Ways of ideating

The book Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1926-2017) was published fifty years ago and was based on the BBC television series with the same name. In the book, Berger expounds on the way we view art (paintings, photographs, films, or any other representation that humans can construct), encouraging us to flex our image-reading skills. A key message of the book is 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak ... But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' This state of flux characterises design ideation too. That is to say, the relation between visual and verbal language, between the image and the word, as in the popular phrase "a picture says more than a thousand words". Or, as expressed by the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) who wrote: "The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book". Yet visual and verbal languages have been intertwined for centuries, for example, medieval illuminated manuscripts, with their elaborate illustrations. Or, say, the Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, who incorporated text into their artwork.