At the beginning of the 1990s, the philosophers W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm developed and claimed, both independently from each other, that the way in which we construct our world had experienced a 'pictorial' or 'iconic turn'. Today we have to acknowledge how true this is. Today's world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts, such as billboards, icons, posters, video clips. Icons and images play an important role in our daily life and education systems.

Think about the standard construction manual of an Ikea Billy shelf. The instruction comes along without any written words to describe how to do this.

We need to understand it visually and "read" how it works, which challenges our visual capacity and sometimes leads to frustration.

The way we use our smartphones and handle complex technology and software is also driven by simple icons. We see, swipe and steer.

Even in the business world we learn, still very slowly, how important it is to create images and tell a story, rather than boring a client with a flood of information. Still, our mental precondition, trained and established during centuries of rationalism and the skill of logical argumentation, falls behind to read and decipher the complexity of visuals and its meaning.