Abstract
In this article, I argue that visual ideation and design thinking helped Darwin shape his revolutionary ideas about evolution. Visual ideation is a range visual thinking methods that are used to generate, develop, and communicate new ideas. I first discuss how immersion in a richly disordered visual context contributed to Darwin’s ideas while sketching. Darwin’s ‘tree-of-life’ sketches are design experiments – hand-on-pencil-on-paper activity that he produced within the context of the disordered visual culture of mid-nineteenth century biological collecting. These sketches helped him to see evolution as an unpredictable, change-driven, time-based set of processes with an indeterminate beginning and end.I next consider Darwin’s finished, published tree diagram from his book the Origin of Species, which was his attempt to communicate his ideas in visual form to his readers. This diagram is a design artifact, an infographic that was based on the mid-nineteenth century visual vocabulary of tree diagrams. By visual vocabulary, I am referring to visual entities that carry certain content within a culture. I believe this ‘tree’ visual vocabulary limited how Darwin could give expression to his ideas about evolution. In my conclusion, I underscore how visual ideation is a vital component of both design and science.
Notes
19. Goldschmidt 2004, 86.
20. Goldschmidt 2004, 87.
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