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Picturing the Community

Who are visual thinkers?  Anybody who uses any of the visual arts for learning or communication.  Easy said, hard to picture.

So, we’d like to enlist the community to help us out.  How would you picture the community?  Which groups are involved?  What roles are involved?  How are the groups related to each other?  What’s the difference between visualization approaches, applications, and those who apply the methods?  Where do vendors fit in?  Practitioners?  Contractors?  Corporate employees?  Here’s one approach that needs a lot of work to get things going:

Here are a few things to consider:

• What are the different approaches?
• Which ones are qualitative vs. quantitative?
• Which ones are conceptual vs. literal?
• Which ones are used in face-to-face meetings?
• Which ones are static vs. moving vs. dynamic vs. interactive?
• Where are the similarities and differences?
• Are these even the right things to consider? 

Can you create a visual that displays all of this information?  Send in your examples and we’ll post as many as we can.

At VizThink, we’re working to create a balanced set content from each of the areas.  This will inform the content for the conference.

Xplane & D.A.D. are Sponsoring at VizThink ‘08

We’re excited to announce our newest sponsors for VizThink ’08, Xplane and Digital Asset Deployment (D.A.D.). 

D.A.D. is a business incubator, based in Madrid, Spain.  They focus on community & Internet-based businesses. 

Xplane creates information-driven communications.  They use visualization to convey complex ideas, processes, and services to improve decisions and speed action. In the next few weeks we’ll be launching our community and event wikis.  You’ll be able to check out these sites for much more detail on each of our sponsors, facilitators, sessions, and community content.

Early Registration Discount Extended

By popular demand, we’ve extended our early registration discount until October 24th.  Many of you, especially our corporate customers requested an extension in order to allow enough time to get the appropriate approvals.  So, we thought we’d extend it for everybody.

Also, be sure to check the website and blog frequently over the next several days.  Many changes are on their way such as:

- More detailed content information
- More exciting new facilitators
- Information on our opening reception
- New sponsor announcements
- Pre-conference events
- Visual thinking samples
- A new community wiki

There’s lots of exciting things goin on here at VizThink.  Be sure to check back often!

VizThink adds a new dimension…

…3D to be specific.  Our goal is to create a community of people from all forms of the visual arts for learning and communication, and 3D is no exception.  There is a lot of research going on in virtual worlds and serious games.  Does 3D matter?  If so, when does it matter?  What can be done with 3D that can’t be done in other mediums.

We’ll have several exciting announcements in the upcoming weeks from this new and growing portion of the visual thinking industry, and our first is Tony O’Driscoll, until recently, with IBM.  Tony O’Driscoll is an educator, speaker and author whose engaging message emphasizes that the key asset in the information age is not technology, but people. He currently serves as a Professor of the Practice at North Carolina State University’s College of Management.

O’Driscoll’s recent research projects include the application of peer to peer technology to improve information sharing among workers and an examination of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing (MMORPG) environments to study leadership in the enterprise of the future. He’s also a member of the editorial board for Human Resources Development Quarterly (HRDQ). Dr. O’Driscoll has been a keynote presenter, panelist, workshop leader, and facilitator at over 75 national and international conferences and symposia.

 Welcome Tony!  Thanks for adding a new dimension.

It’s All About the Community

While we’ve certainly been talking a lot about the conference, the goal of VizThink is to create a global, sustainable community of visual thinkers with the conference as a launch.  However, lots of community work is already been done at a grass roots level, and our next facilitator, Ryan Coleman, is a great example.

In his role as CTO & co-founder of Toronto based Clay Tablet Technologies it would seem Ryan Coleman is far removed from his days in Sheridan College’s Media Arts program.  Ryan’s Visual Thinking effort manifests itself most often in a technical context as he maps out application architectures, information architectures or user interface wireframes. However, as his primary business revolves around the globalization and translation of content and concepts Ryan continues to see the immediate power of being able to explain an idea or solution without requiring the use of written or spoken language. 

In February of this year Ryan created the first regional VizThink group to help foster a Visual Thinking community within Toronto. Leveraging the experience he gained through participating, and later organizing events,  in  Toronto’s BarCamp community Ryan took the VizThink event from a core group of 15 or so people to approaching 50 at the most recent event.

Applied Visual Thinking

We’re really excited about how the content is shaping up for VizThink ’08.  We’ve got some of the industries greatest thinkers coming together to share what they’ve been working on.  However, it’s not all theory and research.  In fact most of the content will be oriented around small group discussion, practical experience, and, wherever possible, hands on practice.

Daniel Rose is a perfect example of this approach.  He is a consultant and facilitator for Bell Canada in Toronto, Canada. He designs and facilitates breakthrough collaborative work events for groups up to 100 people. Building upon his university training in Mass Communications and Philosophy at York University, Daniel brings experience in photography, improvisational acting and drawing to the collaborative events to encourage his clients to see and explore new perspectives and vantage points.

Prior to this work at Bell, Daniel was a Producer for Yahoo! Canada, developing online services in the wireless, mobile and personalization spaces and worked as a producer for tsn.ca, the online presence for Canada’s most watched sports specialty television network.

In addition to his work, Daniel’s interests include photography, playing baseball, hockey and is involved with various groups that promote grassroots community development. He volunteers his time and energy for a small Canadian humanitarian organization called Ve’ahavta and donates his professional expertise to organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, Sierra Club of Canada and United Way.

Scott McCloud at VizThink ‘08

We can’t tell you how excited we are about this next announcement…Scott McCloud is going to be facilitating at VizThink ’08!!!  Scott has written several books that are ostensibly about comics, however, in our opinion, have more to do with visualization, communication, and especially storytelling.  His books should be required reading for anybody in learning or communications.

What’s best?  He applies his own theories to his own writing.  The books are written in a graphic novel form demonstrating the technique while talking about it.  Now that’s cool.  Come learn about spacing, timing, color, combining text and visualization, art style, and so many more things. 

Scott McCloud has been writing and drawing comics since 1984. His book Understanding Comics was a New York Times Notable book for 1994, and is available in 16 languages. McCloud has lectured on comics and digital media at Harvard University, MIT, Pixar, Microsoft and The Smithsonian Institution. McCloud’s online comics can be found on his website at scottmccloud.com. His latest book, Making Comics, for which he just finished a 50-state-and-several-Canadian-province tour is in stores now.

 Can you tell we’re excited?  Welcome, Scott!

Thinking with Photographs

Christine Martell adds another interesting dimension and approach to visualization and facilitation.  Sometimes, people feel intimidated with creative activities like drawing.  While using photos avoids that stress and allows people to still tap their inner creativity. The photos are compiled and organized by the participants to creatively describe their situation and solve their problems.  We’re excited to have her have her demonstrate this interesting approach using real world problems from the participants.

She is in charge of the creative path and marketing direction for VisualsSpeak. This includes research, conceptualization, product design and development of VisualsSpeak products and services. It also involves marketing the VisualsSpeak approach to prospective users and certifying professional facilitators to use the tools.

Christine is an accomplished consultant, public speaker and artist with more than 25 years of professional experience. The VisualsSpeak tool she developed has been used by corporate trainers, independent consultants, small- and medium-size businesses, global corporations, non-profits, educational institutions, and organizations focused on intercultural communications.

Christine earned a bachelor of fine arts in textiles in 1982 at the Rhode Island School of Design. Over the next decade, she worked primarily as a product artist, exhibiting and attracting awards for her work in a wide variety of venues across the United States.

In 1995, Christine made the transition from a product artist to a process artist, concentrating on helping others to discover the value inherent in the process of creating art. She served as a facilitator at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, where she developed ways to help art students reduce their creative anxiety and counseled them on issues related to classes and student affairs.

Christine earned a masters degree in education from Portland State University in 2004, where she researched the benefits of visual communication as a training tool. She holds certificates of completion in a variety of training & development topics including intercultural training, multi-media and Web-based training, and management of training.

Christine started VisualsSpeak in 2005 as a way of bringing the VisualsSpeak approach to a broad range of audiences. She is passionate about opening up the whole person so people can really be appreciated for who they are, and feels she is throwing life lines to people who really need to discover new openings.

Visual Language

We often talk about the use of visual language and the ability of visuals to communicate.  Neil Cohn has taken that to heart.  He believes that like spoken and written languages, there is also a visual language with structure and grammar.  His current research focuses on how this language is depicted in comics.  We’re excited to have him at the conference to lead discussions on this interesting area of research.

Neil has recently been gaining attention for his research on the visual language of “comics” and its relationship to language and cognition. He has spoken on this topic in the US and Europe, and has authored numerous articles and a book, Early Writings on Visual Language (Emaki Productions, 2003). For several years his writings have been a popular feature at Comixpedia.com, an online magazine devoted to webcomics. Since 2005, he has served as an advisor for CAST Inc., a non-profit organization that develops technology for education.

Neil’s work has been featured in publications such as the Comics Journal, the International Journal of Comic Art, the Public Journal of Semiotics, and the forthcoming textbook The Essential Manga Reader. His recent paper on visual language grammar won the 2007 M. Thomas Inge Award for Comics Scholarship. He has given talks at various places including the conference on Iconicity in Language and Literature in Krakow, Poland; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont; the Scottish Word and Image Group at the University of Dundee, Scotland; and is an annual speaker at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California.

In addition to scholarship, Neil’s creative work has been featured in Meditations (Booksurge, 2006), a collection of artistic graphic short stories, poems, and vignettes. Also, with author and nationally syndicated radio host Thom Hartmann, he illustrated the graphic novel We the People: A Call to Take Back America (CoreWay Media, 2004), which addresses the pervasive influence of corporations on American government.

Neil received an M.A. from the University of Chicago, a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has studied in Japan at Tsuru University. He is currently a doctoral student in Psychology at Tufts University in Boston, where he is working with esteemed linguist Ray Jackendoff to further explore the cognition of visual language grammar and its representation in the brain. You can find his work online at www.emaki.net, and at his blog, www.thevisuallinguist.com.

Powerful Presentations

Probably one of the most maligned yet most used forms of business communication is the presentation.  Since the days of Harvard Graphics 1.0 over 20 years ago, the power to make presentations moved from the professional presentation designer into the hands of users everywhere.  As with all things new (remember the blink tag in HTML?), with lots of new power comes lots of scary implementations.  However, presentations don’t have to be bad, and it’s not a function of the tool.

We can learn how to create better communications and presentations for our everyday work, and Nancy Duarte is the person to help us with that.  You may or may not immediately recognize her name, but you probably do remember her work.  Her firm designed the presentation for Al Gore’s Academy Award winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Nancy has been a Principal of Duarte Design, the global leader in developing business presentations since 1988.  Duarte Design creates cinematic-quality presentations in any media – helping innovative companies like Adobe, Cisco, Citrix, Electronic Arts, Hewlett-Packard, Logitech, Mozilla, Scripps Networks, Symantec and Wells Fargo deliver a compelling experience for their audiences.

Her passion for presentations that are clear, meaningful, motivating and attractive has opened doors for her firm in a business world full of cluttered and complex visual communications. She has an MBA from UCLA and speaks regularly at national conferences, authors training content and was a regular contributor to Presentations Magazine.

All you need to know about Visual Thinking