Tag: visualthinking

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Working on a visual representation of the European data strategy landscape, integrated as well as alongside a textual representation this morning. It makes for a pleasant experience. The experience comes from what Zsolt Viczián’s Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian allows me to do, something I mentioned here earlier after the PKM Summit last March where Zsolt showed this.

Excalidraw drawings are basically text files describing the drawing, which are then rendered in the viewer. What the plugin supports is putting other text elements outside the drawing elements, and exclude them from the visual view. This creates two representations of the same file: one the drawing presented visually, one the text content outside the visual. Zsolt calls it the ‘flip side’ of a drawing, being a note accompanying the drawing. I see it more like two different views on the same thing. I have a hotkey (cmd arrow down) enabled to flip a note between both views.

Putting both views next to each other, and working in both at the same time, allows me a seamless mode of working, switching between visual material and text writing. As shown in the screenshot below.

Here you see the same note twice, opened in two tabs. The left side is the textual representation. It also contains an embedded auto-generated image from the visual representation but that is something I choose to do. Underneath that image you see some notes I wrote.
The right hand side shows the visual representation, a drawing of how I perceive the context of the European single market for data (at least, part of it).
I use the visual side as a Systems Convening landscape, to think about barriers, possible interventions, visibility etc. I use the text side to turn those thoughts into notes, potential actions, and links to other relevant material, or to write down things I think might be added to the visual.

Over the years my main problem with working more visually has been the lack of fluidity between the visual and the textual. Basically rendering them into two separate silos. Few tools solve that issue (Tinderbox is one). This means I usually favor the textual side of things. Where I use images, they are ‘frozen’ moments of the ever evolving textual side. The set-up this morning is not silo’d and here the creation of visual elements aids the text creation and vice versa, while I work on both in parallel in a single note. Both text and visual evolve together. Very nice.

During the PKM Summit last week I saw Zsolt Viczián do several amazing things with his Excalidraw plugin in Obsidian as part of his visual thinking efforts.
I’m very much a text person, but do recognise the role of visual elements as part of my thinking process. Shifting concepts around, thinking about connections, clustering etc. It engages the spatial parts of the brain, and humans are good at that. As most tools do either one thing or the other, when a tool can do both as just different perspectives on the same thing that draws my attention. It is why I’ve used Tinderbox and e.g. The Brain. Zsolt showed me how Excalidraw in Obsidian can do both too. Any Excalidraw-in-Obsidian image can have a regular note on the other side, and you can switch between them. All this because it’s just one note in markdown with some parts interpreted by Excalidraw and other parts by Obsidian.


A sketch of the elements needed to post my own slidedecks in a nice viewer, now that I’m no longer satisfied with how I’ve ‘brought slides home‘ the past four years.


The same file but now shown as text, where I’ve written a few tasks as part of creating the setup I’ve sketched in the image. Zsolt calls this the backside of the image. I’m more reminded of Tinderbox where you could see something as outline, as timeline, as tree map, as canvas etc. all interchangeable.

Zsolt very much gave me a great nudge to play with this more, and relearn that I do care about visual elements in my notes, and that it’s just that it wasn’t easy enough to build into my routines in making notes.