The Center for Graphic Facilitation

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 

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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. 

Obama by Diane Durand

This graphic facilitator has been off-the-road and home-with-kids for a couple of years. But she grabbed the closest avaialble drawing tools and captured the speech! (Send your version to [email protected])

Obama by Steph Crowley

From Stephanie Crowley of Chrysalis Studios:

Visualizing Obama's Inauguration Text

Several cool tools have emerged on the Web 2.0 tech horizon that enable swift data visualization of numbers and text. Below are examples of Obama's speech as parsed by two such on-line utilities.

Wordle.Net creates remarkably well organized text constructions remeniscent of the graphic works of Russian Constructivists and the Dutch De Stijl Movement. 

ManyEyes is the “shared visualization” site run by the Visual Communications Lab at IBM Research. This utility allows for more data formats, including bubble charts, scatter plots, networks, word trees, and block charts. See more versions of President Obama's speech here.

(via PopTech Blog)

Obama's Inauguration Speech by Brandy Agerbeck

I wanted to share my image with you all. This morning I drew Barack Obama's inauguration speech:

 

There's a page for it here, including a PDF to print. 

I'm usually drawing conversations, not a single, succinct speaker. I normally map in real time, but the density of Obama's point made me take very quick notes on what stood out to me. I quickly found a transcript of the speech online to reference. One way I help groups is by summarizing and synthesizing their words into brief points. In this case, getting our new president's words verbatim was important. I compared my notes to the transcript, giving me a chance to really decide what to pull out for the drawing. Next, I took to drawing those points around the main banner of Obama.

In my drawing, I really focused on the ideas of work and responsibility, that's what resonated with me. I wish I had colleagues drawing the same speech so I could see what surfaced in their drawings.

Facilitator U.: The Process is Always the Same

"Stuck in Mumbai Traffic" via Flickr by kent21

Treat "Problems" as Learning Opportunities

From Steve Davis, www.MasterFacilitatorJournal.com:

Sometimes the objective of a given session doesn't go as planned. Things can be going just fine when suddenly, the unexpected happens and threatens your entire process. In my humble experience as a facilitator, I've learned to look forward to things "going wrong!" Why? Because, if they are handled well, they can present some of the richest learning or barrier-removing opportunities available. In fact, I've come to see these occurrences as gifts, offering my groups the chance to explore in ways I could never have planned.

Crayon Cartoons that Conform to Complex Physics

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

How many Saturday afternoons did I spend with a huge sheet of paper, a box of crayons, and visions of spaceships careening, cowboys shooting, cannonballs arching across the page?

"It's a game where your crayon drawings come to life," 25-year-old independent games designer from Finland named Petri Purho. "You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly.

LOOK: The game trailer
LISTEN: Interview with NPR's Melissa Block
GET: Buy the game ($19.95) from http://www.crayonphysics.com/

'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!

World's Best Napkin Dad

(Spotted on Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin blog)

Many years ago, then unemployed art director Marty Coleman started to draw simple pictures on the napkins that he included in his daughters' school lunch bags.

Marty put these visual haiku-like sketches everyday throughout jr. high and high school a 5 year period. He found that these disposable miniature artworks not only made his daughters happy with a daily surprise, creating them also helped him get through the hard times.

In December of 2008 Time Magazine published a napkin he drew commemorating the election of Barack Obama!

Read about how this daily gift built a wonderful relationship with his girls that survived a painful divorce and physical separation.

Now you can now get a daily napkin by going to The Napkin Dad Daily blog. Look for the 'subscribe' link on the left. Check out the growing collection of Marty's drawings on his Flickr set.

FacilitatorU: Getting to the Truth

Be familiar with the tactics people use to cloud an issue.

PHOTO: A crowd watching the annual stick-bashing festival in Lombok by simpologist

The front of the room can be a disorienting place to be... especially when the crowd turns hostile. All it takes is for one or two people to kick up some mud and suddenly the group is disoriented and off-target.

Steve Davis of Facilitator U. shares some wisdom from a short article written by David Ellis, author of Becoming a Master Student, entitled "How to Fool Yourself: Six Common Mistakes in Logic".

These six points seem relevant to our interest in clear, critical thinking as facilitators, in his article, Getting to the Truth.