SXSWi 2010 presenter urges pictures over words to express ideas


Digital Roam Inc. founder and Back of the Napkin author Dan Roam gave a presentation at the 2010 SXSWi festival about how presenting information pictorially is a better way to communicate than presenting work rhetorically. Roam’s diatribe of written and spoken words, Blah Blah Blah: Why words don’t work, used a handful of examples, including healthcare reform in the U.S., to argue in favor of what Roam calls “visual problem solving.”

Describing healthcare reform with pictures

According to Roam, rhetoric has a history of failing to effectively express ideas people and accurately relay information. He cited the seething healthcare debate an example of the communication breakdown caused by using rhetoric. In Roam’s view, the 1400 plus page House of Representatives version of bill has no illustrations and as a result is confusing people in terms of what parts of the healthcare system would be affected by the bill.

Roam undertook a project to translate the House healthcare bill, with some help from an associate with a healthcare administration background, into a pictorial language. He created a video and posted it to YouTube.com, which garnered thousands of hits and the attention of FOX News, who invited him to explain healthcare.

Words and pictures needed for better communication

After spending the greater part of the presentation denigrating the usefulness of words, Roam acknowledged in the last part of the presentation that we really need a combination visual and rhetorical content. He addressed this message in the context of the right/left side of the brain myth. Although the idea that one side of the brain is solely responsible for rhetorical thinking and other for pictorial thinking has been largely dismissed, nothing has really stepped up to explain why different people absorb information in different ways.

Metaphorically speaking, we have two types of animals in our brains: a fox who uses an angular methodology to catch his prey; and a hummingbird who seems to be everywhere at once. Some of us are more hummingbird (pictorial) and some of us are more fox (rhetorical) and in order to maximize our message absorption, we need to create content that speaks to both learning styles, which is an idea that I think would be worthwhile for advertisers.

By Lindsey Jones

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