(2019-06-14) One Diagram To Mind Them All Hyperspace In The1970s

One Diagram To Mind Them All: Hyperspace in the 1970s. Earlier this year on 13 April, Tony Buzan, the inventor of the Mind Map, a world famous visual device for organizing thought and developing ideas, died at 76.

The most popular practice of mind mapping today uses a diluted ersatz of Buzan’s colourful and poetic graphic system

He asks Mind Mappers to draw organic shapes and advises against the use of borders: ‘Boxes are like little prisons, which your thoughts are trapped in… don’t use boxes.’ He espouses formal variation – in hue, shape, texture and size – through a homespun theory, informed by his observations of children, that the full activation of senses increases mental capability.

An authentic Buzanian Mind Map begins with an exciting central image: ‘Instead of [using] the word eye, we can do a little sketch’

His informational approach predates the Web by about two decades, but it closely resembles hypertext in its structure. The inventor of hypertext, Ted Nelson, published his treatise on the nonlinear capabilities of the computer, Computer Lib / Dream Machines in 1974, the same year that Use Your Head aired on the BBC

In a corporate 1970s world overrun by typewriters and monochrome documents, Buzan was evangelical about nonlinear thinking in dynamic pictures.