When the ETC moved to the PTC offices in early 2004, and I moved into room 5317, I found this abandoned "creativity toolkit." I've had it sitting around the last seven years, and I thought I'd finally get around to checking it out. It was first published in 1995, and enjoyed critical acclaim. It has three elements. First, a handbook, which explains six facets of visual thinking: environment, culture, seeing, drawing, diagramming, and imagining. This is a pleasing, elegant volume that I found very inspiring in terms of thinking visually, and communicating visually. Most interesting to me was that game designer Scott Kim contributed to the "diagramming" section. The second element, is a blank, bound book for sketching in, since the handbook and the third element suggests many sketching exercises. The third element is a CD-ROM that has a number of visual exercises. Unfortunately, it is Mac only, and what with Macs being evil and all, the software is completely unrunnable on modern Mac computers. "Sorry, classic mode is no longer supported."
I plan to keep this thing in our archive since periodically we run into people who want to do interactive projects that foster creativity. This is certainly a studied one of those. Kristina Woolsey did a lot of work pulling it together, basing a lot of it in McKim's "Exercises in Visual Thinking."
Anyway, I'm glad I finally know what this really is!
No comments:
Post a Comment