What is visual notes?

Visual notes is a concept in personal epistemology: A photo of a whiteboard, sketch, or physical artifact is a legitimate capture method — and for spatial, visual, or environmental information, it is the superior one.

Example: You're in a workshop. The facilitator has built a complex system diagram across three whiteboards — arrows, clusters, annotations, color-coded zones. You could spend fifteen minutes transcribing it into text. Or you could take three photos in four seconds, preserving every spatial relationship, every arrow direction, every color distinction. The photos capture what text fundamentally cannot: the topology of the idea.

This concept is part of Phase 3 (Capture Systems) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for capture systems.