Full Circle Associates

Doug uses A N I M O T O to mash up photos and music to document a panel Chris Lott organized at Northern Voice 2008 on “The blog is dead, long live the blog!” It was fun graphically recording a geeky session. Now it is fun to see Doug’s take on it, months later! Woo hoo!

Oh, I want to watch this!

David Sibbet: TED2008: The Big Questions

This from David:

We’ll be doing this using the latest Wacom Cintiq tablets and beta versions of Autodesk’s Alias Sketchbook Pro. Our drawings, some 5-15 for each speaker, will be saved and accessible on a huge portfolio wall with multi-touch capability. If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report,or used an i-phone, it allows that kind of manipulation of imagery. You can pinch-reduce pictures, rotate them, sort them, move them around — all by touch.

I don’t know what we will produce, but it will be integrated into a book about this year’s TED, focusing on the theme The Big Questions. We’re calling ourselves “visual cartographers,” and I’m focusing on making not only the big questions, but the patterns that connect these ideas visible.

Argh, I have been wanting to finish this blog post. Work is crazy, so I can’t be as complete as I’d like to be, but I have to get this out. There is so much incubation going on in my head about visuals, and not enough time to release it all into the wild!

This past week as part of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 08 “event” we did a session on Drawing Together Online. Leigh Blackall arranged for us to use Otago Polytechnic’s (corrected - thanks Leigh) Elluminate room. Elluminate has a shared white board. Hmmm… possibilities. Could we draw on paper then take digital photos or scans and upload to Flickr? Draw together on the white board? The key was I wanted to create an irresistible invitation for everyone to draw something during our hour together.

We started off with a few ruminations and images from me. Leigh gave us a short lesson on drawing human figures then we just jumped in. And the white board became the center of attention. At first it was chaotic. Then we played with constraints. A theme. A request to work smaller and slower. We reflected on how we felt looking at the images. How we felt when we could not find space to make our mark, or when it was erased by someone else - and not being able to know quickly who it was. We talked about our inner censors, keeping us from drawing. How they came to us as childhood melted into adulthood.

I had a great time. For me, it was a wonderful session. The Elluminate Recording is here. A montage of some of our drawings is below as well as a link to Flickr: Photos tagged with drawingtogether

I invite any of the people who played together that day to share your impressions as well. Some of us said we want to do more exploration of drawing together online. YES!

1. flnw_ambivilance_2, 2. Commute, 3. flnw_coffee, 4. My Texturized Cofee Picture, 5. cogdog’s texturized coffee picture, 6. flnw_boundaries, 7. flnw_ambivilance, 8. I Need MORE COFFEE (PicNik-ed), 9. Our first collaborative drawing, 10. I Need MORE COFFEE, 11. Coffee, 12. Our first collaborative drawing

While we are thinking about visual thinking together, here is another amazing link of a video that really uses visual thinking, from Christian Nold at PopTech. follow that link to take a look at this video. (Edited to remove the embed because it kept auto-playing, driving some of us nuts.)

On Wednesday, January 16th at 22:00 GMT (check your local time) I’m throwing in a contribution into the online portion of the Future of Learning in a Networked World 2008 gathering. Why don’t you join us?

We have a FLNW Slide Sets space on Slideshare and I just uploaded the images I plan to use for this totally off-the-cuff experiment of drawing together online. Here is what I wrote as a teaser:

This is not a talk by any stretch of the imagination. It is an invitation to draw together to exercise our visual thinking. I have been doing F2F graphic facilitation work and it taps into something that I often feel missing online. So can we talk together, draw together then share our images to add to that conversation? What might happen? Let’s play.

See http://flnw.wikispaces.com/flnw2_itinerary for the full FLNW 2008 schedule, both online and on the ground in Thailand. Here is the Elluminate URL we’ll be using for the actual session. (Thanks, Leigh!) And here are the images…

| View | Upload your own

As you may have noticed, I have been ranting about, practicing and exploring the practice of graphic recording/facilitation. Last week we tried to take a series of pictures as a chart was made, but I haven’t figured out how to put them together. Then comes this amazing video, Time Lapse Mural Creation High Speed Art

 (I had the video embedded, but it keeps breaking the WP site so I’ve moved it off. The link is above.) 

Stephanie Crowley’s work is amazing and this video gives a sense of how a full production chart is created. My assumption here is that this is a chart made not in real time at a conference, but something created to be shared and saved/displayed. Nice inspiration for a Tuesday.

I Can Draw

Originally uploaded by Choconancy1

And you can draw.

Yesterday at the IDRC sponsored pre-meetings, I ran a small 2.5 hour workshop on Graphic Recording 101. With the support of my friend and colleague Allison Hewlitt, we planned a quick hands-on tour of using graphics with a focus on recording sessions at meetings like GK3.

We started by drawing graphic self introductions. This example is from Dimage (I don’t think I am spelling that correctly) from Cambodia. His intro is in the lower left of the image. We then toured each others pictures around the room and had a chance both to get to know each other and appreciate the talent we brought into the room. In 8 introductions, we could spot a clear quality of graphic recording, even amidst the disclaimers of “I can’t draw.”

So many of us as adults have lost touch with the innate skills we cultivated as a child. My request at that point was to let go of this inner self censor.

The next thing we did was loosen up with some big circle drawings, then dove right into lettering. I asked them to write the headline “I Can Draw.”

I don’t know how they felt, but I felt joy at seeing them write this. It was a declaration. We have the power to make our mark.

Then we practiced fast lettering, lists and played a bit with color. After that we sat in a circle on the floor and experimented with different pens, looked at samples of other people’s (amazing!) work and shared basic icons on our sketch books. We had a strong emphasis on options for quickly drawing people - which seems to intimidate a lot of us.

Finally, everyone went to a clean sheet of large paper on the walls and we did a practice session. I made up a short, disorganized 5 minute speech and they recorded. WOW, what talent. Everyone created compelling and useful images. (You can see some more photos here..)

Over the week at the meeting, everyone will record a session. We are meeting at lunchtime to share stories, tips and coach each other. By the end of the event the hope is we capture digitally all our images, and then share them via email for final critiques and coaching.

Images are powerful allies. Finding our ability to create and share them, to make our mark, is a powerful act.

Yes, I can draw. So can you. After this workshop, I’m even more convinced that this is a learnable practice.