Challenge & Selection  The first tool I used was the tool of Visualization, or Visual Thinking. Because  Visualization has a role to play throughout the design process or the development  process. Innovation itself has a, has a rich and detailed development process that we  have to follow, from beginning with exploration, moving in through pattern finding.  Kind of peeking with ideation sketching, that's where we really think about the way  that images come in through prototyping, and finally in the way that we pilot and  scale. Visualization is about using images. It’s not about drawing; it’s about visual  thinking. It pushes us beyond using words or language alone. It is a way of  unlocking a different part of our brains that allows us to think nonverbally and that  managers might not normally use. When you explain an idea using words, the rest  of us will form our own mental pictures, usually informed by our training. When you  say, “We need a new growth platform,” the IT specialist sees servers and code and  the marketing guru sees an advertising campaign. If instead you present your idea to  us by drawing a picture of it, you reduce the possibility of unmatched mental  models.  Application  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.  Visualisation is equal parts listening, thinking and drawing. Listening is the input,  thinking is the processing and drawing is the output. These three skills work  together equally in understanding complexity, visualising outcomes to create new  possibilities.  The Atlantic, in cooperation with AthenaHealth, produced “Population Healthier” as  an in-depth report on an alternative approach to healthcare and medicine:  community health. It takes the form of an extended case study, which is written right  into an amazing data visualization that changes views as you scroll through the  page.  Those same dots, however, are superimposed on 3D renders of the city’s main  hospitals, creating a sense of consistency in the piece’s many key visuals.  These visualizations, however, would be greatly impoverished without the report to  which they belong. Indeed, the deeper insights are provided by the prose that  accompanies the data. By pairing each image with the right section of text, both are  enriched. The visual data gain invaluable context, while the prose becomes clearer  and more appealing thanks to the visuals.  All in all, “Population Healthier” shows just how effective visual data can be when  created for and presented in a clearly defined context.

Insight & Approach  What I have learned from conducting this exercise with several groups is that while  the graphic – it communicates relationships of the data with images. This is  important because it allows trends and patterns to be more easily seen. With the  rise of big data upon us, we need to be able to interpret increasingly larger batches  of data. Machine learning makes it easier to conduct analyses such as predictive  analysis, which can then serve as helpful visualizations to present. But data  visualization is not only important for data scientists and data analysts, it is  necessary to understand data visualization in any career. Whether you work in  finance, marketing, tech, design, or anything else, you need to visualize data. That  fact showcases the importance of data visualization.    Since I discovered that the most valuable aspect is the shared insights and learning,  next time I would use the visualization activity as a starting point for a series of  design thinking activities.

