Co-creating a visual thesaurus for the role of design thinking in management decision making

The workshop will engage participants to co-create concept maps and a visual thesaurus associated with ‘design thinking’. For design researchers, scholars and practitioners this workshop aims to expose the epistemological challenges and opportunities associated with ‘design thinking’ in management and leadership contexts. Concept mapping is a tool and technique that aims to enable visual thinking and knowledge organization skills. It offers a way to externalize understanding of complex topics (i.e. design thinking) in terms of both intra- and inter-personal relationships (i.e. within the management domain). A visual thesaurus displays semantic connections using pictures or images, not words. It aids in recognizing visually similar events or visual synonyms. Workshop participants will be guided through a series of visual thinking and design techniques to develop concept maps and a visual thesaurus for ‘design thinking’ and design-related terminologies within the management discourse. The outputs generated from the workshop will reflect a multidisciplinary understanding of the subject for knowledge translation and identify future research goals

An Eye-Tracking Evaluation of Gauge Shapes in Process Control

Operators monitor gauge shapes in control room displays to maintain the status of the refinery control process within normal limits. To test if shapes currently used by operators are effectively designed, two experiments were conducted to test the effectiveness of individual shapes in a Visual Thesaurus toolkit for comprehension and change detection. Moreover, eye tracking technology was used to investigate basic perceptual recognition behaviors of each Visual Thesaurus shape for comprehension and change detection. Thirty-one students from Pennsylvania State University participated in this experiment. It was found that pupil size could be used to track the cognitive load of participants. Correctness was also measured but it was not as sensitive as pupil size, as it did not capture a difference in the effectiveness of shapes.