I’ve written a book on consultative selling called Selling to the VP of NO.
I am also currently working on a book for O’Reilly media with friend and colleague Sunni Brown called The Visual Thinking Playbook, which is due out in January of 2010.
I’m also writing an unbook called Marks and Meaning. An unbook is a perpetually evolving book, a way of swimming in ideas and prototyping them before publishing them in a rigid, printed form. I’ve become quite interested in this form, as it allows a lot of flexibility for authors, and is a way to engage with readers while ideas are still fluid and shifting. Marks and Meaning is about visual strategies for dealing with information and its potential to transform how we operate in an information-rich world.
(Short video here)
The case for change:
1. We are in the midst of an information revolution whose primary trait is the digitization of everything. We are creating a digital information layer where everything that exists, or can be thought to exist, is represented in digital form.
2. At the same time we are developing devices that allow us to access this information layer in more ways, from more locations, with less effort.
3. The goal of all this activity is to make the universe of information available, on demand, at any time, from any place.
4. As a result we are suffering from a phenomenon called information anxiety, which is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. (Wurman, 1989)
5. We need new strategies for finding, manipulating and displaying information. The closer these strategies map to our natural cognitive processes the more effective and less disruptive they will be.
The book proposes visual literacy as a strategy, which includes three main components:
- Ways of meaning, which involves visual language and strategies for communication and discovery.
- Ways of thinking, which involves visual strategies for analysis, organizing/manipulating information, and problem-solving.
- Ways of working, which involves visual systems for collaborative activity, including approaches to learning, interfaces, and information display.
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