Mental Visualization As Social Practice: Repertoires, Material Mediation, And Micro-Temporality

Abstract This article reconceptualizes drawing from imagination as a distributed social practice and develops an empirically grounded triadic model that informs the design and assessment of visualization-literacy instruction. A mixed-methods pilot study with 30 Czech secondary-school graphic design students (March–June 2025) combines observation, questionnaires, and artifact analysis across three task regimes and age cohorts. The analysis identifies five repertoires and three recurring thresholds, interpreting difficulties as translation bottlenecks between modalities and between mental models and marks on paper. Visualization literacy is framed as a transferable material-discursive competence, and a triadic model is proposed as a portable script for assessing visualization-literacy activities.