Visualisation

What is Visualisation ?

Visualisation during design refers to the visual mental images used by the designer during the design process. Visualisation enables the generation, interpretation, and manipulation of information through spatial representation. In other words, it is the mental pictures used by a designer when completing a design task.

How is it applied ?

Visualisation is really important for the process of Design Thinking because it's actually a way of unlocking a different part of our brain. It allows us to think in a non-verbal way and access parts of our brain, our creativity. ... Visualisation is equal parts listening, thinking and drawing.

Application

It's really really important to be able to understand the way that you communicate with people. The primary tools for thinking visually are really just mastering some basic elements of imagining people, spaces, situations and actions or movements. It's very easy to create a simple diagram –  and most anyone can draw a stick figure, a circle, a square, or an arrow. Those are the basic building blocks of creating a Visualisation. We can unlock the power to think differently by doodling. Alicia Diane Durand’s Discovery Doodles - The complete series is a good starting point if you are in search of confidence and want to learn basic visual elements. I try to practice with and learn from my three little girls Khairah (7), Safiyah (4) and Hannah (2). The kids doodle naturally not afraid of judgement. I am not a Picasso. I might not pass the high-school ‘arts’ exam even if return to it once again.

Visualisation has a role to play throughout the Design Thinking. It's an incredible tool, in that sense, in that we're using those tools and that part of our brain at each phase in the design process. It's not just something that has an application in one part of the Design Thinking. It has many ways of being useful at different parts of the Design Thinking process.

When you get to concept development, Visualisation becomes incredibly useful. Your brain is creating pictures of something that doesn't yet exist. It's creating pictures of something that will soon be. As we move forward into prototyping, we get much more detailed in the way that we start to visualise. Then we create very complex diagrams or maps of how we think the customer

experience is going to work ideally. Pictures and images enable us to not only help people understand what it is we're trying to do but to help persuade them in the worthiness of that particular idea or the strength of that concept.

This can be a little intimidating at first for some. I think that people will find that once they start getting in the habit of doing that, you quickly see how the rest of the room responds to you when you get up and you start drawing.

Most of us suffer from whiteboard addiction. We find it easy to articulate problems and concepts with boxes, circles, arrows and key words. Recently I happened to be at a ‘formal’ meeting seated around a table trying to verbalize a problem and develop a concept. 30 minutes into the meeting someone had the courage to break the formality and started to draw on a piece of paper. What happened next didn’t surprise me. It’s not the art that mattered, but the surfacing of the problem, conceptualising ideas and gaining the engagement to shape it better.

Insight & Approach

Visualisation is a core component of the way that we communicate, whether we're aware of it or not. When we're dealing with very complex problems, we're enacting a different kind of problem solving that has to bring in more than just logic. Visualisation is really important for the process of Design Thinking because it's actually a way of unlocking a different part of our brain. It allows us to think in a non-verbal way and access parts of our brain, our creativity. Most design thinkers call visualisation as “the mother of all design tools”, because they are used in every stage of the design thinking process.

