C2D2

Righto, I said I would post a few charts from C2D2 (the Canadian Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation), which happened here in Vancouver in mid-November. As I said in my previous post, it was both fun and exhausting — fun because graphic recording is inherently fun, and it was cool to actually be doing this at C2D2 when it was at the first C2D2 two years ago that I was first introduced to graphic recording! Life is a circle. It was also fun because I got to work with two other graphic recorders, Sue Davis and Deborah LeFrank, whom I had met at Christina's 'Graphics Bootcamp' last spring. I love working as part of a team, and as you can see from the picture at left, we had a good time working together!

It wasn't all goofing around, though: we worked HARD! That's where the exhausting part comes in. It was 2.5 days of very intensive charting, both up front during the plenaries and on sketchpads during breakout sessions. By the end of the conference, I was well and truly bagged. I haven't got good photos of all the charts yet, but here are a couple of the main ones.

This one was done for the first plenary, in which Adam Kahane spoke about "Facing Complex Issues." He talked fast — so we had to work fast!

Just so you can see how very differently two graphic recorders can capture the same talk, I'm attaching Deb LeFrank's chart here as well. (I don't think Deb has a web page or I'd include a link...) I like the way Deb organizes her material, and particularly how she handles text. One thing I realized when I looked at her work is that most of my body text is the same size, whereas Deb works with more variety of text size, which creates focal points and an interesting typographic 'texture'. Note to self!

The chart at left is from the Day 2 plenary panel. This one went even faster than Adam Kahane's; I was so busy scribing that I hardly took in anything they said! I think that's an occupational hazard of this work. You listen, you get it down, you let go, you move on.

The one below is a collaborative effort. I did the bits around the edges at home before the conference (Welcome to C2D2, the map, and the drawing at bottom right), then we filled in the centre on Day 1 as people called out things they discovered they had in common with others at their table. As you can see, some of the things people had in common were pretty funny!

Well, actually, maybe you can't — some of the writing is pretty small. My favourite is "have all done laundry". Yeah!! That's something that'll bond ya.

Here's the last one for today: another chart I created at home (my bedroom wall is serving as my studio these days) — this one is a chart showing what topics were being addressed at what tables.

And that pretty much brings us up to date! So farewell to 2007, and here's looking forward to what 2008 will bring...