Preparations… still

Well, there’s a lot of knowledge about this visualization of thoughts stuff… as almost on any idea in the world…

After my last post, my good friend Priv cited some Wikipedia links, which really expended my learning options. Now all I need is time…

Here’s an Updated Mind Map (as the professionals call it).

But already in this stage I find that this kind of visualization has some problems. The worst problem is that it is hierarchical. And it’s hard to show the links between different ideas. For instance, I found mind mapping tools myself (google searching), and Privman posted a link to full list in Wikipedia in his comment. There is an overlap between the two. How to draw it here?… A problem. I saw some mind-maps that add more graphics (like a cloud that links few ideas), but it seems that they “broke the rules” of the game. Maybe I should try other visual thinking techniques.

Meanwhile I found there are a lot of Mind mapping tools. You can check them out yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mind_Mapping_software (thanks Privman). I tried the Visual Mind 9.1 (demo version). It’s pretty simple and intuitive. It’s output comes out very nice (the last two mind maps I posted were made with this tool). I also downloaded the ConceptDraw MindMap 5 (demo version), but played with it only for few minutes. It seems it has more options than the Visual Mind so maybe I fiddle with it later.

I should put myself some kind of measure for my progress: less words, more ideas. Any good suggestions?

Preparations

Any quest begins with preparations… nowadays any preparation starts by asking the Internet for answers, right?!

So what happens when you google “visualize thoughts”?

The 1st hit is http://www.successconsciousness.com/. That’s a website about self improvement and creative visualization… “Creative visualization is the ability to use the imagination, see images in our minds and make them come true” (a quotation from the the site’s homepage).

The 2nd hit is http://repositories.cdlib.org/ced/places/vol2/iss4/DigerudLundberg/ which is a repository of papers called Places and serves as Forum of Design for the Public Realm. This exact page is a link to a paper called Thoughts on Visualizing Thoughts. This paper is really no more than a page with few paragraphs about the value of sketch in architecture. Other 7 pages are sketches…

The 3rd and 4th hits are a press releases (22 May, 2007) as published in ThomasNet News Room (http://news.thomasnet.com). The press release is about a new version of software application called Visual Mind 9 (TM). Now you’re talking!

The company’s name is Mind Technologies. They have a cool software and 30 day trial version. I just installed it. See a simple output at the end of this post.

The 5th hit is a website of company (http://www.p-spe.eu/index.php) that gives workshops in various themes (management, sales, or project management) for personnel development. They claim to have a method called MindGraphic that allows “abstract thoughts [to be] translated into images…” (http://www.p-spe.eu/pspe/mindgraphic.php). Now that sounds interesting too. I have to check this method.

The 6th hit is about changing the subconscious (http://www.justvisualizeit.net/powerfullthoughts.html). Wow… It’s called You Are What You Think About. Started reading… seems to be a waste of time — just another New Age website…

The 7th is an advertisement for another visualization tool called Inspiration 8. It’s hosted at Educational Technology Store (http://www.knowplay.com/). After a small extra search I found it has 3 different version (varied by age of user). All have demos. Add to my cart…

The 8th hit is an advertisement for a visualization tool for Palm OS called MindManager. I managed to find a path to the company’s site (the company is called MindJet). They have a Demo. Need to check it out too.

The 9th hit is about “New Thoughts on Chemical Visualization and Molecular Modeling“… It’s really a post in a blog called it’s a puzzle (http://geoffhutchison.net/about/). That’s not what I’m looking for.

The 10th hit is an article hosted in Project MUSE, an electronic journals collection made available to subscribing libraries. The article is about “Clinical Therapies, Readerly Mentalities”… what the hack?! I couldn’t read the article (as I’m not a subscribing library) but the word visualize didn’t appear in the abstract…

10 hits is enough. Who looks beyond the 1st page of search results anyway… Well I did. But that’s for the next blog.

Instead of summarizing with words I decided to summarize it visually.

Here it is:

Pretty simple. Tell me what you think.

My Quest

Here it is. Straight away: I think we have too much written words!

Don’t you feel we’re overwhelmed by the written words, lines, paragraphs, pages, articles, books?

We’ve got so much information to digest every day…

Do you succeed in reading all your emails, blogs, papers and other documents you should?

Do you succeed in reading at least the important stuff?

I don’t know what’s happening in your life, but I feel we’ve already drained this old technology of writing, and we have to take a step forward.

It’s not that the writing technology haven’t evolved in the last 5 thousand years. It’s just that we’ve been only improving it. Maybe it’s time to replace it?

Thererfore my quest is to replace words and paragraphs as means to express our thoughts with a different technology. Something else, more visual, intuitive, easier and faster to grasp, but still deep and thorough…

Although I’ve started by writing plain words, my final goal to is express my thoughts visually, no matter how complex the idea would be. Grasping an idea should be a matter of seconds…

Crazy idea? As crazy as traveling faster than the speed of sound in a jetplane if mentioned in 1900…