Monday Afternoon General Session

Making Meaning: Why Visualizations Work
    with Tom Wujec

Digital design tools are evolving at a blistering pace and are touching virtually every industry, from architecture to product design, from financial management to energy exploration, and from science to art. But why? Making Meaning reveals how the brain actually makes sense of visual information, tracing  the near instant journey of nerve impulses from the back of the eye to the multiple destinations throughout the cortex. These fresh insights in visual cognition explain why most of us can't draw even an approximate representation of a dollar bill but why we can envision exactly where we keep the salt shaker in our kitchen, as well as thousands of objects in our spatial memory. Making Meaning explains how our brain makes sense through successive 'aha' moments of discovery and what this means for the future of visualization. Be prepared to be dazzled by stunning illusions, remarkable animations and a 3D digital tour of our brains.

The 6x6 Model: Six Ways of Seeing = Six Ways of Showing
    with Dan Roam

The core of Dan's bestseller The Back of the Napkin is a simple model for looking at the world. Dan's "6x6" model says that any problem can be broken down into just six visual components, and that any solution can be built from the same six pictures. Dan will share this extraordinarily powerful way of looking at the world through an interactive illustration exercise, then present the latest neurobiological research that explains why this approach works.