The Center for Graphic Facilitation

How Adobe uses Adobe: Developing new ways to collaborate

The secret to being a successful Chief Information Officer is simple: 

1. Always know what your people are working on, and...
2. Eat your own dogfood.

As a management and development team, Adobe is creating new ways to collaborate, both in terms of internal projects and in the products they are offering the world.  

In this video interview, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, CIO of Adobe, speaks to ZDNet Editor in Chief, Larry Dignan about her top priorities at the graphics software maker. 

She describes an emerging world of collaboration that graphic recorders and facilitators need to understand and adapt their services to...quickly!

WIRED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense -- Video

LONG BEACH, California -- Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done.

FULL STORY: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html

NPR's Marketplace Whiteboard

Another manifestation of the latest trend in experts + whiteboards + video, NPR's Marketplace senior editor, Paddy Hirsh, explains complex economic trands, terms and causes of the current crisis--as if you wanted to hear more!

Toxic assets from Marketplace on Vimeo.

Toxic assets

If you've been following the problems encountered by the banks, you've probably come across the phrase "toxic assets." They've poisoned banks' balance sheets and brought them to the brink of failure. But what is a toxic asset, exactly? 

See other easy-to-understand explainations:

• The credit crisis as Antarctic expedition
• Why 'Fallout' for the financial crisis? 
• Untangling credit default swaps
• A look inside hedge funds 
• Leveraging and deleveraging 

Subscribe to the Whiteboard video podcast in iTunes

Add the Whiteboard widget to your site. 

Approximately once a week, a new Marketplace Whiteboard video will be released. As these videos are released, they are added to the this Marketplace Whiteboard video widget. 

'Minority Report' Interface Controlled by Hand Gestures

"Before Tom Cruise went crazy," notes the unnamed reviewer in this video from WIRED, "he starred in this actually pretty cool movie called Minority Report, where he was controlling this computer interface purely with his hands."

At CES 2009, Toshiba showed off a conceptual computer interface that uses hand gestures for control. With simple motion sensing technology and a software interface, Toshiba hopes to open up applications for video games and other interactive media.

The WIRED reviewer concludes: "I think it is pretty cool. I don't think it'll hit the mainstream anytime soon. I don't think people will be solving crimes or anything with it."

Who knows? Three years ago, Jeff Han blew the roof off at TED 2006 by premiering his touchscreen interface. Then the iPhone came out and made smallscreen multi-touch an expected feature on gadgets.

Oh, there's the Wii which is fast putting the concept of a hardwired game controller in the category of rabbit ear television antenna.

I want to know when we can use it to start painting in virtual 3-D!

Picturing the Panic on the Back of a Napkin

Check out this fun cross-section of attempts to explain the economic wormhole and how it ripped the fabric of our financial universe! From Dan Roam:

Several visual lessons in what went wrong with Wall Street
The last many weeks have been a field day for people around the world to unleash their inner stick figure. As everyone from market analysts on Wall Street to truck drivers on Main Street struggles to describe what is happening in the global economy, we see more "solving problems with pictures" than at any time in memory.

Of the dozens of clips and links that people have sent me, here are my four favorites so far. (Warning: some of these are longer than they need to be, some more superficial, and some more crude, but all are worth the few minutes they take to watch.) Think of this as a fifteen minute crash course in global economics, presentation design, and visual thinking -- all at the same time.

Also check out Xplane's animated Subprime Explaination.

T. Boone Pickens Scribes Future of US Energy

Click here or image to launch the video.

T. Boone Pickens uses live drawing of the facts and concepts behind potential future energy plans for the US is worth watching in its entirety. I have a hard time coming up with a better example of how to create a series of simple pictures to explain a complex concept.

~ From the blog of Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures:

TED2008 The BigViz Animation

Watch a three-minute movie of the TED2008 BIGVIZ sketches, created by Autodesk animator and compositor Keith Chamberlain, with music scored by TEDster Michael Montes.

The images created by Kevin Richards and David Sibbet during the TED2008 are set to music and animated using gorgeous complexity modeling. The hundreds of individual sketches are transformed into rivers of data, DNA strands, and galaxies of ideas.

Watch a behind-the-scenes view with Sibbet that illuminates the integration of hand-rendered art, Wacom tablets, and the multi-touch wall. Unbelievable, really.

You can download the TED2008-BigViz Book and see more here.

Fast Draw: Gus the Gas

From Deidre Crowley:

While watching the "Sunday Morning" news program this morning, I was shocked to see Mitch Butler and Josh Landis, the "Fast Draw". At interest to me: that these techniques are being used to support the evening news. Here is just one link and you can find many others through Googling Fast Draw, Josh Landis and Mitch Butler.

clipped from www.cbsnews.com 'Gus The Gas' Posted by Josh Landis and Mitch Butler | 1 As the price of crude oil keeps jumping, so has the amount of finger-pointing at factors in the seemingly relentless rise. What's behind it? Have the law of supply and demand and other usual economic forces given way to speculators bidding up the price for personal gain?

Elephant Scribe

Stephanie Crowley sends word of this up-and-coming graphic facilitator. (She adds that travel may be difficult.)

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).

It is absolutely incredible to watch the accuracy and finesse of this beautiful artist. And, watching the images emerge is no less engaging than watching Picasso draw.

Debunking 3rd World Myths with Animated Statistics

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.