Visual Thinking for Design

This is a great book for designers who aspire to support their work on a more scientific basis (in a broad sense), not only on aesthetic grounds. Yes, it is not a light reading, full of flashy and trendy pictures and little text, such as we may be used to find on most design literature. You need to use your school background on the nervous system and the brain to relate the neurobiological processes described, which are slowly becoming understood. Nevertheless the book is clear and precise enough to guide the reader through a series of issues, some of them had been approached before, for example by Rudolf Arnheim (who related visual perception in an artistic context with psychology) yet find much more solid and scientific arguments. The author takes us through a step by step complexity of physiological phenomena, that builds an iterative route of a growing complexity. Colin Ware now helps to relate visual perception to everyday cognitive processes and thus have a knowledge that can be applied on much more ample grounds. As a university teacher of design and education this book has been a great support for my design research course. The knowledge that is brought together in the book can serve as part of a conceptual framework for information design, data visualization, interface design, etc.