VISUAL CAUSALITY

It is accepted wisdom that we base our understanding of the world on repeated observations of cause and effect. Billiard balls will bounce off of each other in a very predictable way. The coffee will be hot right after it comes out of the coffee maker. One ball causes another ball to move. The coffee maker causes the coffee to be hot. This fundamental understanding of causality goes back to Hume, who did early work tracking the association of ideas.

As Kahneman tells us, the psychologist Michotte gave us another way to consider causality. Michotte determined that causality is completely visual. He said that understanding causality is identical to understanding color. Just as you need to be able to see the colors so as to experience them, you also need to be able to visualize the causality in order to experience and understand. Michotte made paper animations in which one square caused another square to move. And his subjects then attributed a causality; one square made the other move. Despite the fact that there was no physicality. Thus, it was the act of seeing, the act of visualization that shaped understanding.  (Thinking Fast and Slow, p 76)

So here we have another instance in which the visual is superordinate. If you have missed other posts regarding the supremacy of the visual over the literal, then you might click here for a bit more background.

Transparent Drawing allows greater investigation, exploration and understanding of causality. And the visual causality that you establish on your drawing is purely visual, in the same way that one paper square move another. The complete causality of the system dynamics of your design is more fully understood. We understand how one elements relates to, and in fact indeed causes, the placement of another element.

And from this purely visual understanding, we are able to then bring elements into the physical world.