Students and professionals in science, design and technology have to develop and communicate concepts that are often difficult to comprehend for the public, their peers and even themselves.

IMAGE | ABILITY – Visualizing the Unimaginable, will help you enhance your communication and interpersonal skills and provide insight, tips and tricks to make such complex and seemingly unimaginable concepts and ideas imaginable.

After finishing this course you will be more skilled in finding the right visual language to convey your ideas, thoughts and vision. You will be able to illustrate units and quantities, concepts and themes and you will know how to unravel complexity by using diagrams and schemes.

Diagrams, charts and graphs are used by all sorts of people to express information in a visual way, whether it's in a report by a colleague or a plan from your interior designer. This unit will teach you how to interpret these tools and how to use them yo

Students apply the vocabulary and concepts from the Activity 9: Feedback Loop Introduction to assess and create earth science feedback loops with the LOOPY online modeling program. (Optional) The students then engage in a discussion of the limitations of the LOOPY program to create feedback loop diagrams.

Students are introduced to feedback loop vocabulary and experiment with different relationships between reservoirs in simple feedback loops using LOOPY, a free, online modeling program.

Students' eyes are opened to the value of creative, expressive and succinct visual presentation of data, findings and concepts. Student pairs design, redesign and perform simple experiments to test the differences in thermal conductivity (heat flow) through different media (foil and thin steel). Then students create visual diagrams of their findings that can be understood by anyone with little background on the subject, applying their newly learned art vocabulary and concepts to clearly communicate their results. The principles of visual design include contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity; the elements of visual design include an awareness of the use of lines, color, texture, shape, size, value and space. If students already have data available from other experiments, have them jump right into the diagram creation and critique portions of the activity.

This site demonstrates where each of the Arabic letters is produced using an illustration of the human mouth and throat. Visitors can view the approximate location of each letter on the diagram, and hear what each letter sounds like when paired with any of the short or long Arabic vowels.

This activity teaches students about the value of planning, knowing, and explaining the limitations of a systems diagram. Students are taught to follow the following four steps when assessing the limitations of a systems diagram: identify the question, identify the scope, identify the missing sources, identify the level of detail. Students then assess the limitations of a systems diagram they previously created, and reflect on how assessing the limitations of a systems diagram also allows them to identify ways to improve their systems diagrams.

A flow chart can be a useful tool in problem solving. You can see at a glance how your decisions and actions affect the outcome of your problem solving process. This lesson will help you learn the symbols and steps for writing a flowchart. 

This article describes how elementary teachers can use modified writer's workshops to help students organize information in their science notebooks.

Students learn the value of writing and art in science and engineering. They acquire vocabulary that is appropriate for explaining visual art and learn about visual design principles (contrast, alignment, repetition and proximity) and elements (lines, color, texture, shape, size, value and space) that are helpful when making visual aids. A PowerPoint(TM) presentation heightens students' awareness of the connection between art and engineering in order to improve the presentation of results, findings, concepts, information and prototype designs. Students also learn about the science and engineering research funding process that relies on effective proposal presentations, as well as some thermal conductivity / heat flow basics including the real-world example of a heat sink which prepares them for the associated activity in which they focus on creating diagrams to communicate their own collected experimental data.

Interactive log p-h diagram for displaying refrigeration cycles of different refrigerants.
Automatic calculation of the COP for heat pumps and refrigerators. Free online tool, no registration required.

More detailed information:
The thermodynamic state of a fluid (e.g. the refrigerant R134a) can be represented in state diagrams as a single point. Complete processes such as refrigeration cycles are visualized by connecting points with lines. These connecting lines correspond to changes in the state of the fluid.

In refrigeration technology, the pressure-enthalpy diagram is by far the most frequently used state diagram. The pressure is mostly scaled logarithmically, hence the name log ph diagram.

The thermodynamic properties of a refrigerant are represented in the state diagram as lines of constant state variables - so-called isolines.