Visual Thinking for Design

Chapter 9 The Dance of Meaning

Meaning is what the brain performs in a dance with the external environment. In this dance tokens of meaning are spun off into electronic and social media and tokens of meaning are likewise picked up. New meaning is constructed when patterns already stored within the brain are combined with patterns constructed from external information. Increasingly, new meaning is also constructed by inanimate computers that do at least partial analysis, and synthesis of patterns and tokens of meaning, then present the results using a visual display.

In this book, the dance partners are considered to be individual people interacting with visual displays. In reality the dance is far more intricate and elaborate; there is a constant ...