THE USE OF VISUALIZATION TOOL

“Pictures reveal a thousand words” and this is the exact underlying concept  behind visualization as an efficient tool for designed thinking. Be it a  presentation for client meeting/stakeholders, teaching a class full of students  or public speaking whatever be your arena of interest; pictorial representation  tends to elevate the understanding capacity of all.  Different individuals have  different mindsets, which leads each of them to perceive things from different  angles; visualization helps here a lot: it gives a clear explanation of what the  speaker wants to communicate, unambiguously. Hence, we can conclude  “visualization” is the most powerful tool that helps in bridging verbal  communication.

CHALLENGE & SELECTION

life of a student isn’t easy- we not just have to be consistent in our  performance each single time; but have to surpass the expectations of  teachers and parents all the time. Not just that, we also have our  commitments to extra-curriculum (singing, dancing, art, etc.). there’s no  standstill at all. Well, now I am going to tell the story of: how I used  visualization tools to surpass them all?

Every year in the month of march we have this big event in our city called:  inter-school cultural fest, organized by the municipal corporation towards  public interest. It is a 5-day event having a gamut of event each day, followed  by announcing the “champions” on the final day of the event. The final day  event was a crucial one, called the “know your motherland”- where each group  has to portray about a particular culture (given the diverse culture of India, we  have at least 28 different cultures and 300 different languages spoken). My  team has had to portray the “Bengali culture”- all the activities symbolizing the  Bengali culture (the art, food, texts, lifestyle etc.). Now, what was the  challenge/hurdle we’re facing? Simply, the language. The audience and the  judges belonged from different cultural background and understood their own  language. What can we do to effectively communicate with them all at the  same time, such that we can portray “Bengali culture” unequivocally?

APPLICATION

Being freshers to this competition, we do not have any prior insights gathered,  to be focused onto in order to elevate our performance. Our team had 20

members (including me): 5 were doing the Rabindra Sangeet (musical  performance), 7 were performing the ancient Bengali epics and folk-fore, 4  were portraying the famous Bengali personalities (Subhas Chandra Bose,  Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda etc.), 3 would be speaking the  modern literary works and I was in charge of the commentary. I felt a lot of  stress, regarding how to execute this? Suddenly I was reminded of the saying  “actions speak louder than words”; and this prove to be a game-changer for us.  How? I quickly prepared a presentation which contained pictures, texts, art,  etc. everything that matters to symbolize the “Bengali tradition”  ranging from  how Bengal was originated, our lifestyle, our language, our values, tradition  and norms; our famous texts, our religion, major spots of significance and  history in Bengal (like, Kolkata for the birth of modern literary works, shanti- Niketan known for Visva-Bharati university by the Nobel laureate Rabindranath  Tagore, Darjeeling for its serene beauty and tea production, etc. ).

What difference did it make?  Well, for starters we became the “champions”  of the competition and not just that, it was privilege for us pass on a piece of  knowledge about our culture to everyone, which was deeply immeasurable.

INSIGHTS AND APPROACH

Communication is a two-way process, solely transmission of the message from  the sender to receiver is not considered as “communication” unless it is backed  up by feedback from the receiver to the sender. There’re seem to be a number  of barriers to verbal communication: abstract language, differences in depth  of understanding, selective attention are the most prominent among them.  Both these are linked with one another, in the sense that: if the speaker uses  ‘abstract words’ it dimly elicits understanding and more prone to  misunderstanding compared to ‘concrete words’ (like table, chair, window,  etc.) which have a clear-cut meaning. As a result of not able to understand  clearly what the speaker wants to impart, leads to lack of interest and  ultimately distorts attention; which violates the principle of communication.

In my application, the major barriers were not only the above three factors but  also “cultural differences” was backing them up. Hence, to elicit clear-cut  understanding I resorted to visual tools and additionally, to negate the effect  of cultural differences I used a common medium (English) which was  understood by all, in the form subtitles in my pictorial representation.

