Cartoons as research tools for consumer understanding? How does that work?
Allow me to explain some of my core philosophies about art and science and how visualization can actually enable us to explore inventive solutions to tough problems. Being both an artist and scientist is fairly atypical so there are certain things about me that my “linear friends” just don’t understand. My core belief is that cartoons and humor can be an essential element of visual communication which both engages and communicates to your viewer, sometimes blatantly but often subliminally. Cartoons can be rich visual metaphors that can capture emotional extremes and have this amazing ability to tickle the visual and emotional centers of the brain directly while completely bypassing all your logic filters, in part because your eyes are hardwired directly into the emotional center of your brain. In fact, I’d suggest that what makes a cartoon humorous is the way it can transform the predictable into something completely unexpected. So what do concept sketching and cartoons have to do with inventive problem-solving? Well… from my perspective, just about everything.
“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds.
A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
- William James
