Virtually Priceless Thoughts

I have been listening to some great stuff by Dave Gray and others on thinking visually. Not about clinical information systems design, but about approaching complex situations through visuals. Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin is an excellent introduction to visual thinking and how to design sketches to help think and present ideas.

Definitely regretting not having gone to Viz Think ’08 this last year, but thankfully they have shared several pieces online (check the blog in particular).

Much of the discussion is around making a complex and chaotic world make sense. Distilling the complex whirl of information into something that can be engaged and reasoned about. A story given a sense of time and knowing that stats don’t give people. Visuals engage the right side of the brain in a way words don’t, helping to process information in a different, more holistic way. The two help make sense out of the utterly complex.

(Note the irony that this post is the first without a visual.)

I have been working with a friend and colleague over the past month sketching out an idea to develop software for the XO laptop, which is part of the one laptop per child
(OLPC) project. The idea is more about how to get others to design and build software for OLPC and we can help facilitate.

We are exploring how to engage students in BC to design and develop health and health education materials with partner communities in developing countries who are part of the OLPC. It is an exciting idea to get students, both high school and university students, to get together and learn about computer science and about healthcare while flexing their creative design muscles in coming up with tools to help children thousands of miles away.

Seems like we are not the only group who has thought of this, of course. There are several projects proposed and in development through the OLPC and can be found on the OLPC Wiki.

We are piloting our OLPC-Health Design Fest this month – it’s a half day paper prototyping event. I am very excited to see how it works.

The title of an article from Harvard Business Review keeps coming up Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box. While certainly not the first place to use the play on “out of the box” thinking, it is a good construct.

I read this many months ago and do find the idea pops into my head whenever I am in a meeting that stalls. Often these are my own meetings, where I realize that I haven’t provided enough structure to promote creativity.

Having a limit or constraint to work with provides a foil for creativity and this article does a good job of providing some examples that can be used. The full article is available for purchase but the 21 question sidebar is accessible, I believe.

Pulling people out of their comfort zone is a good way to stretch the brain and let some creativity happen. Describing the box, drawing on other areas of experience, etc are key to pulling people out of their zone into a new area.

The trick is, of course, to pick the right box(es) to use. You want to stretch people enough and to stretch them in the right direction. Too far out of their range is as bad as having two many options. It would be like asking my grandmother to consider quantum mechanics…you would have gotten a blank stare and be “tsked” out of the room quickly. But asking people to imagine their parents as patients using a personal health record, is something that a developer could probably stretch into.