We've been preaching it for years, but I guess it is now news: Creative work environments improve creative thinking! Congrats to Leslie Marquard and Catalyst Ranch on leading the piece. Thanks for bringing "right-brained thinking" to a "left-brained" world. (Actually, working in creative environments and using multiple learning modalities inspires whole-brain thinking.)
Graphic facilitator Gavin Blake writes us of his exciting collaboration with other facilitators and scribes at a national summit in Australia's capital, Canberra. The objective was for the 1000 participants to generate big ideas over a range of 10 topics including Governance, Productivity and Creativity in Australia. All of the ideas will make up our vision for Australia in 2020. It was a blast meeting music god Peter Garrett, now Minister for the Arts (not sure if you guys know the band Midnight Oil, but I’m a huuuge fan) and Australia’s 100 foremost creative minds. Yes, there were a few celebrities there (Hugh Jackman below) but, there was some serious intent and genuinely insightful ideas thrown around the room. I’m very chuffed this video with our drawing of the journey of the day made it into the news. Stoked. Here are some more photos...
This video speaks of the power of visual language to communicate across cultures... and species! In it, an elephant paints a self-portrait (no joke).
The Point brings together problems, people, and the pressure of collective action. The site allows users to create campaigns and encourage other people to join anonymously. Once the number of members reaches a certain critical mass (10, 50, 2000) and action is triggered: a sale, a press release, a protest.
Extremely useful when shopping for ties, or arguing with your spouse about what color to paint the kitchen. clipped from www.kk.org The folks at Dolores Blog "showed thousands of random colors to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here’s what they said:" In short the experiment goes like this. They generated random color samples and then paid the anonymous workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to give a name to these random colors. Dolores then mapped that name in the appropriate color place on the standard color wheel. The result is this color wheel of names. But the really cool part is that you can search for color names via this Color Label Wheel. Type in a name and see all the colors that random folks think belong to that color name.
Information graphic from New York Times. A sovereign wealth fund is a huge heap of money that is controlled by a nation -- say Singapore or Saudi Arabia -- rather than by a private transnational company. The latter is called private equity funds and their investments have been prime movers in global finance for decades. Some of the largest banks and finance companies that are in the current news cycle, like Bear Stearns, or UBS, are good examples of private money. They buy and sell business across national borders.
This information graphic from Atlantic Monthly shows how Havanna will face a clash of interests—between developers and preservationists, and between moneyed exiles and poor habaneros. This map, based loosely on the visions of Quintana, Cuban American economist Jorge Sanguinetty, and others who’ve been eager for Castro’s end, depicts what might follow, and how the city might be rebuilt.
First newsletter from graphic facilitator Ole Qvist-Sørensen of Bigger Picture in Denmark.
In "Back of the Napkin", Dan taught me a tremendous amount about how to appropriately integrate traditional process maps and diagrams into my own work as a graphic facilitator working with clients who are trying to understand and manage complexity.
Rohdesign is the site of designer Mike Rohde, who writes about design, sketching, writing, mobile computing, technology, travel, cycling, books, music and more. via Lee Potts of Visual Being. clipped from www.rohdesign.com SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes are up! I've just completed scanning, tuning and uploading 34 pages of sketchnotes I captured in my pocket Moleskine sketchbook at SXSW Interactive earlier this week. With the SEED Conference sketchnotes being pretty popular, I'm curious to see how these SXSW sketchnotes are received. While sketchnotes capture concentrated concepts for each session well, I think they're even better at awakening ideas stored in the minds of session attendees. Speakers Featured Here are the speakers featured in the SXSW Interactive Sketchnotes: Naz Hamid, Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Ryan King, Glenda Bautista, Ariel Waldman, John Gruber, Michael Lopp, Jim Coudal, Dan Rubin, Didier Hilhorst, Eris Stassi, Lea Alcantara (sorry for...