Visual thinking & digital imagery

This workshop focuses on exploring the centrality of visual literacy and visual thinking to HCI. Drawing on emerging critical perspectives, the workshop will address visual literacy and visual thinking from an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary design-orientation [2, 8], foregrounding the notion that imagery is a primary form of visual thinking. Imagery—which subsumes digital imagery—goes well beyond sketching and beyond storyboards, screenshots and wireframes. We will address how a broader framework for visual thinking and imagery in HCI can play a role in raising the visual standards of HCI research and practice. Workshop participants will investigate possibilities for developing a culture of curatorial gaze in HCI, in order to (i) promote collection of digital images as a method appropriate for a design-oriented discipline, (ii) invite others to contribute to a genre of working and corpus of imagery unique to HCI, and (iii) to expand the approaches that design-oriented HCI may productively and creatively draw upon.