Clive Thompson, made a good case for visual thinking recently in Wired Magazine. Visualizing problems can help you solve them, and he cites some interesting examples. They can also help to get people "seeing the same mental model" as visualization expert David Sibbett told Thompson.
Thompson is looking for digital communications tools that can help people communicate more easily (like quick sketch tools on touch screen devices). Such tools may have already arrived, but few may have embraced them: British painter David Hockney, for example, starts every day creating digital art works using a simple app called "Brushes" on his iPad.
This is a thought-provoking article for those of us in the visual communications field, and raises the question: can we do accomplish more in our everyday work by being visual communicators? Anyone who has suffered through an all-text Powerpoint presentation knows what I'm talking about.
