Respect the doodle. Use the power of visual thinking to create and share ideas.
The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Doodle Revolution leader Sunni Brown introduces strategic doodling and presents the ABCs of our shared visual alphabet.
You don’t have to be a great singer to write a great song—just ask Bob Dylan. Likewise, you needn’t be a Leonardo to draw your way to more and better ideas. Sketching helps you generate concepts quickly, exploring alternatives rapidly and at no cost of resources. The looseness of a sketch removes inhibitions, granting clients and colleagues permission to consider and challenge the ideas it represents. Mike Rohde outlines the practice, surveys the tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.
Facilitating Mind States & Environments to Impact Group Work
from Steve Davis, Founder, FacilitatorU.com
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In the 1960's, Timothy Leary coined the term "set and setting" referring to a context that influenced the outcomes of psychoactive and psychedelic drug experiments on his subjects. "Set" refers to one's mindset, "setting" refers to the environment in which the user has the experience. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that you administer psychoactive drugs to your participants, though I'm sure that would make your job a whole lot more interesting. What I am suggesting is that "set and setting" play a significant, and often overlooked role, in your work as a trainer, facilitator, or group leader. The Set"Imagination creates reality... Man is all imagination." The set is the mental state a person brings to your group. This includes their thoughts, judgments, beliefs, mood, and expectations about the work, the group, and/or particular group members. According to Neville and many modern thinkers, mystics, physicists, and others, our expectations and intentions about what will happen often has a lot to do with our experience of what does happen. The SettingThe setting refers to the physical or social environment. We all know the impact that friendly versus unfriendly, or stressful versus relaxed environments have on us. Stress, fear or a disagreeable environment may contribute a great deal to an unpleasant experience (bad trip in Leary's terms). Conversely, a relaxed, curious person in a warm, comfortable and safe place is more likely to have a pleasant experience (or a good trip). |
At FOO Camp 2010, this radical sketchnotista leaves it all on the stage in this speed round of deconstructing the dynamics of doodles and how we learn and make stuff happen!
Sunni Brown, Sharpie's official resident doodler based in Austin, proclaims:
"Bring on the freakin' Doodle Revolution!"
Check out the impact that Sunni Brown, founder of Brightspot and co-author Dave Gray, founder of Xplane, are having with their new book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers
Great slideshow using wonderful collage painting to illustrated these ideas for keeping creativity flowing in constrained times.
from Fast Company article by Gregory Berns:
The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn't want to waste energy. That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience." READ FULL ARTICLE >>
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