VizThink 2009 – the “buzz” was about KM

The Kinesthetic Modeling (KM) session Monday at VizThink was a sellout. Tuesday, participants were asking for an encore. That evening after dinner a second group convened anxious to experience how kinesthetic activity liberates visual expression and original thinking in virtually everyone.

The process is a goofy one, admittedly. First, you dump some stuff (Holy Scrap) out on a table and arrange it so that it says something about yourself. You’re not allowed to explain it. Instead, you let other people tell YOU what it “looks like”, but not “what it means”. And finally you can say what you were up to. All the while, your table mates are writing down what people are saying so that you can take it all in. 

What’s going on here? Well, this is an icebreaker, designed to coax you out of your intellectual take on reality. If you’re going to use KM to do some original thinking about something that vexes you, you’d better ditch your habitual ways of thinking. The activity is rooted in the idea that our visual thinking proceeds from sensation to imagery then metaphor and later, only milliseconds later, to explaining and intellectualizing your experience. But, these are thought artifacts and they reveal far more that words could