GVU Center Brown Bag Seminar Series: Martin Eppler

How can experts share and integrate their knowledge more effectively? How can you generally make people's knowledge more easily accessible in meetings, workshops, or virtual conferences? And how can you foster creativity and mutual understanding among diverse professionals? These questions are addressed in a new emerging field called knowledge visualization that integrates findings from information visualization, communication studies, and cognitive sciences. In the talk, we'll examine the premise and promise of this field and look at both seminal concepts, as well as real-life application examples of collaborative knowledge visualization. Key seminal concepts that will be discussed are the notion of "diagrammatic free ride", "representational guidance", and "law encoding diagrams". Application contexts of the shown examples include planning, ideation, project learning, and decision making.

Martin J. Eppler is currently a visiting professor at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy. He is the Chair of Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), where he is also the director of the university's International Study MBA program and of the =mcm institute for media and communications management. He has been a guest professor at Cambridge University (UK), Aalto University (Finland), Pacifico University (Peru), and at the Central University of Finance & Economics in Beijing. His research focuses on knowledge management, knowledge creation and innovation, knowledge visualization in teams, and knowledge communication among experts and decision makers. He is the author of 14 books (among them 'Managing Information Quality', Creability, 'Management Atlas', and 'Sketching at Work') and more than 150 academic articles in journals such as IEEE Proceedings, Long Range Planning, Harvard Business Manager, Organization Studies, the Journal of Knowledge Management, The Information Society, Innovation Management, or the Journal of Business Communication. He is the inventor of the visualization software en.lets-focus.com and he has been an advisor and trainer to organizations such as the United Nations, the European Central Bank, Siemens, Daimler, UBS, eBay, Swarovski, GfK, UBS, Roche, AXA, Louis Vuitton or Ernst & Young. Some of his books and articles have been translated into Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Italian, and French.