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"Visual thinking can be applied to anything. The way we think about things visually is a matter of perspective. And perspective is the source of all great storytelling. With our new Visual Storytelling series, we use information design and data visualization to bring a new perspective to the stories of everyday life. Some pieces will be serious, some humorous, but the aim is to provide a new way of telling stories that we can all relate to."

"Much like other crossover sensations from the creative world such as design thinking and information design, the visual thinking phenomenon has sustained interest for some time now. From the most staid corporate institutions to the most enlightened young startups, visual thinking techniques are being sought after as part of a new business toolkit in the quest to create "cultures of innovation." Post-its, whiteboards, and flipcharts are infiltrating once stodgy conference rooms and work spaces. Unbridled creativity - not industrial-era efficiency - is the key to better products, smarter services, and increased profit. But behind the glowing promise of the vizthink movement, a challenge persists for many in the business world: how best to harness the power of visual thinking to achieve real results?"

Visualized content is popping up all over the web lately, and it's no surprise. Visual content is pleasing to the eye, stimulating, entertaining, and much more interesting than plain old text. Haven't you noticed how much more frequently infographics seem to be making their way onto blogs and websites lately? There's a very reasonable explanation: people love visual content.

"Visualization is often used interchangeably with sensemaking-making sense of the world we live in and then acting within that framework of understanding to achieve desired goals. Thus visualization or sensemaking is not just a shared (social) image with intent, it also implies ACTION. This sensemaking framework is composed of seven basic steps as shown below (Leedom, McElroy, Shadrick, Lickteig, Pokorny, Haynes, Bell, 2007):"

Brand stories are no longer limited to blobs of text on "About Us" pages. Social media has given brands a platform to relay their story in multiple ways and to various audiences. At a recent South By Southwest Interactive Festival Panel, Becky Johns, CC Chapman, Charlie Wollborg and Karl Gude, spoke to educate the audience on how to build a visual storyboard that benefits their brands; in essence, how to not just tell a story, but how to tell a good story. Here are several tips to communicate your story and connect with your audience using photos, videos and design.

 "How do you quantify what makes a visualization good?"

"My biggest learning from working with senior executives, consultants and entrepreneurs around the globe was that we waste a lot of time with talking without necessarily understanding each other. This happens because we just use words, without using visual concepts and tools that could facilitate the conversation. "

James Kelway started the Six Circles - an Experience Design Framework, as an enquiry into how different design principles can be applied to the field of digital product design. The principles studied led to the emergence of six core themes; persuasion, behavior, visual design, usability, interaction and content. The book describes the importance of these areas and how working systematically with these themes will require a holistic mindset and approach that require multi-disciplinary teams within organizations to ensure the creation of quality products. It is also serves as a way to judge the effectiveness of digital products using the six lenses described

Socialcast (which was recently acquired by ReadWriteWeb sponsor VMware) ran an interesting infographic these week visualizing, among other things, a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies (we covered part of this study back in 2008).

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We're extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives."

"For about five years around the turn of the century most of my days were spent helping clients manage their knowledge. Back in 2000 knowledge management (KM) was really big. Every year I'd head off to Amsterdam for the obligatory industry conference, KM Europe. We even had our own home grown conference, KM UK, with pretty much the same people but with less impressive venues. Then suddenly things went quiet - KM Europe was suddenly cancelled in 2005, KM UK limped along (and is still going today). KM had lost its way. The promises hadn't been fulfilled. Of course KM just didn't disappear overnight - it just degraded gracefully. One client, a very large UK multinational, shed their KM teams and announced that KM was now 'embedded in the business'. KM still goes on but it's likely to be on the margins and not essential for peak organisational performance whereas in 2000 KM really was positioned as a game changer. So what happened? That's a good question and one which this post is my first attempt at exploring why KM failed to deliver on its early promises. And why do this sort of navel gazing now? Because knowledge management appears to be making a comeback but this time it has a shiny new suit and it's called social learning."

"Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting."

"From simple charts to complex maps and infographics, Brian Suda's round-up of the best - and mostly free - tools has everything you need to bring your data to life"

Design thinking is basically "a way of approaching a challenge" - it is not a radical new methodology. Design Thinking encapsulates prototyping, convergent and divergent thinking, customer research, and is a holistic approach to management and leadership. It enlivens the gift of curiosity along with the power of observation. It takes data and places it in a given point of time.