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VizThink Europe 2008 Recap: General Session 2

By Monday afternoon things were beginning to settle into a rhythm.  As Tom told me, the general rule of thumb is once you’re past lunch on the first day things tend to smooth out as everyone has done everything once (registered, been to a general session, found a breakout room, and found where to eat).

The afternoon general session was one I was looking forward to as it had the potential to be fairly controversial and I expected some good discussion would come out of it. Cognac, a sponsor and also the team who organizes VizThink London, had spent the past few months interviewing members of the visual Thinking industry and were attempting to create a poster that answered the question “What does the visual thinking industry look like?”

Ellen Coomber delivered a presentation on the process they had gone through to date, and what their findings had been so far. Their process was sound and they spoke to some very influential people in the space.

Finally came the big reveal – as the poster was revealed on screen the Cognac team in the room delivered a copy of the poster to each table in the room for their feedback. From there the balance of the session was spent with Ellen facilitating the tables through a few exercises to generate feedback and then we concluded with some quick reports from each table on their initial opinions.

The feedback was generally mixed which I think was to be expected. Mapping the visual thinking industry is a pretty big challenge and there are a lot of strong, and varied, opinions about what exactly it looks like, or for that matter, what it even is.

One of the more amusing bits of feedback was about the “Tornado” imagery that was prominent in the poster. More than one table noted how it very much evoked an image of a female body:

The notion got a good laugh from the attendees but it was interesting that as soon as that point was raised it was all anybody could see.

I think at the end of the day, while the Cognac folks would have loved everyone to say “Yup, you nailed it.” they had realistic expectations that this was an early draft, and as they put it “A line in the sand” where the conversation can at least start. They certainly deserve credit for that and achieved that goal. We’ll be sure to check back with them form time to time and see what subsequent versions of the document produce.

More photos from the session can be found in the slideshow below:

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Watch the blog over the next few days for a series of posts recapping the VizThink Europe event…

Missed the conference? VizThink 2009 is coming up February 22-25, 2009 in San Jose, California and registration is now open. The early registration discount ends November 30 so now is the time to get the best possible price to attend.

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