Re: Visual-Concept

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3216

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-05-09 21:55:15

I find Visual Mind the best medium for getting ideas down quickly in a useful form. Faster than BrainStorm, which I now use more for organizing material taken from elsewhere, as opposed to recording my own thinking. Visual Concept may be best for _engendering_ new ideas. It seems to make it easier to set aside a habitual way of looking at something and to let new relations percolate.

V-C seems to have a distinctly different feel when compared to mind mapping and outlining. Programs like BrainStorm and Visual Mind have as their greatest strength their transparency. The less effect the program itself has, the less it influences the direction of your thinking, the better. Those two programs—BrainStorm and Visual Mind—are the most transparent I have seen anywhere. Their function in brainstorming is to substitute for cognitive resources that would otherwise be devoted to short term memory. They allow you to expend those cognitive resources on analyzing rather than remembering.

V-C actually helps you see things in a new way. Limited to atomic ideas, you quickly see which ones are related to others. It allows you to respond more to the preponderance of examples, less to concepts governing which example are most important or more central than others.

I don’t think you can take this terribly far. Ultimately your grappling with a problem will be guided by your concepts. V-C seems to me to provide a way of breaking from your concepts at critical times, when you need a new approach. The CLUSTER is more primordial, but also less generally useful, than the HIERARCHY.

Stephen R. Diamond

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