2010.12

22dic10This is a great site I've just found on the importance of graphics. A really lovely thing that came up a few days ago in our 3rd Online Conference is that a few people commented on how wonderful the graphics were.. I think they meant also in getting the ideas across. Made my day! (although I wouldn't take the credit for it - they actually asked 'who does the great graphics' and I said 'it's a collective effort': which it is in that the ideas in themselves are amazing and they're not mine, but it is me who puts them to graphics.And that is something am proud of, but that people usually don't recognize: I work very hard at putting important ideas in a graphic form precisely because they deeply shape our ways of thinking - so it's a way of changing thinking.What I find HUGELY exciting about it is that it's a way of making our thinking more CONSCIOUS. Brill quote from Cambell from Christine's site: When an idea is important

to a person or culture

it will find its way

to imagery.

Joseph Cambell

And from Georgia O'Keefe:

I found I could say things

with colour and shapes

that I couldn't say in any other way -

things I had no words for.

Am so excited about how people think together, how they come to share understandings ...

Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don't just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.

~Theodore Zeldin

An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)