Visual Narratives: The Essential Role of Imagination in the Visualization Process

Baskinger, M. and Nam, K.-C.

The goal of this short form paper is to introduce ideas in contemporary visualization that use hand generated methods to engage the imagination of the author and audience to enhance the larger creative process. This approach, which focuses on exploring lateral ideas in a narrative format, blends many aspects of the fields of industrial design, communication design, and information design. 'Analog' visual communication, defined as hand-generated sketches, diagrams and narratives, is of interest as it can bring powerful perceptual and conceptual processes to bear in making inferences and subsequent decisions. This method of visualization, translatable to many different disciplines, enables the author to think through and investigate his/her ideas by creating sequential image sets that simplify complex/dynamic information, illustrate key issues, and reduce abstract concepts into visually digestible, non-verbal narratives.

Cite as: Baskinger, M. and Nam, K.-C. (2006). Visual Narratives: The Essential Role of Imagination in the Visualization Process. In Proc. Asia Pacific Symposium on Information Visualisation (APVIS2006), Tokyo, Japan. CRPIT, 60. Misue, K., Sugiyama, K. and Tanaka, J., Eds. ACS. 217-220.

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