Visual Explorer Cards Download
Jenell Taitague
Visual Explorer is a powerful tool for encouraging collaborative conversations and effective dialogue in a safe learning environment. This innovative game uses a series of diverse images to create a visual vocabulary that helps people to express themselves through the use of metaphors, intuition, and emotion.
The Complete Game Kit includes three 54-card decks of postcard-size reusable cards and a Facilitator Guide that provides step-by-step guidelines, case history applications, worksheets, and helpful tips for administering a meaningful training session. A PDF will be available as a download at purchase for instructions on accessing the digital version.
The deck contains 60 cards with human values and their brief definitions, as well as instructions for use. The cards may be sorted according to Always Valued, Often Valued, Sometimes Valued, Seldom Valued, and Never Valued.
The postcard sized cards work well on any size of group up to 16 people but are at their most effective when used in a small group setting due to their smaller size. The minimum time allowed for the activity should be 60-90 minutes.
The Playing Card sized cards work well on any size of group up to 16 but are most effective with more intimate groups and in one-on-one situations. The minimum time allowed for the activity should be 60-90 minutes.
Developed by the Center for Creative Leadership, Visual Explorer is a powerful training tool thats designed to encourage collaborative conversations and useful dialogue in a safe learning environment. This innovative game uses a series of diverse images to create a visual vocabulary that helps people to express themselves through the use of metaphors, intuition, and emotion.
Visual Explorer is not a team exercise, game or simulation. There is no single right way to use it. Many facilitators use it to assist people with important or difficult conversations. Dialogue in groups can be difficult for any number of reasons, such as hidden conflict, power differentials among group members, an unclear idea of the problem the group faces, the inability to envision a solution, and group or organizational norms that make some topics off limits. There are 5 basic steps to using Visual Explorer as a way to facilitate group conversation: frame, browse, reflect, share, and extend.
Grounded in research and practice, Visual Explorer can be used in a wide variety of settings, including team building, communication training, and leadership development.
The Kit includes three 72-card decks of postcard-size reusable cards and a 112-page Facilitator Guide that provides step-by-step guidelines, case history applications, worksheets, and helpful tips for administering a meaningful training session.
When an evaluation process has a need to uncover assumptions and create meaning, a mediate approach using images may be a fruitful process- not just collecting data, but also engaging participants and others in a developmental experience. Other researchers within the visual sociology, ethnography or anthropology field have found photography a valuable means of qualitative research (Schwartz, 1989; Weade & Ernst, 2001, Brace-Govan, 2007).
Visual cards are a valuable addition for any workshop or coaching toolkit. They are a "go-to resource" for boosting engagement and conversations at workshops, retreats, team meeting or coaching conversations.
While many facilitators and coaches purchase visual cards, they're not always sure how to use them. The key to using visual cards is that you allow for enough time for exploration, reflection and dialogue. The ways to use cards are endless, from supporting group members to explore vision, or values, or opportunities. This article explores six different ways to use them. As you read, consider how you might incorporate these in your next programming.
Tip: If you're thinking about bringing cards into a virtual event, be sure that you have copyright access or license to use the cards with virtual groups. If you have the ability to share your screen, you may want to make a selection of the photos available eg. a Powerpoint slide. Alternatively, place a selection of photos (6-9 or more) on a .pdf which you can send out and share.
For individuals - Have individuals select a photo which represents their vision (for their work, leadership, business, career etc). Provide group members with time (from a few minutes to ten minutes) during the session to make notes on the cards (using the questions posed in #1 above). You could also leave time during the session for group members to have dialogue around the card they chose with a partner, breathing more life and detail into that vision as they discuss it. Finally, you could also have them journal their ideas before your next conversation point.
For a team - Have a team create their vision using a selection of different photos. When working with teams you may choose to have them select cards collectively, or individually. Some questions you might ask to prompt ideas are:
The old adage says: "All good things must come to an end". As part of your closure activities, get people to select the card which represents what they are leaving the program with, or what their learning has been. The selected photo can be a visual metaphor that they leave with. Alternatively, you can have them select a Question card which they want to carry forward as an inquiry.
There are dozens of ways to work with visual cards. Jennifer gets so many questions about how to use cards that she developed the 40 Ways to Work with Visual Cards e-book. The 40 Ways resource provides facilitators with one and two page facilitated instructions on forty different ways to work with visual cards, along with five worksheets you can bring into your workshop or training event. The 40 Ways e-book ideal for someone who already has a number of visual cards to work with. Purchase a downloadable copy here >>
An error discovered in the item response theory (IRT) scale analysis for the 1997 NAEP visual arts assessment has been corrected. Changes were made to values in Figures 4.7 and 4.8 in Chapter 4, and five statements regarding significant differences were also corrected in Chapter 4. Some values were changed in Tables 6.2, 6.5, 6.8, 6.11, and 6.14 in Chapter 6. Some values were also changed in Tables 7.1, 7.2, 7.4, 7.5, 7.9, and 7.13 in Chapter 7. Finally, some changes in values were made to Figure B4.7 and to Tables B6.2, B6.5, B6.8, B6.11, B6.14, B7.1, B7.2, B7.3, B7.4, B7.5, B7.9, and B7.13 in Appendix B.
The public discourse on environmental issues employs the news media and the emerging consumer generated media as its primary communication channels. Analyzing the use of these channels by the various discourse participants yields valuable insight into the status of opinion formation on environmental problems. This chapter outlines common methods for the monitoring and visualization of public discourse in the news media and it proposes requirements for the application of such methods to environmental discourse. The integration of geospatial visualizations with semantic dimensions and numeric data is identified as the key challenge in visualizing public discourse on environmental issues. A showcase application which addresses this challenge is briefly presented.
Week 1: Monday, Mar 26 Introduction / Data, Graph and Visualization TypesReadings
- Introduction, Chapters 1-2, Stephen Few's Now You See It, Analytics Press,2009.
- "A classification of visual representations", Lohse, Biolsi, Walker, Reuter, CACM 1994. pdf(Or see CommonView for PDF)
- Download and install Tableau before class today (must be registered for the course).
- Post an introduction to the class discussion board following the instructions there.
- Guide to using the Tableau software package:
The Beginner's Guide to Data Visualization.
- Chapter 1 from Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte. (see CommonView for PDF)
- pp. 1-34, Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, Card, Mackinlay,and Shneiderman, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. (see CommonView for PDF)
- The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for InformationVisualizations (pdf), Shneiderman, Proc. IEEE Conference on VisualLanguages, Boulder 1996.
- Assignment 1 (due before class today)
- Cars dataset, adapted from the ASA 1983 dataset.
- Example of Tableau being used for relief work in Haiti
- Chapter 2 from Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte. (see CommonView for PDF)
- The Structure of the Information Visualization Design Space (pdf), Card and Mackinlay, 1997.
- Chapter 3 from Now You See It
- Mackinlay's Ranking of Visual Encodings: Published Paper
- Assignment 2, Exploratory Data Analysis Duebefore class today.
- Project Proposal Due Friday,Apr 13, 9pm.
- Perception in Visualization (html), C. Healey, 2011.
- Chapters 4 and 5 from Now You See It
- Graph Design I.Q. Test (html), Stephen Few, 2009.
- Graphical Perception (pdf), W. Cleveland and R. McGill, J. Amer. Statistical Assoc.,Vol 79, No 387 (Sep 1984), pp. 531-554.
- Assignment 3, Visualization Critiques Due beforeclass today.
- Revised Project Proposal Due Friday,Apr 20, 9pm.
- Chapters 6 and 12 from Now You See It
- Stephen Few onParallel Coordinates, Business Intelligence Network, Sept 2006.
- Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates, Shneiderman & Aris, IEEE TVCG 2006.
- Understanding research trends in conferences using PaperLens, Leeet al., CHI'05 extended abstracts, 2005. website
- Polaris: A System for Query, Analysis, and Visualization ofMultidimensional Relational Databases, Stolte, Tang, Hanrahan,IEEE TVCG 8 (1), 2002.
- Multidimensional Detective, Inselberg, IEEE Infoviz Symposium,1997.
- Theattribute explorer, Tweedie et al. CHI 1994.
- Space-scale diagrams, Furnas &Bederson, CHI 1995.
- PaperLensvideo
- NVSS video
- Influence (Attribute)Explorer Video
- Now You See It, pp. 143-162 (first half of chapter 7).
- Generalized selectionvia interactive query relaxation,J. Heer, M. Agrawala, W. Willett, CHI 2008, pp. 959-968.
- Visual information seeking: Tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays,Ahlberg & Shneiderman.
- Mid-term presentations due today (should be uploaded to GoPost before class)
- ggobi
- LA HomicidesHeer's example of generalized selection.
- A framework for unifying presentation space, Carpendale and Montagnese, UIST 2001.
- A review and taxonomy of distortion-oriented presentation techniques,Y.K. Leung and M.D. Apperley, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction,Vol. 1, No. 2, June 1994, pp. 126-160.
- Generalized fisheye views,G. W. Furnas, CHI 1986.
- Evaluating the effectiveness ofspatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments,Cockburn and McKenzie, CHI 2002.
- Animation: FromCartoons to the User Interface Bay-Wei Chang, David Ungar, UIST 1993.