Shape of Thought

Shape of Thought ~ A New View of Visual Language

An Explosion of Visual Language

Today we are witnessing unprecedented innovation in visualization practices from all disciplines. Through new technologies and approaches, we can map the functioning of the brain in three dimensions, create dynamic carbon maps of the planet during a time of increasing climate crisis, and collaboratively generate the patterns of changing socio-economic indicators. We can, for the first time, visually analyze the structure of knowledge through large-scale data visualizations and fly through abstract space and multiple scales. One thing is certain: today’s visualization tools offer new pattern languages that help us sift through massive amounts of information to make sense of it all.

 

An Emergent Language for Connective Intelligence?

Today, the tools and technologies for connective intelligence are widely available. But with information overload and competition in the attention economy, we need a wise approach to visual language. Many are rushing in with simple answers, taxonomies and translations in an effort to harness visualization as a new universal language.  However, it is only through understanding the deep history of visual language that we can engage the power of visuals.  We must understand this history visually as well as logically. How can we discern the wisest and most effective use of visual language for our future?

 

The “Shape of Thought” View

 As visualization practitioners and scholars, Eileen Clegg and Bonnie DeVarco have been placing their understanding of the current field into a deep historical context for the past five years of researching and writing Shape of Thought, a book and interactive website set to debut in 2009.  DeVarco, who brings the perspective of cultural and symbolic anthropology to the project, has been a pioneer in the design of educational 3D worlds and a curator of visualization technologies. Clegg, who brings decades of journalism to the project, was a pioneer in using large-scale visuals to facilitate conversations about emergent technologies.  Working at the leading edge while studying ancient history, DeVarco and Clegg together have unearthed stories critical to understanding the role of visual language in our time. 

Under the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu is a cave that holds secret to our past.

Toward a Deep History of Visual Communication

Until just five years ago, historians believed that humanity’s visual practices went back only 30,000 years to cave paintings and etchings on stone. Yet the true timeline of visual languages takes us much farther back.  The discovery of shell beads in Blombos Cave on the coast of South Africa tells us the story of visual language dates back at least 75,000 years.*  This discovery “provides powerful evidence for modern thought and the earliest storage of information outside the human brain” and offers us the most ancient evidence of abstract, symbolic thought in our ancestors. 

DeVarco and Clegg's work allows us to reach back farther in time than ever before. Through Shape of Thought, they link humanity’s oldest signs, symbols and artifacts in a seamless thread through the ancient practice of the “Art of Memory,” cartography, the lost history of medieval diagrammatics and immersive simulacra to the most emergent practices of today’s visualization technologies. This history is condensed and encapsulated into illuminated timelines of visual communication – connecting the patterns that lead us to the present day explosion of visualization. 

*Mayell, Hillary. “Oldest Jewelry? ‘Beads’ Discovered in African Cave” National Geographic News. April 15, 2004

What is the Shape of Thought?

by Eileen Clegg and Bonnie DeVarco

"Words and language, whether written or spoken, do not seem to play any part in my thought processes. The psychological entities that serve as building blocks for my thought are certain signs or images, more or less clear, that I can reproduce at will." Albert Einstein

The Intersection of Nature, Geometry, and Communication

 Shape of Thought mural, Eileen Clegg & DeVarco 2009/2010

    Across cultures and throughout time, certain shapes have carried the power to inspire, intimidate, delight and inform. A spiral, a pentagram, a labyrinth may invoke momentary longing, fear, or curiosity, although we may not know why.  Over the millennia, many mathematicians, artists and scientists studied the secrets of timeless symbols—shapes that seem to resonate with Nature and the human mind. But only in modern times, with the explosion of new tools and technologies, has science enabled us to experience the profound truth:

    Certain shapes and symbols draw our attention because they mirror the building blocks of our bodies, the arrangement of distant galaxies, and the complex proportions of Nature’s mechanisms, including the very nature of time itself.  Appearing all around us—from our grandmother’s quilts to Islamic tilings to maps of scientific data—these resonant shapes represent a universal language.  The ancient patterns that humans have drawn in the sand, carved into stone, painted on the skin, woven into textiles and written on countless media from papyrus to paperless cyberspace, tell us a story about who we are and how we make sense of the universe around us. 

Powerful images are not simply representations of physical objects or specific ideas; they are containers of deep truths and ancient wisdom that are felt on an emotional level as well as understood intellectually.  Some symbols and archetypes contain shared meaning around the world and across the generations. Today, as our world becomes more connected and flooded with information, pictures have become critical to sense-making. One theory is that the new global language will be one of images, not words.

As pictures, sketches, and animations become increasingly present on the Web, in schools and organizations, some people today are scrambling to figure out new taxonomies where symbols represent specific things. Some are even trying to develop standards for communicating with images–complete with grammar and rules for a new visual language.  Yet in the rush to translate words into images, we can lose the subtle potency of visual communication by becoming too “literal.” 

    Rather than narrowing the definition of symbols, we can open our minds to wisdom that defies words.  In the ancient language of the visual, shapes themselves contain knowledge:  about time, the universe, human cognition and deep communication.  Instead of just using them, we can learn from them.

The Shape of Thought Approach

Now that humanity has reached a crisis phase—drowning in information, at odds with the Earth, and challenged to collaborate across cultures to solve global-problems—we’ve reached the limits of traditional language as a species trying to gain the wisdom we need to shift our paradigm.  The language of shape (also called “visual language”) is an alternative.  It connects history with a new future.

The “Shape of Thought” an approach to visual language that focuses on the patterns and meanings that link ancient artifacts, emergent technologies, Nature’s geometry, and human cognition.  It is an alternative method of communication that most of us experience every day without full awareness.  It is a re-discovery of a language that our ancestors used more consciously than we do today. The decorations on ancient pottery were not random; often, they conveyed our ancestors’ understanding of the world around them. Visual language is a compressed way of understanding 6000 years of history, as well as the patterns in Nature we’re discovering through today’s sophisticated instrumentation.

Using the Shape of Thought approach, we honor images, particularly those that appear repeatedly through history, as vehicles for communicating more than words can tell us. We explore their historical meaning that may convey wisdom about Nature and humanity that we have forgotten, or do not yet know.  We use a new lens for data: looking for patterns and shapes that are emerging as we visualize today’s massive databases. We think of shape as more than an illustration of ideas, but as an integral part of the story. We begin to see how history and the leading edge meet in universal images that transform as humanity transforms.

Visuals are the Language of Intuition

 

“Ocular imagination” means the “eye of the imagination,” the term was used by 17^th century physician Robert Fludd who thought that an inner eye projected images on to a mental screen.

    Even without understanding the anthropological and scientific reasons for why shapes work, most of us “feel” their meaning.  That is why we often can communicate across languages and disciplines with sketches and gestures. It may be as simple as someone pointing the direction to get somewhere, or as subtle as someone sketching a spiral to explain the unfolding of a new idea. Images often are more than compressed communication; they convey a sense of emotion and meaning.  Some of these are what the great psychologist Carl J. Jung described “archetypes”—symbols that seem to be inherited rather than acquired by humans.

Most of us are vaguely aware that meaningful shapes have their origin in Nature, on the micro and macro scale. Spiral things; fingerprints and galaxies; spherical things: molecules and planets; helical things: climbing plants and proteins. A spiral, a pyramid, a sphere, an “X”, a triskelion,[i] a five-pointed star, a square convey concepts in subtle ways. People sense the meaning of certain shapes.  Often the meaning is shared across cultures, generations, and professions.

    Shapes resonate on a subliminal level. They convey emotions, capture the “gestalt” of a concept, and provide a sense of context.  They do their job, even if their original meanings have been lost in time.  The people who first drew spirals, trees, and stars lived in the same world we do—but perhaps saw it differently because they were more consciously attuned to the cycles of Nature. Some of the images that are now common symbols emerged as a result of the original scientists mapping the world around them. Because we also experience Nature— even unconsciously—these images resonate with us. 

    Often our bodies intuitively know more than our brains understand about the meaning of images.  The language of shape is “spoken” with spatial and kinetic intelligence, and is “read” visually.  As an experiment, ask different people to explain specific concepts with their hands and bodies – “flow,” “excitement,” “the whole idea,” “defeated.”  You will likely find similarities:  an undulating motion for flow, arms open with energetic movement for excitement, hands drawing a wide circle or big square in the air for the whole idea, shoulders slumped and body closed for defeated.  

 

Professionals who participated in Eileen’s 2007 visual communication course demonstrate how the body expresses happiness and triumph.

Now the group demonstrates the physical expression of “defeated.”

 

    Even if our use of these visual cues is intuitive and our response to them unconscious, we are communicating with the language of shape every day.  At a time when information and communication is flowing and changing rapidly, those who understand it consciously will have an advantage. 

An Intentional Visual Culture

 

    Most of our computers have turned into electronic scrapbooks full of photo, videos, sketches and mind-maps. Everyone with a mobile device today has the capability to create and consume a vast array of images on the go.   The emergent visual culture is one of online videos, animations, games, immersive virtual worlds, “augmented” reality environments, global information systems. It’s not unusual on a given day to swap photos and videos, have your avatar walking around in cyberspace, and navigate the real world with a mirror of your movement on you handheld GPS system.  Often the visualizations are for entertainment or used as illustrations for ideas – such as decorative images inside 3D worlds, sketches alongside text in a report, animations that tell a story. But out of the visual riot in today’s media, a more intentional use of visual language is emerging.

    Students are learning to show their ideas in clusters, executives are literally writing on the walls in corporate board rooms, biologists and physicists visit 3D online worlds or immersive domes like University of California’s Allosphere to see and share models of the universe, young readers are creating a new market for graphic novels.  From data analysts to website designers to global team leaders, many people are looking for ways to use images more effectively.

    Many information designers and scientists are studying artifacts dating back thousands of years, back to a time when images were not used randomly but were understood as the language of Nature. In the visual culture of our ancestors—when people lived closer to the Earth—imagery carried deep meaning. The circles and spirals they carved into stone were not just decoration; they were a form of communication about their best understanding of how the world worked. 

 

    Today, as the world of visual communication is rapidly evolving, we have a unique opportunity to consciously witness a shift in our cultural norms and collective perspective. For example, not too long ago, we saw information with a linear and static organization, in books or on grids.  Now information is hyperlinked, three dimensional, and depicted in a variety of shapes.  With geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning satellites (GPS), we can now see information “in place”—tied to specific locations, enabling us to see new relationships and the movements of communities through time and space. 

    How will these perceptual shifts change humanity?  If we are returning to a time when information is depicted in relationship to our planet, will we become more attuned to Nature?  As modern scientists are weaving data into visualizations that help us picture the nature of time and space, are we hearkening back to ancient astronomers whose observations were woven into fabric? What can we learn from the perspective of our ancestors who saw their daily life in relation to the cycles of Nature?

The Shape of Thought approach helps us to answer that question.  We begin with several premises: 

• That humans share a universal language of shape
• The language of shape resonates with the mind
• Shape encodes critical information about the universe

Following is a brief discussion of each of these premises:

Humans Share this Universal Language

Image to honor computer visionary Doug Engelbart’s idea of “Collective IQ”—showing how certain images make sense globally - by Eileen Clegg

    No matter where we travel, usually we can make simple gestures to enable at least some communication.  People of different ages, ethnic groups, and geographies often share a similar, if general, sense of how concepts are shaped.  This is why so many global organizations are using “visual language”  (artful depiction of information using a strategic combination of images + few words).  The most impactful images are those that are very simple, similar to gestures we make with our hands: Like talking with your hands and leaving a mark. As our world gets smaller and we are challenged to collaborate across cultures to solve urgent global problems, visual language helps create context for conversations, learning and collaboration. We might not convey details in this kind of communication, but we can share the gestalt or “big picture” of meaning. To the ancient Chinese saying “a picture is worth a thousand words,” we would add “across cultures and throughout time.”

The Language of Shape Resonates with the Mind

     Cognitively, certain images connect with the unconscious mind in a way that communicates context as well as content.  Unbeknownst to most of us, certain powerful shapes are containers of ancient knowledge and accurate reflectors of the how Nature works.  As such, visual language can create a cognitive frame that enables us to “wrap our heads” around complex topics. 

    While data scientists struggle with how to make massive amounts of data available to decision-makers who need information to make good decision, individuals from all ages and walks of life are struggling with how to sort through the massive amount of data and communication that come into our lives every day.  Increasingly, those in the middle—the technology interface designers—are looking at shape and pattern to guide them in organizing information. 

Shape Encodes Critical Information about Nature and the Universe

 
The Astrolabe was an ancient astronomical computer.

    There is a reason why NASA scientists still use the astronomical records that were kept by the Babylonians more than 2000 years ago even as they collect new data with sophisticated new technologies.  Throughout human history, brilliant thinkers have contemplated the universe and recorded its cycles using the tools they had available at the time.  Their observations were often built one upon the other. Often, important information and artifacts that were lost for centuries, and once uncovered, became useful in refining our science or allowing new discoveries to be made. Many times, scientists and engineers have made breakthroughs after studying historical artifacts—often outside their own discipline—by identifying patterns the original creator might not have even recognized as significant. Learning the “read” the language of shape is a way of understanding information in a new way.  Understanding the story behind shapes may lead to a new understanding of the universe and our place in it.  

Words Capture Ideas; Images Free Them

 

Words in context:  The application “Wordle” www.wordle.com enables us to see the gist of a chunk of text.  In this case, we put in the words of this chapter into the online Wordle application and saw which words came up most frequently.  Today’s visual language is often a strategic combination of words and images. (As a visual aside, this wordle does look like a footprint). 

    For most of the 20^th century, “art” and “communication” were separated in the Western world. Art was for entertainment or decoration, and communication occurred via words, spoken or written.  Cave paintings were considered “primitive,” ancient textiles were “folk art” and picture books were for children. That began to change toward the end of the 20^th century with the advent of the World Wide Web, the fast cycling of information , a new “many-to-many” form of communication, and the emphasis on innovation.

    As author Daniel Pink said, the 21^st century ushered in “conceptual age.”[i] With the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, finding information is no longer a challenge.  Understanding, communicating, collaborating with information is the challenge. Age-old visual tools began appearing—butcher paper on the walls of meeting rooms, napkin sketches during business lunches—then taking new form on the Web with interactive graphics and immersive worlds.

    The strategic combination of words + images can capture the sweet spot: A few words to convey information, contained in an image that conveys context.   Words have literal, clear meaning.  Images have figurative amorphous meaning.   Historically, images and ideas worked together to convey concepts. Then words and images became disconnected.  With the advent of the printing press in the 15^th century, humanity shifted to text-based written communications and much of the wisdom encoded in graphics for 12,000 years was lost.  Today the ancient images and diagrams are being revived, restored and reproduced in high resolution on the Web.  Many of these images are now being seen and circulated beyond the museums and archives, the experts and scholars to the general public for the first time.

    We are at a crossroads in how we use images today.  Will the world culture revive the ancient language of shape? Or largely persist in the unconscious use of visual language? What will we choose as individuals and as a global collective?  Will images be entertaining?  Illuminating?  Inspiring? Or containers of wisdom new and old?  There are four levels in which images are being used today.

(1)  The Random Use of Images.  Finding sketches and pictures and clip art that seem like decorative or interesting additions to text.  Lots of eye candy and visual stimulation to accompany the plethora of text we see every day.

(2)  Art to Invoke Meaning and Emotion.  Inviting artists who “speak the language of intuition” with their hands and bodies to migrate their “felt” understanding of the shape of thought into the technological world.  Bringing calming and beautiful online spaces for  information—live and online—with aesthetics as the driver so that information is conveyed with subliminal context.

(3) The Shape of Thought Approach: Invoking and responding to imagery with deep intention:  Understanding the origin of shapes and symbols and invoking them thoughtfully, choosing appropriate containers for a concept.  Bring anthropologists, scientists and artists together for a “shape of thought” approach to organizing information.

(4) Developing the Shape of Thought.  Uncovering and discovering new patterns in data and integrating this new knowledge into the next iteration of visualization. At this highest level of imagery, we are learning from the patterns that emerge naturally from information. How does a list, a spreadsheet, a data set arrange itself visually?  How does that align with other patterns, from different disciplines and different times?  How does that data allow us to iterate our visualizations to a new level? The shape of thought serves us mostly deeply when the patterns providing information we could not see before visualizing it.

Prove it with "The Shape Test"

We see concepts in images, and to the extent those concepts are shared, we experience communication at a deeper level.  As an experiment, try the following Shape Test, linking the number of the shape with the letter of the definition.  Then try it out on someone else at home or in the office.  Then talk about why you made the decisions you did.

     If you compare your answers with others, you likely found a number of similarities and some differences.  Rarely is there a universal precise translation from word to image; yet we tend to associate words with concepts in ways that are mutually understood in surprising ways.

A 21st Century Renaissance

We know that we share meaning from shape.  We know that today’s proliferation of data requires us to understand visuals more deeply. We know that we must sift, analyze, condense and compress.  But we stop right there.  Can we take the leap?

    At a time when so much of the world is “connected,” visual language could be a key to transforming the way we view one another and our planet.  It crosses borders, professions, and age groups—and connects us with Nature and our ancestors.

    The great Renaissances of history occurred at times of convergence, at the intersection of cultures, traditions, disciplines, arts and sciences. Deep shifts occurred that enabled breakthroughs in technology, science, and humanity’s understanding of itself.

    During the most well known Renaissance—in the 14^th to the 16^th centuries—artists and scientists returned to and drew upon the wisdom of the brilliant thinkers before them, the ancient Greek philosophers whose knowledge was in turn, influenced by earlier teachers from Egypt, India, Persia and Babylonia. An earlier Renaissance occurred in the 9^th to 11^th centuries as translators in the Arab world looked back to Greek classical works and added new commentaries. Then these texts traveled to through Spain, the crossroads between Europe and the Arab world to help initiate the birth of our Universities. These cycles of “rebirth” always included a great return to periods in history, and the study of visual artifacts that encoded knowledge.

     With the world’s knowledge at our fingertips and all of the world’s population in our extended networks—we have all the ingredients for another Renaissance that could bring our cutting-edge technologies together with ancient wisdom about how humans are connected to Nature and to one another.  As with the great Renaissance periods of the past, exploring the history of imagery can reveal deep insights about humanity and the world—insights found at the intersection of Nature, geometry and human communication.

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[i] Pink, Daniel.  A Whole New Mind. New York:  Riverhead Books. 2005.

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[i] [i] See discussion of the triskelion in Chapter 2. 

 

Curiosity, Coincidence or "Code"?

by Eileen Clegg and Bonnie DeVarco

“The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature. When nature begins to reveal her open secret to a person, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.”  Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Patterns of Genius

    While most of us “read” the language of shape subliminally, many of history’s notable artists, philosophers and scientists did so intentionally enabling their genius creations and discoveries.  Leading thinkers in many disciplines explored shapes and their geometries, learning Nature’s language so they could translate sound into music, words into poetry, canvasses into art, and observations into scientific theory.

Page from original copy of Luca Pacioli's 1509 Treatise, De Divina Proportione with sketch of polyhedra by
 Leonardo da Vinci. On exhibit in Mlan, ItalyCC Paxelsson

    A recent revival of interest in the story of shape focused on a well-known genius of history, Leonardo Da Vinci, who worked at the intersection of many disciplines – art, mathematics, science and engineering.  Leonardo painted memorable art pieces including the “Mona Lisa,” designed technologically advanced machinery including an early version of the helicopter, carried forward mathematical innovations based on the work of ancient geometers, and discovered the workings of the human body by dissecting animals.  Nearly 500 years after his death, a novel captured the imagination of a culture beginning to rediscover visual language.  In 2003, the book Da Vinci Code­ [i] spun a tale of a historical conspiracy with clues encoded in ancient artifacts.

  While the “code” concept makes for great fiction, the reality is far less illicit and far more elegant.  Nature speaks the same way to everyone; some just listen more carefully than others. As Goethe said, it is an “open secret.”  With today’s tools for analyzing ancient manuscripts and artifacts, we’re discovering that our ancestors mapped the workings of Nature, and made discoveries that are helping today’s scientists. Nature’s patterns appear in pan cultural art throughout time.   It seems like a code because it underlies so many disciplines and communication forms.

  Shapes in nature –sometimes called  “nature’s language”– are not just static forms. They predict the process of growth, the cycles of planets and, and the principles of aesthetics. Conspiracy theories aside, there is some truth to the stories about ancient sects with hidden documents explaining the patterns of Nature. Knowledge about the relationship between geometry, shape, art, architecture and science was passed on through various exclusive organizations over centuries.  But the knowledge is not hidden; it can be found with just a little digging into the journals of people who have influenced global knowledge.  Many were privy to studies of earlier generations.  A few examples: 

• The Greek philosopher Plato, known to most Philosophy 101 students as the author of the political treatise “The Republic,” was a student of geometry who wrote about “perfect forms,” and postulated a geometric basis for the universe and in his work Timaeus (360BC)

• German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) generally known for his literary contributions was a polymath who studied science, optics, shape and color and whose philosophy influenced Charles Darwin, who is credited with the theory of evolution.

• Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was mathematician C. L.  Dodgson (1832-1898) whose work in geometry carried forward that of ancient Greek mathematician Euclid.  Carroll’s writings are thought to contain references to mathematical and logic problems.

• Composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is thought to have created his harmony, rhythm and other musical structures based on his studies of shape and proportion. [ii] A quote attributed to him:  “music is the arithmetic of sound as optics is the arithmetic of light.”

    From these and other influential creators of the past, we can surmise that the study of shape enhances creativity and innovation.  Clearly, innovative thinking comes from crossing disciplines to discover patterns at the intersection.  But there is more to it:  There is something special about certain shapes that allows them to impact our thinking and imagination in unexpected ways.

Begin with the Golden Mean

  The golden mean is fairly well known as a mathematic concept, so it provides a good launch into the exploration of shape of thought.  Leonardo and Debussy are among those who based some of their work on the Golden Mean.  It appears all around us in Nature, in art, in architecture and even our teeth – and yet the concept is elusive to most in these modern times when the power of shape is not well understood. 

The golden mean is a geometric ratio found throughout Nature and human design. It is pleasing to the human eye and is one of Nature’s most ubiquitous building tools.  In the next set of images, you can a “golden rectangle” at work.  A golden rectangle is one in which the long side is slightly more than one and a half times the other.  In the image, you see a set of nested rectangles with a spiral inside, demonstrating a unique property of the golden ratio:  If you cut a square from the Golden Rectangle, the remaining rectangle would have exactly the same height-to-width ratio as the original rectangle. Cut a square from that, and again you are left with a remaining rectangle that has the same height-to-width ratio, and on and on.  Only a rectangle scaled to the Golden Mean has this property. Inside the rectangle, the “Golden Spiral” is also defined by this special proportion. It is the same spiral found in the galaxies and, as shown, in a shell, cauliflower, sunflower and ancient artistic motifs and is known by its symbol, PHI - Φ.[iii]

 

 

 

 

 

    In the 1980s, British dentist Dr. Edwin Levin applied the golden proportion to make false teeth more natural, an endeavor that led him to create the “golden mean gauge” instrument to measure the ratio on everything from teeth to insects to famous architectures.[iv]

 

 

Dr. Edwin Levin's "Golden Mean Gauge" shows the golden ratio in a smile, a butterfly wing, the Great Wall of China.

 

 

For more than two millennia, the golden mean has been used by artists, architects and scientists in wildly different ways:  To design type fonts and page layouts, to design buildings, and to understand the proportion of the body. Today the golden mean also informs some of our newest technologies.  It is being used in biotechnology and nanotechnology to design our smallest human machines; it is also used to understand the structure of the cytoskeleton and micro-crystals and to understand better the workings of our brains.

As a “code” the golden mean has turned out to be, as scientist Mario Livio called it, “astonishing.”[v]  As a key for bringing beauty and power to their art, the golden mean was known by Leonardo da Vinci and other artists as “divine.”[vi]  

 

Beyond the Golden Mean

As it turns out, the golden mean is only the beginning of the story. Exploring the geometry of Nature – spheres, spirals and the practical beauty of five-fold symmetry –opens a world of knowledge into the art of human communication.

Startlingly, we’ve now discovered that ancient humans used symbols based on features of Nature they could not see with their eyes or instruments.  Is it possible, as some have theorized, that humans intuitively speak the language of Nature – not just through observation? That theory gains credibility with discoveries that made through the electron microscope and the scanning tunneling microscope.

Some of the shapes depicted in ancient artifacts that were invisible to the human eye and came into view only with the advent of 20^th century tools included microstructures that are fundamental to the workings of our planet, among them:  The Carbon-60 molecule (the buckminsterfullerene), the micro-organism, Emiliania huxleyi,[vii] and the brain protein clathrin[viii].

 

 

    Each of these organisms resembles the “buckyball” shape, most familiar to people because of the geodesic dome created by architect Buckminster Fuller. Each is a truncated icosahedron (20-faced sphere with 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons). Each serves as a transport mechanism:  Buckminsterfullerene in the Universe, Emiliania huxleyi in Earth’s oceans, and clathrin in the brain. And they do so because they have the ability to weave themselves together when necessary and unbind when their task is done.

     Unbound, they show another layer of shapes that are also strangely familiar. In fact, these shapes can be seen in the art of the ancient Southeast Asian three-way weave, a part of ancient basketry practices and an important design feature of the woven balls for the game, sepak-takraw, played with a ball based on the same structure of buckyballs –  and the same flexible geometry that also inspired Fuller’s geodesic domes.[ix]

   Are the similarities in structure just a coincidence?  Or are Nature’s structures somehow understood intuitively beyond our logical thinking?  The story behind Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome offers insight into these questions.

 

 

The Architect, the Chemist and the Brain

    Architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller’s life and work demonstrate the power of shape.  Born in 1895 and famous as “the world’s friendly genius” by the time he died in 1983, Fuller worked across disciplines and deep into the interrelated aspects of Nature, geometry, and design.[x]  He was among the visionaries whose work demonstrates the power of shape—what he called “Nature’s technology”—in cross-disciplinary wisdom.  He was known for his philosophy and architecture, most famously for the geodesic dome that would later have a profound influence on chemistry and nanotechnology.

    The importance of the sphere came to him in a vision in 1927, at a time when he was in the depths of despair over the death of his first daughter and his inability to provide for his new child and her Mother.[xi]  He was questioning his will to live when he envisioned himself surrounded by a transparent sphere, and these words came into his mind, “You do not belong to you, you belong to the Universe.”  He then dedicated his work to the power of efficient design, which, he discovered could be found in the hidden geometry of the sphere.

    The dome captured the zeitgeist of the environmental movement. During the socially turbulent 1960’s, Fuller galvanized a generation of artists and musicians who resonated with his writings about Nature, and his bubble-like Expo dome became an icon of optimism and holistic thinking. A student-created geodesic dome was a feature of the first Earth Day celebration at University of Minnesota, where Fuller was a speaker in 1970 – and the dome would come to be associated with Earth Day and sustainability, which was central to Fuller’s vision for a better world. Fuller’s geodesic dome was so appealing to people that it has been used for world expos, theaters, trade fairs and auditoriums. But the dome had properties that extended well beyond its aesthetic appeal. After his death, in the 21^st century, the geodesic dome, affectionately called the “buckyball,” would be considered a key to understanding nanotechnology.[xii]

    Fuller lived to see his intuition develop into a design science approach that has inspired the world. But he did not live to see another powerful effect of his vision.  It was after his death that the structure of his geodesic dome inspired a significant scientific breakthrough:  Scientists Richard Smalley, Harold Kroto and Robert Curl had been puzzling over the 3-dimensional structure of a newly discovered carbon60 molecule, invisible to the eye even with a microscope:  They knew it was made up of hexagon shapes, but how could the hexagons curve into a sphere? 

    Dr. Kroto recalled his experience inside Fuller’s Expo ’67 dome in Montreal that was a key feature of the U.S. Pavilion.  He realized that Fuller’s geodesics held the key to understanding the molecule’s 3-dimensional curved shape.[xiii]  Fuller introduced pentagons between the hexagons to create his domes, enabling curvature.  Richard Smalley called the buckminsterfullerene the “Rosetta stone of nanoscale architecture because of its dynamic properties and unique symmetry. [xiv] It enabled chemists to create carbon nanotubes by introducing pentagons to create curvatures in a lattice structure to close the ends or to braid the nanotubes into “ropes”.

 

 

 Left to Right: Buckminsterfullerene (C60) molecule. Fuller & Sadao’s Expo ’67 Dome, Montreal, 2004 
 PSCHologram montage  of Buckminster Fuller portrait (circa 1980) and a model of buckyball (by Ellen Sandor,1996).

 

    Fuller had an intuitive vision of a shape that turned out to be a building block of the universe—before scientists were able to perceive it in Nature.   Was this an example of understanding “the language of intuition” that is also the language of nature?  To Fuller, beauty of design and the workings of Nature were not separate.  He often talked about “Nature’s technology” and its resonance with beauty. “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, it must be wrong.”[xv]

    One of Buckminster Fuller’s phrases was “invisible architecture,” referring to what he believed to be unseen organizing principles of the universe.  He studied geometry in relation to “synergy” (the term he popularized meaning “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of its parts considered separately).   His own experience demonstrates how synergy may arise from an innate comprehension of the power of shape.

The Invisible Roots of Symbols

    Perhaps Fuller would not have been surprised to learn that his geodesic dome reflected an invisible and essential carbon molecule.  Or that other shapes that people discovered intuitively would also turn out to have morphological siblings on the micro-scale.  It’s a leap to try to explain why.  Is it possible that we “feel” or “sense” the language of Nature, and automatically express it in our movements and art?

    We have examples of symbols that seem to have universal meaning, without their originators knowing why.  The symbol of the triskelion is one.  It is included in the brain protein clathrin. As described above, clathrin works by folding and unfolding.  When it unfolds, the parts are in a shape of three curved “legs”—the triskelion. 

    The triskelion is a shape that has become a symbol in many cultures around the globe, dating back to ancient artifacts developed at a time when humans had no way of knowing its role in the human body.

   

Ancient Tibetan, Celtic and British symbols depicting the triskelion

 
 The folding and unfolding of the brain protein clathrin. [Screenshots from an animation by Tomas Kirchhausen and Allison Bruce, Harvard University
 http://www.idi.harvard.edu/uploads/mm/images/13_1Clathrin_1.mov

 

 

Can Nature Help Shape Our Thoughts?

    Amazingly, ancient symbols were based on images of Nature that were invisible to the people who created them.  This shifts our thinking about communication. We’ve long known that Nature’s principles enhance art and design—key ingredients in deep communication (engaging the “heart and mind,” the conscious and unconscious).   Now we are beginning to discover the reverse is also true:  That art and design can give us a glimpse into Nature, perhaps even aspects of Nature as yet undetected.

    Nature does have a “code”  – it’s comprised of math and geometry, “Nature’s technology” that inspired Fuller and so many other geniuses.  Whether uncovered though observation or intuitive leaps of thought, Nature’s technology determines the patterns in the Universe.  Should we be surprised to discover that it also applies to our human communication?

    Looking back at the scientific observations and artistic of past eras enables discovery of the shapes and symbols that have endured over time.  If we “unpack” these shapes and symbols, most have a story to tell.  They carry the weight of centuries of human interpretation. 

    Understanding the interplay between Nature and shape is a step toward understanding how we can use Nature’s technology to re-engineer our communication, data visualization, and information organization at a time of cognitive excess. 

    It also is a step toward exploring what we can learn about Nature and our own human challenges—which were shared by our ancestors—from shapes, symbols and artifacts that are part of our collective global culture.

 

 

---

 

[i] Brown, Dan The Da Vinci Code. New York: Random House. 2003

 

[ii] Howatt, Roy, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983.  

[iii] The famous “Fibonacci sequence” is intimately linked to the golden mean. In the 12th century, mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in his studies on rabbit breeding discovered a number series that both reflects PHI and can be used to derive PHI.  It is now called the Fibonacci Sequence. This number series is endless, but begins as 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144...  These numbers may look random, but they are not.  Starting with 0 and 1, each successive number is the sum of the previous two. The PHI ratio starts to appear after the first eight numbers in this sequence. The magical ratio between the numbers then occurs over and over again.

 [iv] http://www.goldenmeangauge.co.uk/

 

 

[v] Mario Livio, Head of the Science Division at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, published the most important recent historical work on the Golden Mean in 2002. The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the Worlds Most Astonishing Number is one of the most extensive additions to the timeline of historical and mathematical treatments of the golden mean.

 

[vi] The golden mean has been a recurring subject within many classic works. It was first mathematically defined in Euclid’s Elements in the 4^th century BCE and discussed in Vitruvius’s 10 books on architecture. The term “divine proportion” was later applied to the golden mean by Fra Luca Pacioli in his book De Divina Proportione. Written in 1499 and published in 1509 and this was the first book completely devoted to the Divine Proportion. With its 60 color plates of polyhedra, Pacioli’s was also the only book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci. The 2000-year timeline of books on the Divine Proportion is discussed later in the "Shape of Thought" series.

 

 

[vii] Although it is hard to see the specific geometry of the coccolithopore, Emiliania huxleyi, the most prevalent form is made of 10 round coccolith platelets self assembled with radial symmetry. The geometry of these platelets creates an internal structural pattern of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, the “truncated icosahedron,” one of the most spherical of the family of polyhedra.

 

 [viii] Clathrin coated vesicles are found throughout the human body, with clathrin’s role to bring nutrients into the body and facilitate communication between the cells.  To do this, clathrin assembles into geodesic “basket shapes” of varying sizes. But the clathrin protein that is found in the brain – synaptic clathrin -  is exactly the same truncated icosahedron shape as buckminsterfullerene and is sometimes referred to as the “biofullerene.” Koruga, Djuro, Stuart Hameroff, et.al. Fullerene C60 – History, Physics, Nanobiology, Nanotechnology. North Holland Publishers. 1993. p142.

[ix] Subsequent installments of the "Shape of Thought" series explores the influence of the Southeast Asian three-way weave on Fuller’s work in detail.

 

 

[x] From 1927 to 1983 R. Buckminster Fuller devoted his life to what became a lifetime experiment that he called “Guinea Pig B” – B for Bucky. During his 56-year experiment, Fuller left an incredible legacy of artifacts, patents and publications, as well as what the Smithsonian called the “most extensive personal archive in existence.” See “Life, Facts & Artifacts” by Bonnie DeVarco, an essay on Fuller’s archive from the companion Web Site for the American Masters Biography: R. Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud.http://www.thirteen.org/bucky/devarco.html

 

[xi] Fuller’s young daughter, Alexandra, died from complications from polio and spinal meningitis in 1922.  His second daughter, Allegra, was born in 1927 when Fuller was 32 years old.

 

[xii] “For Fuller there were no flat planes. Everything was curved, from space to shape. Everything was in motion and was continually shifting. But the classical shapes remain as guideposts to form found throughout the Universe. His approach the same problems that earlier geometricians and artists tackled by "tiling the plane" or building polyhedra was through the closest packing of spheres. Delineating vector lines within closest packed spheres, Fuller defined the basic polyhedra that could be used as dynamic building blocks on a larger scale.”  DeVarco, Bonnie. “Energetic Architecture – Buckminster Fuller’s Geometry of the Sphere.” fromInvisible Architecture. Online Publication. 1996. http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/invisible.htm

 

[xiii] “Kroto remembered the day he had walked around with his son inside the Expo Geodesic Pavilion in 1967. He had marveled at the triangular latticework of the huge sphere that surrounded him, a sphere that needed no internal supports. Almost 20 years later as Kroto and Smalley discussed Fuller's geodesic dome and its possible relevance to their finding, Smalley decided to check out a book on Fuller from the library and take a closer look at his domes. He found the secret in a photo of Fuller's 1958 Union Tank Car Dome in Baton Rouge, the largest clear span enclosure of its day. Fuller used pentagons! Once they figured that out, it was easy for them to build a cage structure of sixty atoms whose shape exhibited 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. Kroto and Smalley felt it most appropriate to name it “buckminsterfullerene” for its striking resemblance to Fuller's geodesic domes”  DeVarco, Bonnie. “The Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene” from Invisible Architecture. Online Publication. 1996. http://members.cruzio.com/~devarco/nature.htm  See a longer account of the discovery of buckminsterfullerene in Chapter 2 “September 1985” in: Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. The Most Beautiful Molecule – The Discovery of the Buckyball. Canada: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1995. pp52-92.

 

[xiv] In an early lecture on nanotechnology in 1996, the late chemist and Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley described the importance of buckminsterfullerene’s natural structure to the still emergent field of nanotechnology, "Carbon has an incredible ability to spontaneously assemble to form these objects. That's what we really discovered. The more we think about that, and how neat these objects are, the more we are beginning to realize that we can find ways of tricking nature in to self assembling carbon into other fullerene-like shapes as well, and that these new materials may well have major practical as well as theoretical significance. "In fact, it emerges that buckyball was (and is) a sort of Rosetta Stone of what we now realize is an infinity of new structures made of carbon one way or another . . . And the deciphering of the C60 Rosetta Stone has led us to start dreaming of all sorts of new structures that truly are geodesic architecture on a nanometer scale, and to scheme about how to make them." 
Smalley , Richard. "From Tubes to Ropes." Presentation to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, S. Texas January 1996 http://cnst.rice.edu/aiche96.html

[xv] Fuller’s original oft-quoted comment in full is:  "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." This quote is attributed to numerous sources in Fuller’s live talks and transcripts.

ReVisioning Trees

by Bonnie DeVarco and Eileen Clegg

The tree is history’s most enduring symbol, one that demonstrates beautifully how our visual representations are shaped by human perception.  We use shapes to visualize knowledge. These visualizations, in turn, shape the way we perceive the world.  Using the Shape of Thought Approach [1], we can see how history and the leading edge meet in a universal image that has transformed as humanity has transformed.  

 

Traveling through history in a short series of images and visualizations  of the tree, we can see a very different story about human perception than that told in the text-based, historical record.  Looking at how humans have used the tree structure as a communication tool, we can see how humanity’s perception of who we are and how we fit in the Universe changed through the centuries.

    The following three tree stories - The Tree of Life, The Tree of Human Relationships and The Tree of Knowledge - demonstrate how our perception of ourselves and our relationships is not static.  Instead, it is a dynamic, ever-changing visual conversation between generations

The Tree of Life to the Superorganism 

The World Tree

    The tree is one of the oldest, most enduring visual metaphors in human history. Because of its dense networks of roots, branches and foliage, the tree is often used to visualize relationships between species, languages, families and social groups. For at least the past 2000 years, it has also been used to map hierarchies of knowledge and ideas. 

The tree is central to the way many cultures understand the cosmos. It also represents the source of life. Every sacred practice and religion used tree myths to tell origin stories, from the oral tradition of the Icelandic Edda to the Tree of Life in the Judeo Christian Bible.  The tree also holds answers to future-oriented questions about information management, because its growth pattern involves fundamental properties of geometry, including the Golden Mean, which can be applied as a design approach or used in algorithms for digital design.

    Ancient cultures throughout the world used the tree as a symbol to represent the construction of the universe. The oldest symbolic use of the tree was the “World Tree” or the “Tree of Life.” Mircea Eliade, renowned historian of myth, religion, ritual and symbol, traced the World Tree idea to the navel of the Earth, a symbol found in the folklore, stories, rituals and architectures of numerous indigenous cultures around the world. The Tree of Life is also referred to as “axis mundi” or the cosmic axis - literally the point of connection between the sky and earth.

    In Norse mythology the world tree is called “Yggdrasil”, an oak tree that connects all nine worlds of Norse Mythology together.  Visualized as a colossal tree, the Yggdrasil connected the heavens to the Earth with its roots extending deep underground. 

    For pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica (the Aztec, Izapan, Mixtec Maya and Olmec) the World Tree was central to the origin of the Cosmos. Their reverence for the Milky Way was linked directly to the World Tree, the center of the Earth-Sky.

    Since ancient times, we have represented humanity and the gods or higher powers as part of the tree of life.  More than three millennia ago in Mesopotamia, the tree of life was depicted on bas-reliefs as both a symbolic and literal image capturing the force that connects all life. 

     To the ancient Egyptians, the “tree of life” was an Acacia tree from which the first couple, Isis and Osiris emerged; they called it the “tree in which life and death are enclosed." [2] In the Judeo-Christian Bible, the book of Genesis introduces two trees—the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit from the tree of life gives immortality. When Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they lose their innocence and are banished from the Garden of Eden. A more abstract Tree of Life can be found in the Hebrew Kabbalah. Called the “Sephirot” it is a mystical diagram with ten sephirot (spheres or emanations). Between the 10 spheres are 22 sacred pathways used to “map” creation—wisdom from the direct understanding of the nature of God.

     The Tree of Life in the religious or symbolic context encapsulated the idea that everything is related, from the cosmos to the tiniest atoms in our bodies. In the nineteenth century we witnessed the emergence of a different tree metaphor, the scientific tree of life. 

Classifying Life

 Charles Darwin, a naturalist who spent a decades carefully charting the variations among animals of the same species in different environments, helped ground the fledgling field of evolutionary biology in a more exacting science. He published his remarkable scientific work, On the Origin of Species in 1859. This book contained only one illustration - an abstract diagram showing Darwin’s theoretical “tree” of multiple species related to a common genus.

Many years earlier Darwin had drawn the genesis of his tree of life idea as a simple network structure. A sketch next to his earliest thoughts on this tree of relationships and speciation was drawn 22 years before his legendary book was finally published.   This sketch is considered to be the very first “network diagram” - his first depiction of a scientific “tree of life” next to his now famous words, “I think.” 

    In the 19^th century, biologist and physician Ernst Haeckel, a protégé of Darwin’s, was the first to describe and codify the “phylogenetic tree” into five branches. Charles Darwin knew it was important to visualize the relationships among groups of organisms for his theory of evolution. Integrating Darwin’s idea of an abstract branching diagram with Haeckel’s own ideas about genetic evolution, Haeckel  animated this vision using a literal tree structure as a natural metaphor and as a structural diagram of relationships. Forty years after Darwin’s sketch, Haeckel published the first official image of the genetic “Tree of Life”. At the time, the notion of human progress was deeply embedded into the theory of evolution and humans were considered the pinnacle of the Tree.    

     As both artist and scientist, Haeckel is best known for his beautiful illustrations of the morphology of microscopic life forms. He named thousands of new species and coined many terms for biology including “phylogeny”. His tree was called the “phylogenetic tree.”

    The evolving morphology of the scientific “tree of life” through the next couple centuries tells a story about our increasing knowledge of life. In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, biologists have acquired a greater understanding of the genetic relationships among the species.  Haeckel’s literal image of the tree with roots still limited our way to diagram genetic relationships. The Tree of Life was not a direct or hierarchical lineage, but rather a radial branching of various species from a common ancestor.  By 1960, the Phylogenetic Tree image organized the species’ into five different “Kingdoms.” 

    Throughout most of the 20th century, the tree of life still had five kingdoms; we still shaped our understanding of life into an anthropomorphic framework by the use of the word, “kingdoms.” 

    More recently, the work of scientist Carl Woese started a revolution in the way we classify life by taking out the hierarchy where humans represent the pinnacle of evolution. He did this by organizing the tree of life into only three domains. 

      At this point, the plant and animal “kingdoms” were seen to be part of the Eucarya family, and the name “kingdoms” had been changed to “domains.” The new tree of life’s three domains were dominated by microscopic life - bacteria and archaea. Lynn Margulis, who championed a new way of looking at evolution in the theory of symbiogenesis, originally proposed by cell biologist Boris Kozo-Polyansky created the first dendrogram showing these trees in the 1970s. 

With Haeckel’s 19^th century conception of dominant branches of life being animalia, protista and plantae  we look back to see this as  a time when scientists considered humans and meso-scale life to be the dominant life form on the planet.  Today, we understand a vastly different story about life on Earth. Humans have been knocked off their pedestal.

Mapping Life on Earth

  Last century, the burgeoning of genetic knowledge and a concern about the many threats to biodiversity gave rise to a project to map all life on Earth. Using the power of the World Wide Web to link the work of hundreds of biologists from around the world together, the “Tree of Life web project” (ToL) was launched in 2002. In its first five years, this project has networked together the collective work of professional scientists, teachers, students and amateurs. Over 1.7 million species are identified and searchable on more than 10 thousand web pages. [3]

  In 2006, a new, interactive genomic tree of life was completed by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) showed us a different picture of the relationship of humans to other forms of life. It is considered the most accurate tree of life to date.

    The evolution of tree imagery demonstrates how, through a new generation of science centered around genomics, we are reframing the way we look at our place on our planet. New research by Princeton biologist Bonnie Bassler demonstrates that, genomically speaking, 99 percent of our bodies are comprised of bacteria that actually talk to each other using a chemical language called quorum sensing. With new views based on the burgeoning field of genomics we are forced to further to rethink our place in the tree. Humans have become a “footnote in the story of bacteria” and life looks more like a vast “superorganism” from this genomic point of view. 

These new visualizations of the tree of life convey a far more accurate "whole systems" view of life on Earth. We see the dominant branches of the tree the very modest place humans, and all mesoscale life hold in a living system dominated by microscale life. As scientists map more and more of the diversity of life, we need bigger, and more dynamic “tree” maps to contain the hundreds of thousands of life forms on the tree.  

In the late 1990's, CAIDA's WALRUS, a large graph mapping too, enabled us to visualize the structure of the Phylogenetic tree as we know it today through a 3D hyperbolic space through a computer screen. 

      Even today, 3D visualization gives us a glimpse of what might be possible when we are able to fly in and around a 3 dimensional virtual or augmented genomic tree and to “feel” where we fit into the whole.  We see in the biological Tree of Life, the progression from a linear, hierarchical vision of relationships to a circular, radial and eventually spherical image of the tree. As we’ll see below, the metamorphosis of the family tree paralleled the evolution of the Tree of Life as humans began to think less traditionally and linearly in our use of metaphors. 

A Metaphor becomes an Algorithm

    The tree in nature as a visual metaphor and symbol has become more and more abstract when we use its image as a structural principle to organize social relationships and knowledge.  But can the tree as a visual metaphor drawn directly from nature somehow also lead us directly back to nature’s own geometry? Could we decipher a “code” that would allow us to automatically generate virtual 3-dimensional trees as realistic as those in the real world? Although most people are unaware, we are already well on our way to doing that. It is part the most recent history of our visual languages: the history of visual math (fractals) and the emergence of virtual worlds.

    In the 1970s biologist and botanist, Aristide Lindenmeyer created a formal grammar – a computer language to model the growth processes of plant development in order to study plant growth. His language is called “L-Systems” and it has been used since that time to generate lifelike branching structures. [4] 

    Amazingly, the tree takes us right back to our very special symmetry. When Lindenmeyer began his work, mathematicians had already discovered two things: (1) math could be used to understand complex systems that are self generative and these could be visualized as geometric objects or “fractals” and (2) The Fibonacci series [5] has the special property of “fivefold symmetry” that is an important property of organic forms of life. Lindenmeyer applied the Fibonacci series to fractal algorithms in order to create this new “language.” L-systems could generate and model the morphology of branching organisms that look and act like real trees.  Certainly he, as those before him understood and used a type of geometric “code” derived from Nature. The Fibonacci series approximates the Golden Mean. 

  Today L-Systems are used by botanists, physicists and ecologists to better understand the natural world. But L-Systems has already had a huge effect on computer programmers, 3D designers and virtual world developers today. Lindenmeyer’s computer “language” inspired a new field within artificial life. Artificial Life, commonly called ALife studies evolutionary agents or populations of computer simulated life forms in artificial environments. ALife researchers use three fundamental concepts essential to our understanding of structure and processes of life: symmetry, complexity and self-similarity. They apply the tools of L-systems to generate “life” in cyberspace as evolving virtual worlds. [6]

The Tree of Human Relationships

Trees of our Forefathers

    The tree has been used for hundreds of years to organize our genealogical histories.  Our forefathers are the “roots” of our branching family line, and the branches reflect our relationships to each other with a similar, hierarchical beginning. Trees showed heritage to be related to royal bloodlines and religious figures. By the 12th century, the Christian religion emphasized the connection between the New and the Old Testament by visually codifying the line of Jesus back to King David in illuminated “Jesse Trees”.  The Jesse tree is envisaged to demonstrate the direct lineage between Jesus and the Prophets of the Old Testament to prove he was a direct descendent. It is based on the prophecy of Isaiah, "there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." [7]  Yet even in biblical Jesse Trees, a pagan female figure, the Cumaean Sybil was also included with the Prophets because she had predicted the birth of a “messiah.” 

    The Jesse Tree of the Judeo-Christian Bible, depicted in countless illuminated manuscripts, paintings and stained glass windows chronicled the genealogy of Jesus up to the Father of King David. The Jesse Tree as a structural metaphor continued to be used through the centuries by Royal families. Royalty used consanguinity trees to understand lines of descent and to determine whom they could marry.

 

     Visually, these trees progressively went from a literal to a more abstract form. In the tradition of the “Jesse Tree,” royal consanguinity trees perpetuated the royal status of bloodlines by conflating royal blood with religious and royal decree. Consanguinity trees were theoretical diagrams of blood relations showing who may marry and who may inherit.

 

 

Trees become Structures & Charts

    A new symbol system was created in the field of anthropology as an abstract diagram used to demonstrate the many types of familial relationships within different cultures. In the 20th century, anthropologists studying familial relationships through “kinship charts” began to find numerous non-hierarchical and patriarchal familial formations of bloodlines.  

    

     Cultural practice such as matrilineal and avuncular family structures made us rethink our linear, hierarchical categories and appreciate the diversity of family structures and lines of descent.

Interest in ancestry began to grow in the latter part of the 20th century. The power of the World Wide Web in the 1990s unleashed an explosion of interest in personal genealogical research that could be carried out from anyone’s home.  Digital census records and historical collections were brought into ancestry web sites for broad access to information on the Internet.   

    Genealogy networks and software tools enabled thousands of people to trace their ancestry and link to others with the same lineage. Family tree templates, charts and software make it easy to input family information, share and display it with others. Many of these contemporary family trees use more radial abstract tree diagrams than the elaborate heraldic structures of the past.

Dynamism and Dimension

    The Internet revolution has changed the basic nature of our personal and community relationships. Humans are collaborating and communicating with each other; mapping relationships has gone beyond genetic heritage and geographical locations on Earth to include complex and overlapping sets of networks.  As we communicate globally and instantly with each other through email and social media, our game consoles, PDA’s and IPhones, our relationships increased and global communities of students, scientists, friends and international business colleagues have emerged.

  Our hierarchical trees of human relationship were turning ever more radial with the rise of global communities coming out of enhanced synchronous and asynchronous communication via the Internet, Now we have numerous dynamic graphs of social networks, where we can see “communities” linked by affinity rather than by geography or blood. 

 

Social groups are now linked by interest, affinity and knowledge. These groups can include thousands of people. We can learn about our transforming culture by analyzing these new social groupings. We now want to “see” how our new communities congregate in cyberspace compared to relationships in the physical world, and how subgroups arise, branch off and change through time. As Web 2.0 applications, social networking and microblogging hubs like Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook scale out, each and every one of us can now see affinity “friendship networks” of our contacts in the real and virtual environments. 

    New visualizations such as Twitter’s tweetmaps and Facebook’s friendwheels are based on branching tree structures  that have become increasingly abstract, nonlinear, and dynamic. These radial wheels also show how our networks of associations are interconnected, demonstrating that we are all linked to each other by less than “six degrees.” 

    With the advent of social networking and blogging, digital mapping tools are now being merged with blogs and network hubs such as Friendster, LinkedIn and Facebook. In 2006 IBM released ManyEyes, a Web 2.0 site a number of visualization tools anyone can use to visualize their own data and share it with others. [8]

    Since that time, the toolset behind ManyEyes has been integrated with interactive news hubs such as the New York Times Visualization Lab. This way, users can create and share their own visualizations with up-to-the-minute statistical data from New York Times Stories. Social network tools are now changing rapidly with an explosion of shared data and locative information from myriad sources.  Expectations for the emerging Semantic Web suggest that this new level of ontologically networked information will enable us to visualize even larger meta-networks of relationships.  These visualizations will provide new insights about the complex, emergent organization of our growing communities and the knowledge these communities share. 

The Tree of Knowledge to Mapping Knowledge Domains

Structuring Knowledge with Arboria

    In addition to mapping relationships, humans have also used trees or “arboria” to structure knowledge and organize ontologies.  Going back Aristotle’s categories of logic, third century Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry visually codified these categories into a tree structure that was later called “Porphyry’s Tree.” The terms ‘genus’ and ‘species’ used by Darwin and Haeckel for their scientific Tree of Life derived their use from the more ancient practice Porphyry used to trace relationships between abstract dichotomies (genus differentia) and their sources (species). 

     The Tree of Life and Porphyry’s Tree further influenced medieval thinkers to use trees to identify relationships between different categories or types of knowledge. In the 6th century, Bishop Isidore of Seville used trees to organize his encyclopedia, “Etymologiae” and Catalan mystic and philosopher Ramon Llull followed suit by using Porphyry’s structure to depict the disciplines of knowledge as Ars Sapientiae, or Tree of Knowledge. The model of Porphyry’s Tree was also used in tree diagrams for medieval religious books. Trees of Virtues and Vices were used to visually diagram moral stories in the life of Jesus, dichotomizing good and bad. 

     

    Trees were also used by later writers, delineating the structure of book sections or geometric classes such as Luca Pacioli’s Tree of Proportions in his book on the Divine Proportion, De Divina Proportione, published in 1509. 

     

    Over the following several centuries, trees continued to be used to organize categories of knowledge, topics and subjects in encyclopedias. 

 

Organizing the Data Deluge

    In today’s digital culture, the current profusion of data requires us to find new ways to organize vast amounts of information: to see more at once, to allow for numerous the points of view (POV), and to introduce dynamism in our models. In order to do this, the metaphor of the tree has brought us from linear trees to cone, spherical and hyperbolic trees. The use of the tree structure continued through the 19th, 20th and 21st century as a way to organize knowledge and our web site directories.

In 1991, Stuart Card and his team at Xerox Parc introduced dynamism to the tree structure by creating “cone trees” that could be rotated.  These trees moved away from the top down linear structuring, but allowed multiple views and the ability for the user to spin the cone tree around to see all the data. 

 

    Three university students who worked at Xerox Park—including visualization pioneer Ramana Rao—were inspired by the nonperiodic tilings-based artworks of artist M.C. Escher to try to create a dynamic way to visualize a tree of related information or content. Influenced by the hyperbolic math that MC Escher used (which was actually enhanced by Escher’s discussions with geometer Donald Coxeter while he was creating his artworks), Rao and his colleagues created a browser interface that would enable each chosen node to become the center around which all the other connected nodes would be organized.  This became the first hyperbolic tree browser through Rao’s company, Inxight Software, Inc. 

 

      Along with social relationships, the nature of human knowledge began to change with the advent of the World Wide Web.  Today, we have too much data and it is changing too fast for us to stay current. It is important to have simple ways to navigate and visualize connections between ideas, information and domains of knowledge. We can do this by revolutionizing the way we look at data by visualizing its larger patterns. 

As our knowledge increases on the Internet and access to massive databases of information must be analyzed, classified, accessed and understood, we need new structures to envision broader swaths of knowledge, its creation and evolution. In the first decade of this century, Dr. Katy Borner, Chaomei Chen and Kevin Boyack pioneered a new direction for visualization as applied to “domains of knowledge” by mapping the growing domain structure of  scientific disciplines through citations indexes.

Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans Map of Science, 2007; Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley; Commissioned Katy Borner at Mapping Science. www.scimaps.org

    Boyack’s work with Richard Klavans has undergone almost a decade of refinement in the visual metaphors used for these structures, becoming less and less hierarchical and more natural, almost biological in shape. These new science maps are based on hundreds of thousands of citations and are analyzed and visualized to identify emergent paradigms of scientific knowledge domains. 

Now that visualizations can illustrate the radial patterns and connections between different types of knowledge, we are able to see relationships between disciplines again.  The branching connections and overlaps between research is highlighted in a new kind of mapping developed by a cluster of scholars and leaders in the field of information visualization.  These are called “Knowledge Domain” maps. [9]

A New Aesthetics for Knowledge Visualization

    “Knowledge domain” visualizations have become a growing genre now known as “Science Maps.” A new information aesthetics defines the way to show metrics across a broad range of source material. More cross fertilization between disciplines is seen. More data is being generated collaboratively in the public domain. Using a public Wikipedia “data dump” in 2007, Borner, et.al. applied knowledge domain visualization methods to understanding how science, math and technology are represented in Wikipedia - showing where they cluster and where they overlap.

 

 

 Although the Wikipedia map of science is just a snapshot of Wikipedia at a moment in time, eventually such “maps” will be able to be used as dynamic interfaces into huge repositories of shared information. As we move further into the dynamism and non-linearity of collaborative information, visualization tools are being created to visualize knowledge “flows” over time through new kinds of visualization such as those by Moritz Stefaner’s Well-Formed Eigenfactor. 

    A new aesthetics of data visualization is emerging. The universal image of the tree has transformed from a natural form that was used as a mythical image, a visual metaphor, a symbol, a dynamic organizing structure for information, and finally, an algorithm that generates lifelike trees in virtual space.

    The tree structure has morphed from a static image to a dynamic way to look at the changing patterns in large amounts of data.  As we used the tree to map relationships between humans and knowledge, our tree patterns evolved from a linear 2-dimensional tree to radial tree to a 3-dimensional sphere tree. Now we can return to the original mythical images of the World Tree and the Tree of Life and take these tendrils out further to the Global Mind. 

  Shape of Thought Mural, Clegg & DeVarco, 2009/2010

    The rapid growth of social media and knowledge domain mapping is changing the way we communicate our relationships, our knowledge, and our relationship to our planet. As the streaming, conversational network of the realtime global community grows, the only way we can see our organizational forms from a “satellite view” is to use visualization tools. 

    These dynamic tree structures and new visualizations can be thought of as a small world networks.  These are mathematical graphs of networks. In the burgeoning field of network theory, which builds on early work by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967, everyone is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees. Milgram postulated that networks of clusters are connected to other clusters with very few bridges, connecting all the nodes between. We can think of this as a number of linked or nested tree clusters. In the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, this idea was born out and popularized. 

    The “Oracle of Bacon” game was more than just a popular game. It influenced mathematician/physicists Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz to establish the mathematical principles whereby Small World Theory could be rigorously proven as a class of random graphs.  This complex systems algorithm initiated the new “science of networks” that allows scientists to better understand collective dynamics through graphing techniques or complex tree structures. Similar dynamics can be seen in any type of network. Physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi later proved that the distribution of these networks follows a specific power law, and this common blueprint can be seen in a vast array of networks – from intra-cellular protein networks to human social networks.  Network theory is now able to be put to pragmatic use for everything from computer viruses to human behavior. Scientists led by Alessandro Vespignani have recently used network algorithms  to map how patterns of global transport networks can help us quickly respond to pandemic outbreaks. [10]

     From the Kevin Bacon game to a game changer for humanity, small world network theory and its emerging class of visualization technologies offer new ways of thinking and “seeing” that amplifies our human ability to share knowledge for global self-reflexivity. What began with the tree metaphor has become instead a dynamic language of patterned networks of whole systems behavior – systems of life, knowledge and relationship.

 “These patterns are biological, they are scale independent – the patterns we see when we use our powerful lenses to explore the outer reaches of the cosmos and the inner dimensions of the cell.  Visionary language mirrors the history of knowledge, the neurostructure of synaptic behavior, the self-assembly of crowd consciousness, the ubiquitous mobility of swarm behavior, the ephemeral architecture of smart mobs.  But it does more – it mirrors the span of self-awareness to mass introspection by engaging our emotional intelligence through the act of seeing our reflection. In the words of biologist Barbara McClintock, it offers us “a feeling for the organism.”"[11]

Through the evolution of the Tree of Life, the Tree of Human Relationship and the Tree of Knowledge, we see the story that brought us to   today’s visualization technologies reflecting the ‘superorganism’ of collective thought. 

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] See more about the Shape of Thought Approach "What is the Shape of Thought?" Clegg & DeVarco

[2] From the online New World Encyclopedia – Judeo Christian Tree of Life

[3] http://tolweb.org

[4] Lindenmeyer, Aristid and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. 1990. The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. Springer-Verlag

[5] 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...

[6] Storyboard for UCSC Virtual High School Complexity Gallery

[7] Isaiah 11:1. The New International Version of the Bible

[8] See more about ManyEyes

[9] Borner, Katy, R. Schiffrin, "Mapping Knowledge Domains," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jan. 23, 2004.  

[10] See more at: Scholarly Networking to Stop Disease which features the work of A. Vespignani, S. Sherman and K. Borner.

[11] DeVarco, B.  “A Visionary Language.” Scale Independent Thought Blog Jan 2, 2009.