Thinking Geometrically : Re-Visioning Space for a Multimodal World

Digital Formations is the best source for critical, well-written books about digital technologies and modern life. Books in the series break new ground by emphasizing multiple methodological and theoretical approaches to deeply probe the formation and reformation of lived experience as it is refracted through digital interaction. The series examines broad issues in realms such as digital culture, electronic commerce, law, politics and governance, gender, the Internet, race, art, health and medicine, and education.

What skills do we need to negotiate the changing technological circumstances of our lives? How should we respond to the changing space of the visual, the technological? We are bombarded with answers to these questions: by media, by government, and by education. For the most part we are told that what we need to do is utilize the latest technologies and develop the newest skills (computer literacy prominent among them). Here, with keen interdisciplinary insight, historical sensitivity, and corporate design experience, John T. Waisanen offers a different kind of argument. He looks to particular skills we might be losing (and might have for some time been losing): drawing in particular; and to the «art» of integrating complex vision, thought and practice, what he calls design – or geometrical thinking. This points to the importance of the arts as a physical practice and to the cultivation of complex vision and thought gained in and through an education where geometry and literature are equally important, where physical intelligence (not just dexterity) and philosophical intelligence are equally important.