illustration – translating mental models into visual models, and on the other end
communication – translating visual models into mental models.

As pointed out by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, founders of the field of 'embodied cognition' and the authors of "Metaphors We Live By" and subsequent books*, our concepts about the world, our 'mental models', are based largely on 'image-schema'. Image-schema are the mental-images, the 'pictorial concepts', that we learn through our experience – through our bodily interaction – with the world.

We use image-schema to understand concrete phenomena such as how balls bounce and dominos fall, and – this is the surprising and important point – we use these same image-schema to form our abstract/metaphorical concepts of how the world works (we 'bounce back' from bad relationships, governments 'topple'). Image-schematic metaphors are deeply imbedded in our language and thinking, so deeply imbedded we hardly notice them.

The lesson of Lakoff and Johnson's research is that, at its core, the meaning of words is grounded in our everyday perceptual experience such as what we see, hear, and feel. Consequently, the meaning of words, and much of our understanding of the world, is inherently visual (image-schematic). Words, rather than having meaning in themselves, are often the means by which we call up images in the minds of our audience. This is why a picture can be worth a thousand words: pictures can show directly what we struggle to describe indirectly with words alone.

Idiagram's illustrations are an attempt to tap into the embodied basis of meaning. Our graphic style has grown from our striving to render, in a clear and concise manner, the image-schematic structure of thought.