From the course: Concept Visualization

What is concept visualization?

From the course: Concept Visualization

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What is concept visualization?

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- [Instructor] You're surrounded by, really inundated with concept visualizations at all times. But it's not a bad thing. The buttons and dials on your toaster probably have icons. Your software is chock full of visuals that help you to know where to click to do different tasks. And every PowerPoint you create and are exposed to is brimming with concept visualizations. They are literally everywhere. But let's demystify it a bit by turning that fancy phrase into something more tangible. Concept visualization is when you create a functional visual that represents just about anything other than data. So it's functional, meaning it's not fine art. It's not purely aesthetic. It serves a purpose. And it's not data, because data visualizations are visual representations of numeric things, which is its own category. So concept visualization is sort of everything else. First, it's a visual that represents a concept, which is an abstract or sometimes not-so-abstract idea. So it can be a visual representation of an adjective, like fast, or a noun, like opportunity, or a verb, like flying. Ah, so it's a visual metaphor, yeah? Yes, that's one example of a concept visualization. But it can also be a visual that represents a process, like how to ride a bicycle, manufacture a solar panel, or transplant a kidney. It can also be a visual display of a flow of some kind, like how electricity flows from the power plant to your house, or how ideas flow between collaborating scientists. And there are other types as well, which we'll get into. So we use concept vis all the time. Whether you're doing user interface design and giving someone an icon to click on to send an email, or you're writing an annual report for a nonprofit and using photography to demonstrate some of your primary activities, or you're creating a marketing piece with a complex illustration to promote your company's proprietary process for making widgets more efficiently, it's not about the medium or the type of image. It's about what it represents. All right, now that we've defined it, we can think about when and how to use it.

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