Maybe this is wordless and open to a little ambiguity, but surely if you follow this recipe you don't end up with pancakes... Aren't those flat and fried? Without chocolate or cream?

oops, you are right. the infographic above is for chocolate cake... I have changed the main post to reflect this. thnkx chef!

Nice, but relatively wordless... unfortunately some ingredientes are in English. Could they be expressed with icons like flour=wheat + mill?
Besides, we can understand icons according to our culture.

Nice experiment. I'm curious what the final goal is for this. Is it to facilitate the understanding of directions for one country/culture/language? Or is it to faciliate directions across multiple cultures and languages? The later seems more necessary and important, yet this doesn't fully address this. I guess there is not international standard for 'Plain Flour' or 'Sour Cream' and it would be great to try and address that. Nevertheless, this shows how difficult visualizing something as simple as cooking directions can be.

Do I bake it for 55 mins or 11 hours?

Nice idea, but the experiement is a failure - it's not wordless (e.g. "plain flour", "cocoa powder", "sour cream" "sugar" (practically illegible)); and, what size spoon? table spoon? tea spoon? If you're going to "cheat" by using words for ingredients, then why not inclucde worded instructions? Because, then this blog post would have no reason to exisit.
There are applications for wordless instruction - this is not one of them.

of course this project is more an explorative study than a real-world application, but I am not sure if agree with your argument.

there are people that have more difficulty with reading descriptive instructions in specific contexts (e.g. I do when I have to make recipes from a foreign language cookbook), & might be helped by the visual illustrations.

people might also find it easier to remember the visual diagram as textual instructions?

very inspiring. Its a brilliant idea for a non cooking background people (me) to remember these steps. I think the exact info on the amount of ingredient/technique can be improvized and perfected in the future.

I am the creator of this work, and have only just stumbled upon this posting here.

Unfortunately the piece has been taken out of context and without any explanation people are misinterpreting both the point and the crude stage of development.

This recipe is one of many that I am developing and is a work in progress.

The eventual aim is to have a website that allows users to select the mode in which the content is presented (ie: pure words, pure images and a range of options in-between combining word and image).

I am open to ideas, comments and suggestions.

hi Lauren,

great work & thnkx for the clarifications! even on its own the infographic has value, in my opinion.

looking forward to the website, which seems to augment the concept even further.

the lines are a bit confusing. what's the difference between the dotted line and the solid-arrowed lines? both seem to being giving the same direction (pour).

We've just pre-launched our new site, harnessing the power of recipics!

Check it out: http://coo.kz