Visual Thinking Design Patterns Colin Ware Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping University of New Hampshire Durham, NH, USA cware@ccom.unh.edu William Wright Oculus Info Inc. Toronto Ontario, Canada bill.wright@occulusinfo.com Nicholas J. Pioch Systems & Technology Research LLC, Suite 5850, 400 W. Cummings Park, Woburn, MA 01801 npioch@STresearch.com Abstract—In visual analytics, interactive data visualizations provide a bridge between analytic computations, often involving “big data”, and computations in the brain of the user. Visualization provides a high bandwidth channel from the computer to the user by means of the visual display, with interactions including brushing, dynamic queries, and generalized fisheye views designed to select and control what is shown. In this paper we introduce Visual Thinking Design Patterns (VTDPs) as part of a methodology for producing cognitively efficient designs. We describe their main components, including epistemic actions (actions to seek knowledge) and visual queries (pattern searches that provide a whole or partial solution to a problem). We summarize the set of 20 VTDPs we have identified so far and show how they can be used in a design methodology. Keywords—design patterns, visual thinking, data visualization, visual analytics. I. INTRODUCTION Visualizations are tools for reasoning about data and to be effective they must support the activities of visual thinking. Part of this is ensuring that data is mapped to the display in such a way that informative patterns are available to resolve visual queries concerning the cognitive task. This requires matching the graphic representation with the capabilities of human visualization. For example, correlations between variables should be visually easy to see and commonly searched for symbols should be more distinctive than those that are rarely sought out. In addition, interactions must be designed to support an efficient visual thinking process. Visual analytics is an example of distributed cognition and cognitively efficient interactions require that perceptual and cognitive processes in the brain of the analyst must be efficiently linked to computational processes in a computer. For example, data points representing companies can be shown simultaneously in a map view and in a scatter plot view; the technique of brushing can be applied so that points on the map, when selected, are highlighted in both views. This can support reasoning about the growth of industries related to geographic regions, but to be cognitively efficient the brushing effect should ideally appear in less than a tenth of a second. In this paper we introduce the concept of Visual Thinking Design Patterns (VTDPs) as a tool to help with the construction of cognitively efficient visualization designs. VTDPs are based partly on a prior construct developed by Ware [1] and called visual thinking algorithms (VTAs). VTDPs represent a broadening of this original concept with a change in emphasis. VTDPs are a method for describing the combined human-machine cognitive processes that are executed when interactive data visualizations are used as cognitive tools. First we describe the characteristics of VTDPs followed by a brief description of the set of 20 we have identified to date. Two of the VTDPs are described in somewhat greater detail to show how they combine machine computation with perceptual and cognitive processes. Finally we show how VTDPs can be used in an agile design process. VTDPs take their inspiration from Alexander’s design patterns [2] intended for architects as well as designed patterns as used by software engineer [3]. Although considerable research has shown that perceptual and cognitive principles can be applied usefully to the design of interactive visualization, this knowledge is only applied in practice if a particular designer has taken an interest in the relevant research. VTDPs are intended to provide an accessible structured method for combining knowledge about interaction methods and visualization designs together with cognitive and perceptual principles.  Like their precedents, VTDPs are intended to describe best practice example solutions to design problems where interactive visualization is an intended component.  VTDPs provide a method for taking into account perceptual and cognitive issues especially key bottlenecks in the visual thinking process, such as limited visual working memory capacity. They also provide a way of reasoning about semiotic issues in perceptual terms via the concept of the visual query.  VTDPs incorporate the common set of interactive techniques used in visualization and suggest how they may be used separately or in combination. This is not to say that there are no prior methodologies for incorporating cognitive principles into design. About three decades ago the GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods and Selection Rules) model [4] was introduced and more sophisticated approaches have followed in the form of the