New address

Greetings from my new address!

Yes, I've changed my URL from axisofemail to my own name. "Why?" you ask? Well, when I set up this blog last summer, I was in a political snit. "Axis of email" popped into my head in response to the Axis of You-know-what that we kept hearing about in the news. And I confess, I thought it rather witty. However – it's not exactly an intuitive address. You don't think, "Avril Orloff – I wonder where I might find her – oh, of course, she's at the Axis of Email!"

So I thought, well, how about using my actual name? Especially since, as far as I know, I'm the only Avril Orloff in the world! That would make it really easy to find me. So that's what I did. Or rather, my friend Elen did it for me. Elen is a computer maven who understands the strange language that lurks behind the thin veneer of user-friendliness on the surface of computers – a world I dare not enter. She offered to do what was necessary to transfer my blog to my domain. And minutes later, voila! A new address. Thank you, Elen!

The only downside is that apparently Blogger users who switch to FTP transfer no longer have access to all the easy set-up features that Blogger Beta included. So now it's back to trying to figure out which of those strings of HTML I need to tweak to make any changes to the look of this thing. Sigh...

PS: By the way, Elen also has a fascinating blog, and turned a lot of her material into a book. Don't Shoot! I have another story to tell you… Check it out.

A different use of visuals

A few weeks ago my friend Kate Sutherland asked me to do something a bit different. Instead of asking me to record a meeting, she wanted to use visuals to present a proposal for a conference she's designing. She thought that presenting her ideas visually would be more engaging than a standard, straight-text proposal. So we went to work. Kate had prepared a mind map of her concept, and we spent some time going over it and refining the design. Then I got busy with my markers, and here's what emerged a couple of hours later:

As soon as it was done, Kate rolled it up and whisked it off to the group. The next day I got a delighted email from her, telling me the presentation had been a huge hit! "Presenting the community engagement proposal through graphic images was very powerful," she wrote. "The colours and images and large scale of the paper immediately drew peoples' interest and sustained attention. It was a wonderful and quick way to get all the people in the meeting up to speed, on the same page, and buying in. And committee members felt freer to interact with the graphic presentation than they do with a Power Point — for example, suggesting additional images and arrows."

Needless to say, I was very excited. Both by the fact that the drawing had such a strong effect, and by the fact that people felt free to interact with it. I wasn't present at Kate's meeting, but when I'm in the room I always check in with the people there to make sure I've heard and recorded their thoughts correctly. Sometimes I leave a space for people to add their own words and doodles, or provide sticky notes so they can add other thoughts, corrections, etc. Ultimately I'd like to find ways of building more interactivity right into the process so that people can express their own creativity!

Catching up...

Here, at last, are some more pictures of work I've done in the past couple of months. This batch is from a strategic planning session I recorded for a community centre in North Vancouver.

These were all done "live" – that is, I captured the conversation as it was taking place. Sometimes I'm given info in advance, such as for some pieces I did at the Sechelt session. Other times I do my work during breakout sessions when I'm not required to record on the spot (e.g. the second drawing for the Sea to Sky session). This gives me more time to organize the ideas into clusters – something that's hard to do when the talk is flying thick and fast! But sometimes I manage to organize as I go. I think I got it this time...

I'm looking forward to having more opportunity to practise at home now that I've got a nice big place with a whole separate room for an office! Beats hell out of working off the kitchen table...