Travel back with me to a time when life might’ve been much simpler: grade school.

One of the earliest common comprehension tools that teachers use across various subject matters is the Venn Diagram. Perhaps you had a task like this:

The goal was to compare and contrast teaching kids how to sort based on straight-forward characteristics. Which animal was on land? Which one was on water?

Over time, the Venn Diagram gets extended to literary concepts asking informed students (who hopefully read the material) to “draw those two overlapping circles” and “find the similarities and differences”.

Did you read that last sentence with your 3rd grade teacher’s voice in mind?

Venn diagrams were introduced in 1880 by John Venn in a paper entitled “On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings” in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. He initially referred to the concept as “Eulerian Circles” and the terminology did not take on his name until much later. Also called a set diagram or logic diagram, the Venn diagram was meant to show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets.

Why am I bringing this up?

For most children, Venn diagrams are used as comprehension tools typically representing two or three sets. Our takeaways from the novel we were assigned are filed into a system with two tasks at hand: compare and contrast.

Comparing offers similarities while contrasting gives us endless differences. The outside circles could’ve been filled to the brim while finding 2-3 in the middle was all the assignment likely called for.

You get the picture. But this is what we often call two-dimensional thinking.

There are higher levels of Venn Diagrams including one known as the tesseract, the 16-cell. (Aside: For Marvel fans out there, yes this might’ve been an elective taught on Asgard.) But for the most part, students are taught to mine out these areas with a relatively flat takeaways.

We were taught to compare and contrast at an early age without all of our tools in our tool belt. The lifelong learner has much more at their disposal .

Consider how an animator begins to illuminate a character from an idea to a sketch and eventually a vibration expression on screen.

• A 2-D drawing shows a flat expression focused on the frames of images.
• A 3-D rendering of animation introduces depth and movement of images.
• A 4-D expression introduces an element of time.

Beyond a Steamboat Willy to Mickey Mouse, the goal is to consider the way we communicate in present day is captured into a solitary 2-D arc: a post, a response, a tweet and yet we understand life is lived out in a much different dimension. If a 2-D conversation stops at “what are the facts”, reality is also placed in the what if the “why”, “how” and “when”?

What would it look like if a nuanced approach to communication considered depth and time? What if the speaker and listener took the compare and contrast directive and found space for more than two overlapping circles?