If words are limiting, then can’t pictures be as well? Especially pictures that are not coherent? Yes, the pleasurable thing about art is its ability to be open ended and relatable to all, but don’t artists—generally- create with intension? These are a few questions that came to mind when reading Nick Sousanis’s “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form.” I enjoyed the synopsis from his dissertation, but I struggled with understanding much of his imagery in the raw form. I think I would have liked to see a few more “polished” strips. This leads me to another question, one in which he mentions text and imagery being a generative cycle. If his sketches are created for the intention of generating thought, is his intension to generate thought just for him or for the viewer as well? How can an artist create something that generates thought for the public and not just generated for the artist’s thoughts?
Sousanis’s excerpt generated many questions for me, especially since I document my work in a less creative manner. Much of my work generates from pictures. Pictures I have taken with my camera phone. I find that I am one who is guilty to being a slave of time. Due to that, I constantly take pictures on my phone of things I want to revisit. I don’t often carry a sketchbook around with me anymore because it takes up space, but instead, I allow the space to be consumed by my phone. A device that can capture what “captured” me more accurately—but maybe less creatively. However, I do appreciate his argument for visual thinking. I have seen many statistics on how humans obtain information mainly though seeing. This one, I have copied and pasted from http://velvetchainsaw.com/2012/05/23/your-senses-your-raw-information-learning-portals/:
Neuroscience and cognitive psychology research has uncovered the amazing power of our senses. This was unimaginable a few years ago.
According to researchers Dr. L.D. Rosenblum, Dr. Harold Stolovitch and Dr Erica Keeps, here’s how much information each of our senses processes at the same time as compared to our other senses.
83.0% – Sight
11.0% – Hearing
03.5% – Smell
01.5% – Touch
01.0% – Taste
That’s surprising. And it flies in the face of some of our conventional educational theories like VAK (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) and Learning Styles. No matter how you slice the pie, our brains give preference to processing vision as compared to our other senses.

So why don’t we emphasize the visual more in education?