V + E = DIT

(Visuals + Experiential = Divergent Inspirational Thinking)

Visuals for Change’s own Amanda Lyons will lead VizThink NYC’s next event, an excursion in Central Park, where we will break out of the office and into the great outdoors.

This engaging outdoor event will highlight both individual and group processes through reflection and other visual + experiential activities that you can add to your tool box. We will find new reasons to appreciate our surroundings. We will ask questions about the cultural assumptions that propel us through our every day. We will share and gain new perspectives. The reflection, drawing, photography and visualization at this event might even inspire you to action! Come visualize with us!

Bring friends, a water bottle and wear closed toed shoes. Optional items to bring: camera, sketchbook, and snacks to share. This is a free event, however if you feel compelled to donate a few dollars towards reserving the space in the park that would be ok too. See you in the park!

When

July 19, 2011 from 6-8pm

Where

Heckscher Picnic Area in Central Park

6500 West Dr.

New York, NY 10023

(South West Central Park near 65th St)

About out Facilitator

Amanda Lyons is the founder of Visuals for Change, a visual facilitation consultancy whose purpose is to serve clients via engaging experiences, dialogue, and visualizing the unfolding art of business and its ever-changing variables. Amanda is a master of the art of unconventional presentation with a passion for teaching folks how to present well. As a Lead Instructor for Outward Bound, Amanda revitalized her presentation style towards facilitation, sharing the belief that ‘learning by doing’ is the way to go. Visuals for Change performs graphic facilitation and other visual activities at conferences, meetings, and events.

Please register at http://vedit.eventbrite.com/

Admission is free!

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1. VizThink NYC Summer Social

Visualisation Rennes

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VizThink NYC Summer Social

Come out and get to know the community of New York area visual thinkers for an evening of socializing as we gear up for another great summer in the city.

Join us for a casual evening of food, drink, and fun, including:

• Sketchbook Show & Tell – Bring yours, check out others. It’s always a treat to peek inside someone else’s sketchbook, as well as to share the doodles, notes, and thinking in yours.
• Pen Swap – Got a pen, pencil, or maker you love and want to share? Bring a couple to swap with other pen geeks.
• Napkin Sketching – We’ll be sure to have a few stacks of napkins to jot down your ideas on.
• Graffiti Wall – Contribute your doodles to a wall of paper… and we will share the end results with the community.

When

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

6:00-9:00 p.m.

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2. How I took Sketchnotes at TEDxBloomington

Challenge

Usually when I go to an event, I grab my sketchbook and bag of markers, plop down in a comfortable seat, and write down what I hear, illustrating points when I have the inspiration. When I decided to attend TEDxBloomington, I went into it knowing I wanted to stretch my skills by synthesizing rather than transcribing the speakers’ content. I wanted to illustrate main points and not worry about capturing all the details. This was a challenge because I’m a detail-person by nature.

Preparation and Set-Up

I made sure to read over the event program and get a feel for the theme, “Wisdom of Play,” in advance. Awesome theme, right? I was excited to hear the talks so I got there early to grab a front row seat of a back section in the Buskirk-Chumley theatre. Away from the front to avoid distracting the speaker, but close enough to feel like part of the audience.

I snatched a regular chair that was stacked near the front of the auditorium, I don’t even know why they were there but it was perfect for me to store my markers and sketchbook on the chair in front of my seat. With the lights low, I couldn’t see which colors I was picking. Luckily, I had just seen Mike Rohde’s genius idea of using a tap light via Twitter. I propped my little tap light on its side in my pen bag and went nuts.

TEDxBloomington proper

Even with all the awesome breaks we had in-between the different tracks of Wisdom, Learning, Creativity, and Play, by the end of the day I could tell I was slowing down. With all the live talks and official TED videos, I think we saw almost thirty speakers. Don’t quote me on that.

The thing with synthesizing content versus transcribing exactly what you hear, is that you have to hear the information, roll that information around in your brain so you can put it in your own words, figure out how you can visualize that information with stick figures and colors, and then actually follow through and draw it. All without missing the next bit of information that might contribute to the core of the talk.

It’s no wonder you can get exhausted by the end of an intense day of speakers and synthesizing. Pretty convenient that it’s the best kind of exhaustion, where you get to learn, be creative, and have something to show for it.

Final Result

In the end, I had a lot of fun trying new things like the tap light and having a makeshift table for my markers. The tap light was indispensable. I would not have been able to see my markers or sketchbook page without it. In the end, focusing on the core of each talk helped me sustain creativity longer, because I wasn’t buried in the details. I kept telling myself, “Keep the images simple, rely on stick figures.”

Enough talking from me. Here are my two pages of sketchnotes from the event. Click the images to view details.

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When you are known as a writer on creativity, people send you things. Recently I was forwarded a link to AquaNotes, a waterproof notepad you can put in your shower. I’ve never used one, but I can tell you the science behind why people get ideas in the shower.

Technically speaking we get ideas all the time – that’s what it means to be conscious. We have ideas for what to eat, say, and do in nearly every waking moment. It’s quite hard to stop thinking, as anyone who has tried to practice meditation can tell you. We are hard-wired for ideas.

More germane to showers, we rarely admit how much of who we are is driven by our subconscious minds.  We know our dreams, which are owned and operated by our subconscious, can be incredibly creative.  But on a busy day in modern times we are bombarded with information, and our conscious mind dominates. It’s only when we have quiet time, going for a walk, getting some exercise, or taking a shower, that our conscious minds quiet down enough for our sub-conscious to be heard. And that’s why you get ideas in the shower. The other inputs to your mind are quiet, your body (which is connected to your brain) is relaxed, and the way is clear for the rest of your brain to bubble up interesting thoughts. (Chapter 1,  6 and 12 of The Myths of Innovation explores the science/history of, and advice on, how creativity works – sample chapters here (PDF)).

Of course there are other ways to engage the natural creativity of your sub-conscious. Taking an improv theater class is all about learning simple games that quiet your conscious brain, and let your creative instincts come through. And as everyone is different, going for a run, sharing coffee with friends, or painting a fence might provide the best kind of environment for you.  Lastly, there’s drugs and alcohol, substances artists have used for centuries to shift their thinking and allow other parts of the mind to have center stage. Don’t kid yourself: the caffeine in your coffee does all kinds of things to how your brain functions.

But part of the mythology around ideas and showers is  somehow a truly great idea will, on its own, make you rich and change the world, a fantasy I can promise has never happened. Ideas are easy to find once you understand the basics of how they work (See ideas are made of other ideas). But it’s always what you do with your ideas after you get them that matters. And perhaps this Aquanote thing, which lets you leave the shower with the idea in your hand, isn’t such a silly idea after all.

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I attended on behalf of VizThink and the conference organizers to share the joy of visual note-taking with attendees. To my delight, many of the attendees hadn’t seen anything quite like the large-scale, poster-sized notes I created. I do this in real time, as presentations are being given. Some folks I talked to had seen pictures of this kind of visual note-taking (also known as graphic recording) but had not seen it done in person, nor on subject matter they were familiar with.

More and more people are becoming familiar with the concept of sketchnotes — visual note-taking in a personal or lap-sized notebook — and some attendees, like Sarah Mitchell, were creating their own at this conference. Are you someone who took visual notes at the Healthcare conference? If so, VizThink invites you to share your work. Please add a link to your photos in the comments section below or contact me: boston@vizthink.com.

In the meantime, here is my Flickr set from a day of inspiring talks about how we can improve the health care experience. Special thanks to VizThink and Mad*Pow for making this possible.

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The evening began with a discussion about people’s hesitation to use visual communication, how we overcome that hesitation, and the value images can have in expressing ideas. The group shared their thoughts on how to clear the first and biggest hurdle, “I can’t draw.” As we moved into the activities that would follow, we all learned how much more there is to visual communication than drawing.

The first activity of the night was a session of VizProvization where attendees improvised a presentation from the fictional company, smACME. Participants had twenty seconds each to talk about smACME’s new initiative guided only by an image projected on the screen. Beginning with an airplane cockpit and continuing to display images like a taco, a bespectacled chihuahua, various random statistics and the odd alien here and there, the improvisers passed the microphone around the room and spun a story about smACME’s future plans and had a few laughs along the way. After the exercise, we discussed what had happened and realized the many ways we can use images to tell a story.

The next activity of the session was VizBizPictionary where the room broke up into teams to play a variation of pictionary. Each team received a cup full of top-tier business names and had 5 minutes to get as many of the companies as they could. Pictionary is a great way to show that when it comes to visual communication, your drawings don’t have to be pretty. After the game was over we talked about what goes on during a game of pictionary and discussed the various strategies we use. It turns out those strategies work even when you aren’t scrambling to figure out how to draw a picture that represents Walmart (try it.. it’s hard!) Two of the most powerful tools we use in a situation like pictionary, and with visual communication in general, are metaphors and analogies. We continued our talk by examining how, even when we are only using words, metaphor and analogy conjure images in our minds and help us understand and communicate ideas. This led us into the final activity of the evening, a brief introduction to sketchnoting.

We watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and were asked to listen for and draw the images we heard in Dr. King’s speech. This exercise showed us how much more we engage with a speech or presentation when we notice the imagery being described or shown. It also gave many first-timers a taste of what sketchnoting is like and how drawing (or even doodling) while listening engages different parts of our mind. Even though most of the audience was familiar with the historic speech, listening in this way proved to be a new experience of it for the whole group. We wrapped up the evening sharing our thoughts, our different approaches to sketchnotes, and discovering how many different ways there are to hear, see, and communicate the imagery in that amazing speech.

BigBlueGumball and VizThink NYC gave a great overview of visual communication without focusing on drawing techniques but instead showing us how much our minds play a part in the process, not just our hands. By engaging the crowd in fun activities we have probably all done before, and then looking back and analyzing how visuals play a part in those activities, we all left with a better understanding of the power of visual communication.

Thanks again to Todd and Steve from BigBlueGumball and to our host Liquidnet for a great evening.

View event photos on Flickr (courtesy of VizThinker MJ Broadbent)

We’d also like to thank attendee Amanda Lyons for her fantastic blog post, in which she created visual notes of of the whole evening. Nice work!

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Based on the success of the project in 2009, for this, their second tour, The Art House Co-op invited nearly 30,000 artists from 94 countries to use a simple 5-1/4″ x 8-1/4″ Moleskin Cahier Sketchbook to fill in any way they chose and return it for curation, display, and permanent collection in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The current Sketchbook Tour starts in Brooklyn, New York, makes its way to Austin Texas to visit the South by Southwest festival, and then has shows around the country scheduled throughout the summer. Ultimately, it returns to The Brooklyn Art Library and will be cataloged online.

Check the schedule and the map to see if the tour will be in your town and, if not, visit the exhibition online. But, if you can, try to see it in person in order to follow the experience that will unfold page by page, sketch by sketch, person by person. If you’re inspired and want to create this experience for others, watch our site and Art House Co-op for future opportunities to share your visual explorations.

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No, the picture on the right is not from some ritualistic cult ceremony or a crazy torture experiment…it is from the February 2011 VizThink NYC event entitled “Drawing for Thinkers Workshop” led by guest presenter Liz Burow.

Liz, a seasoned architecture and design professional, presented an engaging two-hour workshop incorporating fast-paced interactive exercises in which participants were challenged to develop new ways of thinking and expressing themselves visually. The event was an opportunity for attendees to tap into their inner child, inner athlete, (or whatever else was inside), in order to build new drawing and visualization tools, developing their ability to draw in a way that was less self-conscious and more intuitive.

“Draw like a robot…or a caveman” were among the mantras for the evening, as participants honed their skills to increase effectiveness and confidence to communicate ideas, visualize problems, and create stronger human connections.

The event concluded with the room dividing into two pairs of teams competing in a speed round of Viz-Pictionary, which gave everyone an opportunity to showcase their newly developed “personal toolbox” of drawing shortcuts. Lots learned and fun was had by all.

View event photos on Flickr (thanks to fellow VizThink NYC organizer Dean Meyers)

Special thanks to our hosts John Labriola and Teach for America.

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As you squirm in your seat, remembering how boring childhood often was, and how we sometimes squandered our time and talents on coloring books (they destroy creativity, according to Marlys) in order to conquer our fears about making pictures. And so, for the days when we don’t feel that we can draw, the kindhearted artist offers a stand-in chicken to use instead. We can trace it, cut it out, and paste it into our own drawing space. “The Dear Chicken is on the job!”

“What happened on the day I realized I could not draw?” Now that’s an ugly thought, but the courageous artist assures us that “it happens to almost everyone.” She explores the fear that a blank drawing book, or even a blank sheet of paper can conjure up, then proceeds to annotate the process of making ugly and pretty shapes, collecting them into nice piles, and then “finding your way back to the place where the shapes are happening.” Another piece of sage advice about overcoming our inherent inabilities is a blinding glimpse of the obvious: “The trick is to stand not knowing certain things long enough for them to come to you.”

“Try dots when you are blue,” the thoughtful artist urges. This section explores in detail the language of dots; how they differ from lines and how it made her feel as a child when she covered things in dots – “it was like a dare.” Picture This covers just about every kind of art crisis imaginable and what to do about it. “What makes you able to endure uncertainty. What makes your mind wander? Why do we lose focus?” Part of the solution is “You have to be willing to spend time making things for no reason.”

The prolific artist obviously lives her good advice; the pages of this miraculous book are wall-to-wall jam-packed with pictures, art fragments, torn, cut and pasted printed matter, lettering, writing, and ideas. “It took a long time to realize that I didn’t kneed to be in the mood to move my brush before I picked it up,” she writes. “All I needed to do was move the brush and my mood would follow the trail.”

As Marlys becomes braver, she draws herself and her cohort Arna. A chapter-like section of the book details this process, starting with pictures of Marlys in different guises: dancing, boxing, eating grilled cheese and other fun stuff. Then she deconstructs what makes drawing herself or Arna such a different exercise. Later on, Marlys uncovers her Rosetta Stone. “I had an idea for a party,” she writes, “where people made pictures together and the rule is you can talk about anything except the pictures. What happens when we make pictures without talking about them? Why would we not talk about a picture? What does not talking give us?” And so, dear readers, as my friend the English art director likes to say, “Suck it and see!”

This review was authored by Peggy Roalf and published by DART / Design Arts Daily on December 1, 2010.

Related: Listen to Lynda Barry’s November 2010 NPR interview on how to “doodle your way out of writer’s block.” More about Lynda can be found in her virtual studio on Drawn and Quarterly.

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