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!