both, and it is a supremely useful book.
—Christina Wodtke, author of Radical Focus and The Team That Managed Itself and lecturer in HCI at Stanford University
Introduction
by Stephen P. Anderson
I love making complex topics and challenges more approachable. Throughout my career, from my earliest days as a high school teacher to the many design and leadership roles I’ve enjoyed over the years, I’ve earned a reputation for seeing and communicating how all the pieces and parts of a thing might fit together into a cohesive whole. This has spanned everything from creating “site maps” for websites to facilitating strategy sessions that made sure everyone’s voice was heard in forming a unified vision. But my own need to make sense of things has been more than a job—it’s a way of living for me, one that shows up in nearly everything I do, both professional and personal. Often, I was asked “how” I do what I do. I suppose that’s how this book began, as a way to work out for myself how—exactly—I make sense of things. I wanted to understand, well ... understanding!
My early answers were only part of a much bigger picture.
As a designer, what I’ve commonly produced to “solve” these problems of understanding has involved some kind of visual representation. Concept models. Posters. Sketches. Graphs. Visual artifacts of all kinds. I knew going in that some portion of this book would deal with how to craft these kinds of visual explanations. But more critically, I wanted to learn why exactly visuals are so effective. I also knew there was more to it. Just as visuals are powerful for understanding, so, too, is the right metaphor or a good story that people can latch onto. I also knew that all these things only work because of the associations they activate in the brain. It’s not about the story that’s shared or the picture we see—it’s about how these things change our perceptions. All these topics would become the first half of this book.
But there are more pieces to the “understanding” puzzle.
Consider what happens when you’re in a workshop, moving sticky notes around on the wall. Or when you rearrange scrabble tiles, to help you see more word possibilities. It’s not just about seeing things—it’s also about interacting with these things, to change your own understanding. This was the world that my co-author Karl Fast opened my eyes to, introducing me to concepts such as “epistemic interactions” and the notion of “small data” problems. Following an introduction at a conference, it became clear that we each had been circling this “understanding” topic for many years, but came at it from different perspectives. Where I tend to fall back on personal examples and ideas based on experiences, Karl brought an academic perspective, grounded in rigor and research. One thing led to another, and we concluded this book would be better if written by both of us.
Of course, while writing this book, my activities at work began to change—I found myself doing more training and facilitation. Where public speaking and presentations emphasize communicating an idea, workshops are an altogether different challenge. While the pictures, the stories, and the interactions still have their place, I developed an appreciation for what skilled facilitators do: they hold space for reflection, and they know how to ask the exact question that lets others figure things out for themselves. I began replacing the lecture heavy bits of my own workshops with more experiential learning activities, where people could sort out for themselves some difficult concept. Through it all, I developed my ability to explain as well as to facilitate understanding.
That, essentially, is the arc of this book.
As with the process that produced what you now hold in your hands, this book is very much a journey, with each subsequent chapter building on the one before it.
And when you arrive at the end of this book, you will be able to answer this question: How might we help ourselves and others make sense of confusing information?
To be clear, the problem is not that we have “too much information,” as we so often hear. Rather, it’s that we don’t know what to do with the information we do have. Email. Tweets. Newspapers. Podcasts. Data. Knowledge. Content. Statistics. Technology has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to do much with information: create, publish, share, organize, search, consume. But this ready access to information doesn’t promise understanding. We’re given information, but not in a form that makes sense to us.
Simply passing on all this information for others to figure out leads to things like incomprehensible tax policies, business models that can’t easily be explained, and facts and figures on global issues that have divided rather than united us around possible solutions. Information alone is not the answer. It’s what we do with the information that matters. In nearly all areas of life, we lack the tools, skills, and literacy needed to cope in a world of endless information.
At a fundamental level, this is why Karl and I wrote this book, to change the conversation from discussions of “information overload” and “big data” (and even “data visualization”) to the question these discussions ultimately beg: How do we make sense of it all? In short, how do we work with information as a resource, as a “thing” we can adapt, modify, and transform to meet our needs.
The Book, in Brief
Let’s look at the structure of this book and what you can expect:
Part 1, “A Focus on Understanding,” clears the way for the rest of the book. We’ll start small by clarifying what we mean when we talk about problems of understanding. From incomprehensible privacy policies to confusing medical explanations, you’ll see how we typically respond when things are confusing. You’ll also become aware of just how often we’re given information, but not in a form that makes sense to us.
Then we’ll explore where understanding happens with a historical survey of cognitive science, one that begins with the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and ends with how a new revolution—embodied cognition—changes how we approach problems of understanding.
With that foundation in place, the remainder of the book will turn to our central question: How does understanding take place?
Part 2, “How We Understand by Associations,” opens with a brief look at how the brain—as a perceptual organ—uses prior associations to make sense of new information. Given how fundamental this is to our topic of understanding, we’ve devoted three chapters to the many ways these associations show up—from stories we tell ourselves, to the metaphors we use, to how a specific word choice can alter how we think. This is followed with a cautionary chapter on the dangers and limits of associative thinking.
Part 3, “How We Understand with External Representations,” investigates how we create external representations to extend our thinking into the world using tools, maps, drawings, and spaces. We dedicate a chapter to our sense of vision, and a chapter to the topic of color, before turning to the ways we use space to hold and convey meaning.
