Once in a while, I like to think about and be astounded by how people have managed, over time, to form their own niches of communication and language that are wildly different around the world.

Language is a really cool thing. We all speak at least one, and we use it to communicate and learn and share ideas and create wonderful things like technology and the internet. We managed to make meaning out of sounds and shapes and movements to create written, spoken, and gestural languages, and somehow, every culture - at least, that I can think of - came up with some form of a mathematical language, which, because in math 1 + 1 will always equal 2, we also have a language that allows us to communicate cross-culturally.

What else is really cool? Visual communications. Like the old idiom says, a picture is worth a thousand words, and people have come to realize that humans are generally more pictorially inclined and learn better through visuals. Well crafted images and photographs will mean similar things - despite cultural differences and spoken language barriers.

Even within visual communications, we have our own languages. For example, in architecture studios, we had to craft our drawings very specifically - different line widths, line types, line colors all meant different things. When I draw a diagram for a class now, I take into consideration all of these factors - but my peers, who are trained in things like Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, likely have less sensitivities for such because they were not trained to do so.

I swear, there is a difference between a 0.75 pt line and a 0.5 pt line. They do mean different things.

I recently learned that during the Civil War era, slaves created their own form of visual communication language in order to help each other out and figure out ways to escape the plantations. That visual communication device? Quilts.

Is that not the coolest thing. Every time I think about it, I'm totally mindblown. Through incredible adversity, these people - who probably could not communicate with each other very well, because slave owners made an effort to group slaves from different tribes and areas together - managed to take elements from their own cultures, pool information about the plantations together, and create a visual communications language that somehow not only stayed secret from the plantation owners but also was fairly universal across the country.

Anyway, I digress. (I will come back to these quilts in the future.)

Visual communications permeates all of our lives. We see images everywhere - ads on billboards, shop logos, school diagrams, the Internet... it's quite obvious that visual communications is an important factor in all of our lives. We learn visually, and we're probably more perceptive to visual information now more than ever.

Which is why, when my friends send me pictures like this, I am somewhat infuriated.


This is a picture my best friend sent me, from some museum in New York City. This is an example of a very poor implementation of Augmented Reality.

AR is basically one of the next big things for visual communications. AR allows us to augment information on top of real life objects - think Google Glass and how it could potentially recognize products you're looking at and tell you exactly what it's for. I did an AR project last semester, in which a Wellesley student and I prototyped an application that focused on adding visual information on top of products in a museum-style retail space. You can read about it here.

Not that I consider myself an expert on AR - definitely not. I don't consider myself an expert in anything - I believe that I can, and will, continue to learn about everything for the rest of my life. You should never stop learning.

But I do know a lot about communicating ideas through images. I've been a painter my whole life, and paintings are all about communicating emotions and ideas; I've been trained to communicate ideas and concepts through architecture, using line weights and color and renderings; I know that people are much more receptive to images than tiny words on a page, and especially now with our digital revolution, people are becoming lazier about actually reading.

Besides, what is the difference between reading tiny text on a digital screen as opposed to the tiny text blurb you usually see in a museum? There is literally no difference - in fact, reading the tiny text on a digital screen is probably much more difficult and harder on your eyes.

What would I have done instead? Diagram the painting. The blurb is clearly about the painting underneath, since everything else is faded out - instead of the giant blurb, I would have literally just added images and text over the actual painting. A visitor could see the painting and cross reference it with visual information literally pointing to different sections of the painting on the screen. That'd be pretty cool, and it would still be static information, making it just as easy to implement.

This image infuriates me because it's a clear opportunity for incredible visual diagramming and communicating, and they took it and threw it out of the window.

Guys, we know what makes a good image. People have been studying it for thousands of years. We know how to make good images and good diagrams, and we know how to communicate in pictures.

So let's actually do it properly.


What do you think about language and communication? If you saw a screen like the one above in a museum, would you try to read the blurb?