
technology, management, business.

15. Seeing and Thinking
• Discoveries in the direct context of seeing
– Sir Alexander Fleming turned a laboratory accident
into the discovery of penicillin by his thinking about
what he observed.
– Fleming noticed in a routine laboratory experiment
that some plate cultures of staphylococci had
apparently become contaminated and died.
– This observation had most likely been made by others
who knew that some bacteria can interfere with the
growth of others, but Fleming saw it in a way that
eventually led to the discovery of penicillin.

16. Seeing and Thinking
• Nobel laureate James D.
Watson (1968) also
attributes his discovery of
the construction of the
DNA molecule to the use of
a three-dimensional
physical model.

17. Imagining and Thinking
• Nikola Tesla, the technological genius whose list of
inventions includes the fluorescent light and the A-C
generator, ‘could project before his eyes a picture,
complete in every detail, of every part of the machine.
These pictures were more vivid than any blueprint.’
• Tesla’s inner imagery was so like perceptual imagery
that he was able to build his complex inventions
without drawings.
• Further, he claimed to be able to test his devices in his
mind’s eye ‘by having them run for weeks – after which
time he would examine them thoroughly for wear.

18. Imagining and Thinking
• Chemist Kekule came upon one of the most
important discoveries of organic chemistry, the
structure of the benzene ring in a dream.
– "I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. .. long rows
sometimes more closely fitted together all twining
and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was
that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail,
and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if
by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I
spent the rest of the night in working out the
consequences of the hypothesis.”

19. Drawing and Thinking
• Drawing and thinking are simultaneous and an
organic extension of the mental process.
• Drawing: helps bring vague inner images into
focus, record of advancing thought stream,
memory

20. Idea-sketches from notebook of John
Houbolt
• Conceived lunar landing
– Rough
– Graphic "talking to oneself”
• Graphic ideation precedes
graphic communication,
helps develop visual ideas

21. Left and Right
• Right hemisphere of brain serves as
neurological center for feeling and imagining
• Left hemisphere serves as center for verbal
reasoning and mathematical description

22. Dominant Eye
• Stretch your arm out directly in front of you.
With both eyes open point to a distant object
• Close your left eye. If your finger continues to
point to the object, the eye you are looking
through, your right eye, is dominant.
• If your finger appears to shift away from the
object your left eye is dominant

24. Hemispheric Preferences
• If you saw a duck, exhibiting left-hemisphere
preference
• Rabbit, you preferred to process the image
initially with your right hemisphere.
• Brain can only process one meaning at a
time, hemispheric preferences made the first
choice
• You can learn to move your thinking from one
hemisphere to another at will. Train your
thinking to be ambidextrous.

25. Visual Dance Video
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFV6h6M
XQkI&feature=related
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-
yhtXAzYwc&NR=1

26. Bridges Within
• Maslow (pioneer in humanistic psychology):
– Internal transfer from left to right vital to healthy
thinking
– Most creative thinkers, are those who achieved
psychological integration.
– “A truly integrated person can be both secondary
and primary; both mature and childish. He can
regress and then come back to reality, becoming
more controlled and critical in his responses.”,
Maslow, A. “Emotional Blocks to Creativity”

27. Visual Thinking
• McKim:
– “Ambidextrous thinkers, who are capable of
drawing on their primary creativity, necessarily
make the unconscious, conscious”
– “creative thinkers are ambidextrous: they use the
… right brain as well as the left. Learning to think
visually is vital to this integrated kind of mental
activity”

28. Exercise in Interactive Imagery
• You have three openings: a square, a triangle and a circle. The
length of the base of the triangle equals the height of the triangle
equals the length of the side of the square equals the diameter of
the circle.
• Describe or draw the shape of a single solid figure that will fit
snugly through all three of these openings. It should fit exactly, that
is, it could serve to plug up any one of the three holes.

29. Exercise in Interactive Imagery
• See a solution by cutting and trying with
cardboard
• Close your eyes and imagine solution
• Make sketches
• (alternate)

31. Experience using your eyes and mind
together
• In the row of five cards there is only one card
correctly printed, there are mistakes in the
other four. How quickly can you find the
mistakes?
1 2 3 4 5

32. Drawing and Thinking
• Most visual thinkers clarify and develop their
thinking with sketches.
• Watson in discovery of DNA structure:
– "It came while I was drawing the fused rings of
adenine on paper."

33. Drawing and Thinking
• Some problems are most
easily solved by graphical
means
• With one continuous line
that does not retrace itself,
draw the pattern

34. Images in Action
• The Operations of Visual Thinking: Experience
the kind of mental operations that do the
active work of visual thinking

35. Pattern Seeking
• Perception is an active pattern-seeking
process that is closely aligned to the act of
thinking

36. Closure
• Filling in an incomplete pattern
• Finding a desired pattern embedded in
distracting surroundings

37. Filling in
• So active is the pattern-seeking nature of
perception, that these partial images are
"closed" into meaningful patterns.

38. Finding:
• Decide
whether or
not the figure
is concealed
in any of the
four drawings

39. "perceptual speed”
• The quick way involves seeing a pattern as a
whole and matching it without hesitation
• Long way involves detail by detail comparison
(computers may be programmed this way)

40. Matching
• Check the duplicate figure

41. Categorizing
• We invent our world by this visual spatial
operation. We discover all of the objects in
our environment by recognizing common
features.

42. Categorizing
• Find in each row two figures that are exactly
alike.

43. Categorizing
• We literally invent the world by this visual-
spatial operation
• Discover all objects in our environment by
recognizing common features
• A child distinguishes cats or dogs
• Scientific discovering

44. Visual Memory
• Active visual perception and accurate memory
are closely aligned
• Inspect the designs for two minutes and then
reproduce them, in any order.

45. Rotations
• Inverse Drawing

46. Rotations
• Rotating Dice
• Which pair can the first
die be rotated into the
position of the second
die?

47. Orthographic Imagination
• Ability to imagine how a solid object looks
from several directions

48. From another viewpoint
• Dynamic Structures
• Which is the same
drawing of the sold
object on the left?

49. Dynamic Structures
Folded Pattern
Which of the 3d
objects is the result
of folding?

50. Knots
• Unfolding: Which would form a knot if pulled
tight

51. Kinesthetic Imagery
• Motion in visual-spatial operations is effected
by kinesthetic (muscle) imagery
• Although next problem is mechanical in
nature, imagery in three-dimensional thinking
is important to visual thinking in many fields.

52. Pulleys
• Which way will pulley X turn (a or b)?

53. Visual reasoning
• Logical reasoning works in much the same way
in visual thinking as it does in verbal and
mathematical thinking
• However, visual deduction is difficult to
describe
• Painter who realizes and abstract idea in a
particular composition thinks deductively

54. Visual Reasoning
• Spatial Analogy

55. Visual Induction

56. Visual Induction II

57. Visual Induction II
• The principle that relates the three designs is the sequence:
– The entire figure rotates 45 degrees
– The two sets of symbols move as sets 90 degrees clockwise and 90
degrees counterclockwise
– Inner and outer sets of symbols exchange positions
• The related design is therefore (c)

58. Imagining
• Everyone possesses imagination
• Educated often to “stop imagining things”
• Contemporary imagination neglects inner
imagery
• Mind’s eye (imagination) can be reopended
and revived

59. Exercising your mind’s eye
• Taking your time, translate each of the
following descriptions into a mental image.
• Sense (see, touch, hear, taste, smell) with your
minds eye:
– a familiar face
– a galloping horse
– a rosebud
– your bedroom
– a changing stoplight
– a newspaper headline
– the sound of rain on the roof
– the voice of a friend
– children laughing at play
– the feel of soft fur
– an itch
– a gentle breeze on your face
– the muscular feeling of running
– of kicking a can
– of drawing a circle on paper
– the taste of a lemon
– of toothpaste
– of a potato chip
– the smell of bacon frying
– of a gardenia
– of perspiration
– the feeling of hunger
– of a cough
– of coming awake