Interview with course designer Bob Horn | What's in the course? | How do I bring the course into my company? | Effectiveness of visual language | Details about course | Please contact me | MacroVU home page | Send us a message

Bob Horn is well-known as the inventor of Information Mapping's method of structured writing. The method has been taught to over 200,000 professional writers world-wide. It is used by technical writers, professional communicators, managers who write reports and memos, and Web teams to analyze, organize, and present information for business and technical documents. Horn founded and was CEO of Information Mapping, Inc. until 1986, when he left active participation in the day-to-day activities of the company to go back to research and writing.

Since then Horn has written three books, Mapping Hypertext, How High Can It Fly?, and Visual Language. He has also led a team of philosophers in the development of a new methodology for presenting argumentation analysis and has developed a course to teach professional communicators how to use visual language.

Bob, what is visual language?
I think of visual language as the tight integration of words, images, and shapes. If you don't have both words and visual elements you don't have visual language. If they are just tossed together, it probably isn't visual language. They really require tight integration. By that I mean that if you take away the words, the remaining visual elements do not comprise a meaningful communication unit. Similarly, if you take away the visual elements, the remaining words do not comprise a complete, meaningful communication unit.

Why is visual language so important today?
I think visual language is one of the most important and exciting developments in communication­especially in business and technology. It is literally a new language. We see it in TV visuals, newspaper and magazine graphics, and in business presentations. Visual language has become the new language of the World Wide Web and other forms of multimedia.

Visual language represents a fundamental change in human communication, in part because organizations can use it to communicate complex and nuanced ideas that are impossible to "say" in any other way. Visual language gives new meaning to the idea of high-speed, high-bandwidth communication. It breaks through the severe limitations that words alone place on communicating about time and sequence and about multiple causality and multiple interrelationships. It is holistic, integrative, and international. I've written a book that describes this emerging language and explores for the first time its syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The book is entitledVisual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century.

Many people would agree with you and want to use visual language, but don't know how to get started.
I think I've solved that problem by developing the next step beyond Information Mapping. It's a new course called, Visual Thinking and Visual Communication.   The course is a "boot camp" for people who are getting into visual language for the first time.

You may also want to look at a very extensive project we've done using visual language to map one of the great philosophical debates of our century: Can computers think, or will they ever be able to?  The Mapping Great Debates: Can Computers Think? project is described elsewhere on this site.

What makes visual language important for business?
The first visual generation has already arrived in our colleges and universities. At Stanford University, where I have been a visiting scholar for the past few years, I can see it in the classroom. When we assign projects to student teams, they immediately begin sketching ideas on scratch paper. Visual thinking is becoming a normal part of communication for the college generation. There are other reasons as well...complexity of communication is the best example.

Business is based on communication, and communication is more complex than ever before. Visual communication is the only way we can handle the complexity of much modern business communication -- effectively and efficiently. Business must begin to respond to this phenomenon now.

Moreover, business is becoming increasingly international. Visual language facilitates intercultural communication by tightly integrating the instantly comprehensible images with words. Visual language makes translations easier and less expensive because there are often 30 percent fewer words to translate in visual language documents.

The third reason is multimedia. CD/ROMs, graphic computers and the World Wide Web now provide the opportunity for better business communication. These media will not reach their full potential until the core skills and concepts of visual thinking and visual communication are widely known and used.

Why is visual language a distinct language?
My answer is twofold. First, people are increasingly speaking it. It is growing up in our midst as a new means of communication. It is emerging in the way that spoken languages have emerged: people invent them. A great variety of people are inventing visual language, and it is all coming together.

Second, the linguistic concepts we use to analyze ordinary spoken languages apply to visual language. We can analyze the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of visual language. At the same time, these concepts don't quite fit, because they have been used heretofore for verbal language only. So, I have had to adapt them to the analysis of visual language in my book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century.

What is the course about?
Our visual language course,Visual Thinking and Visual Communication, specifically focuses on how to immediately begin using visual language in your work lives. It is basic. You don't even have to be able to draw a straight line in order to take the course. It is practical. By the end of the course you, together with a team of two or three colleagues, will actually prepare a visual language presentation. It brings together cognitive science concepts and data, information design guidelines, syntax and semantics from the linguistics of visual language, graphic design principles, idea-sketching skills, media know-how. It is built around tasks that you use almost every day on the job. In short, it gives you what you need to know to get started using visual language. It gives you vocabulary to work with, guidelines and rules for effective use, and tips for efficient production of visual langauge.