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Home > Meetings > March 2000 > Robert Horn Interview

Robert Horn Interview

Jason Whitney

From A field report: Studio 2000, March 28, 2000
A field report: Studio 2000

QUESTION. Bob, in your book you suggest that a new language is evolving in our midst. What is visual language?

REH. I define visual language as a tight and thorough integration of words, images, and shapes. The emphasis is on the integration. Prose, no matter how heavily loaded with image-words, is not visual language. Arrow-like shapes on road signs, without words, are not visual language. Pictures by themselves are not visual language.

QUESTION. Why should teachers be interested?

REH. First, because students will need to be able to communicate with visual language, and, second, it is useful in instruction. Visual language is becoming widely used in business, science, and technology. There are over two million presentations given every week. Many of them exhibit the close integration of words and visual elements that define visual language. Businesses are finding it useful in dealing with communication in multicultural situations. And it is rapidly becoming the language of the world wide web. If you're going to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century, you're going to have to give them visual language.

QUESTION. Why don't you just call what you're doing "graphics?" Why call it a "language?" Why work so hard to bring this attention to something that has been going on for a long time?

REH. The answer, I believe, is that "it's a whole new ball game." First, it's not just graphics tacked onto words. Remember, the definition of visual language includes the idea of tight integration of words and images. Second, it's democratized. These days with the development of computer tools you don't have to be a skilled artist to use visual language. We now have the proper tools so that visual language can be used by anybody.

QUESTION. What is different about the computer?

REH. We have the computer hardware capable of displaying good graphic quality. All computers sold these days are graphic. We now have software that produces quantitative graphs and charts automatically with the push of a button. For example, the sub language (or dialect) of quantitative charting has become a thoroughly understood and thoroughly automatic process. While there are still questions of esthetics and good communication quality that are raised about unsophisticated use of these programs, they are nevertheless part of a capability we did not have ten years ago.

We have a great variety of easy- to-learn drawing software. We now have large libraries of "clip art" images that are stored in the computer and are ready and easy to use. Today, these libraries consist of up to 250,000 or more drawings that are combinable with each other. Many of these drawings can also be taken apart, stretched to the needed scale, and used either partially or in their entirety. They cost $50 to $100 for each collection. No one can complain that the tools are not available.

QUESTION. How are students reacting to the graphic computer?

REH. In the last decade the invention of the graphic computer inspired many people. People have always wanted to express themselves visually. Now they realize that with the computer, they can draw. After about sixth grade, many people have given up the idea of ever expressing themselves in anything other than words. Education, for the most part, has steered people in the direction of learning verbal expression and in many cases completely ignoring the use of visual language elements.

But the visual computer provides automatic tools that enable all of us to convert our spreadsheets into graphs. And the simple paint and draw programs have shown us that we can easily add visual components to our presentations.

Now many people are asking how they can take the next step. There seems to be a great yearning to express oneself visually. People want to know how to communicate well with compelling graphics fully integrated into their communications.

As someone said after one of my talks, "Before very long, it will be regarded as weird NOT to have copious graphics in your documents and presentations. People will expect to be spoken to in visual language sooner than you think." The key issue is getting the right graphics and the right words together in an integrated set of communication units. That is a major subject in my book. I am not advocating gratuitous pasting in of just any graphic element. That is what is called "eye candy," and I'm against it.

QUESTION. There's a lot of software that kids use on their home computers and at school that exhibits visual language.

REH. Many kids already use it. They have the tools. They use the draw and paint programs. They have cartooning software. Some say the new "killer app" of the internet is greeting cards. They use the internet. The world wide web is full of visual language pages.

Many kids learn best from it. And editors of modern textbooks have begun to realize this. I recently saw a new high school biology textbook in which over 1/3 of the pages are done in visual language. They are using it because it is superior to text.

QUESTION. Visual language is superior to text?

REH. Yes. In many situations. That's why it's so important. In particular it's superior for showing the structure and dynamics of complex systems, which is what a lot of modern subject matter in science, technology, and business is about. For example, we have done experiments to show that it is nearly impossible to convey in succinctly declarative sentences what a moderately complex diagram or chart shows.

QUESTION. What does it take for students to learn to communicate in visual language?

REH. For some students, it has already become a natural second language . We are now seeing students entering college that have never not had a graphic computer on their desks.

Some teachers have been using it in their handouts, presentations, and slides for years.

However, I think we are going to need new curricula based in part on what I analyze in the book. We are going to need to learn about the syntax and semantics of visual language, and we're going to have to know some practical principals for applying it. When I say "we", I mean teachers are going to need to learn it as well as students.

QUESTION. How does your book Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century treat visual language?

REH. Several ways.

First, I see visual language as a newly emerging language. One that is still being created all over the world as people try to express what they need to say.

Second, visual language has enough clearly identifiable syntax and semantics that I was able to do a preliminary exploration of. I devote several chapters to this. The key new study here is what I call functional semantics. It is the analysis of what words do best and what visual elements do best when they are tightly integrated. They have different effects when they are integrated from when they are used separately.

Third, I treat visual language as a historical phenomenon with a chapter that identifies 60 major innovations that have occurred over the past several centuries.

Fourth, there is a chapter on the pragmatics of visual language-how people actually use it in business, science, technology, art, and the humanities. Also, I consider how it will likely develop in the near future and what the consequences will be.

Fifth, I consider the differences that visual language is making in reading.

QUESTION. In reading?

REH. Yes, I think that we are seeing a new mode of what I call "multi-modal" reading developing. Visual language communication units are both more demanding for readers and more immediately comprehensible. Because multiple levels of visuals, text, and concepts are combined, they require readers to spend a little more time in synthesis in order to come away with the full meaning of the communication. At the same time, the presence of familiar visual images provides a point of immediate entry and understanding that often bypasses linear apprehension. (For sample pages, see www.macrovu.com)

QUESTION. How is visual language going to affect education?

REH. There are already many schools in which students develop multimedia reports. As I've said, I think the communications curriculum is in for a major change. We have just started working with one school district to create a high school curriculum for visual language.

Most often, we hear educators bemoan the pervasiveness of the visual culture. They attribute to TV the decline in reading ability. They blame TV for the decrease in analytic ability, and students' poor writing skills. I do not want to dispute these data; I agree that the sheer weight of time that students spend immersed in television, computer games, and other visual distractions keeps them from other educational activities. But TV is not the visual language that I am describing.

I dispute any idea that visual language contributes in a negative way to literacy. On the contrary, integrating visual language into the schools will enable students to think in more complex ways and to make better decisions through more skillful analysis. Visual language may very well improve writing ability as well; sometimes when there are fewer words on a page, each one must be scrutinized more carefully. And visual language does reduce the number of words.

QUESTION. What will be the action agenda for education, if we are not to be left behind in this visual language revolution?

REH. One of the advantages of visual language is that it doesn't take too much extra training to read it. Among the educational needs is to rapidly improve "speakers'" visual language. "Speaking" visual language does require extra learning. By "speaking" I mean writing and drawing. There is not a good single word. But fortunately we don't have to draw very much. We have the clip art collections as I mentioned.. So nobody has to learn to draw, unless he or she wants to. Many will want to, however.

We need to figure out how and when to integrate visual language into the curriculum of elementary and high schools. Very immediately, we need to remedy poor diagram skills, both reading and composition. Diagramming is one of those essential sub vocabularies of visual language that is essential for understanding the complexity of the modern world. In my teaching of adults I have noticed that even many competent visual language speakers have "capability gaps" when it comes to diagramming. We do a whole unit on diagramming in my courses for industrial writers.

All this means that there will need to be a certain amount of teacher training. We'll need improved instructional materials both for students and teachers.

While textbooks have become more visual, they are often more glitzy than communicative. Current textbooks often violate Sweller's "split-attention effect" which is defined as the burden placed on human short-term memory when explanatory text is separate from the diagrams. There is often redundancy of the verbal text with the visual language. What I mean is that a diagram is provided that is then completely described in the text as well. That is counter productive. It leads to errors, again as John Sweller has shown in his research.

I might also mention that we're going to have to retrain graphic artists to some degree. They are very good at rendering. But they often ignore the value of clarity and comprehension for visual language and instead emphasize style, novelty, and the current idea of "cool". This is often confusing to the reader. Such professionals will need to learn the value and the methods of user testing for really professional visual language textbooks.

QUESTION. So, overall you see a new global language?

REH. Yes. Most experts call it an "international auxiliary language." It's international to be sure. People are using it (and inventing it) all over the world. It's auxiliary since we don't expect it to replace one's native language.


About Robert E. Horn: Robert E. Horn is a visiting scholar at Stanford University and has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities. His recently published Mapping Great Debate series Can Computers Think? delineates the intellectual history of the philosophical debate and illustrates how visual language can be used to handle the most complex of topics. He is author of Mapping Hypertext and The Guide to Simulations/Games. He is also director of several projects to apply visual language methodology to mapping debates about evolution and the frontiers of consciousness research.

His book, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century can be ordered through

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