The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Sunni Brown in the The Washington Post: Spreading the Doodle Revolution

Quoted from http://sunnibrown.com/:

My experience as the Resident Doodle Expert at Sharpie, and the subsequent media tour it required, eventually led Margaret Webb-Pressler of the Washington Post to my telephone. She wanted to do a feature on doodling in the Kids Post and thought (probably because I myself am quite a child) that my work would be a great match for the story.

The interview lasted about 30 minutes – resulting in, I don’t know, 17 whole words from me – and turned out to be the beautiful splash page you see above, with presidential doodles and all. We agreed there should be a Call for Kids’ Doodle Submissions for the holiday season and I’m really looking forward to seeing what gets published. It’s a two-part feature story, so perhaps in the next article I’ll squeeze in the line I’m now famous for in my family: “To doodle is to light up your mind!” Long live the Revolution, and thank you, Washington Post, for the coverage.

Graphic Facilitation on NYTimes.com

From Jay Smethurst of Sente Corporation:

Caricaturing Economists

By JUSTIN WOLFERS

I was at the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum last week, talking about my research over recent years on prediction markets.  It was good fun, but the real novelty was that as I was speaking — literally, in real time — there was a cartoonist next to the stage, cartooning my talk on a five-foot-wide poster.  I’ve never seen this before, but it was a real hit.

As a speaker, it can be hard to organize your own thoughts even when you know what is coming next.  And as an audience member, it can be harder still to sort out the key points a speaker makes from their conversational asides.  But the artist — Christopher Fuller who works for Sente Corporation— was just amazing.  He not only picked out the important analytic insights, but found an incredibly useful way to represent them, cartooning (or perhaps caricaturing) my message.

I think this is a great idea, and it will serve as a useful reminder to those who heard the talk.  And if you weren’t there, hopefully this cartoon gives you some sense of what I had to say.

Now if only I could get my MBA students to do the same thing, they would all have a wonderfully entertaining set of notes to study in advance of their exams.  I would love to see a study figuring out whether it helps them retain the material.  I bet it would.

via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

IFVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam, The Visual Thinker Spectrum

IFVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam (part 2) from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

FVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam, Solving Problems with Pictures

IFVP 2010 Keynote: Dan Roam (part 1) from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

IFVP 2010 Opening Keynote: Andrea Saveri, Futurist

IFVP 2010 Opening Keynote: Andrea Saveni, Futurist from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.

Andrea Saveri has spent her career as a futurist, doing forecasting and probing ambiguities of things to come. In her keynote address, she speaks to IFVP members about the ambiguous and complex landscape that we are living in, populated by black swans, wicked problems and cognitive surplus.

She emphasizes that organizations are forced to plan for a future that they don't understand in a present that is influenced by vast, complex systems.

A Message from Bigger Picture: Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

Hello friends,

As visual practitioners we all believe in the power of visuals to create engagement and clarity.

At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference <http://www.cop15.com/>  we are the next 12 days using this power to help WWF create clarity around what is happening at the conference and what a good deal and agreement may look like.

We invite you to help us bring a lot of visuals into the negotiations and out to the public and hereby raise the understanding and prove the power of visuals.

GOP Healthcare Op Art

A stunning example of how to create a disinformation graphic.

From Time.com Posted by KAREN TUMULTY Thursday, July 16, 2009:

House Minority Leader John Boehner, borrowing a tactic from the health care wars of 15 years ago, has put together an arresting graphic "to expose the truth about the Democrats' health care plan to the American people." Over at TNR, Jon Cohn has responded with onethat looks at how things work now. I'm posting both of them below. Which is scarier?

THE BOEHNER CHART OF WHAT THE HOUSE DEMS' PLAN WOULD LOOK LIKE

JON COHN'S CHART OF WHAT THE CURRENT SYSTEM LOOKS LIKE:

(You can click on the images to enlarge them.)

Jon Stewart Pillories GOP Health Care "Chart"

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GOOD Transparency: Drinking Water

GOOD is a great source of ideas for change and global improvement. Their series of animated information graphics make complex data sets humane and understandable, showing the human impact behind the global statistics. See more>>

About this animation on the effects of inadequate drinking:

It's the source of life but it's also the cause of a lot of unnecessary death. In places where clean water isn't available, water-related diseases like cholera cause massive diarrhea, dehydration, and thousands of deaths each day. Affordable water-treatment solutions exist. We'd like to see them flourish.

Worldchanging's Graphic Series: Earthly Ideas, Biochar

Click image to enlarge

Worldchanging Editor's note: This post is part of a series featuring Worldchanging ally Andy Lubershane's original graphics. While many of the issues covered in the comics have been discussed on Worldchanging in the past, we hope that you'll be able to use this new medium in a different way … whether it's in your classroom, on your office wall, or to help explain ideas to friends and family.

Andy Lubershane researches, writes and cartoons about sustainability from his home in Boston. Check out more of his illustrations here

NPR: Bored? Try Doodling To Keep The Brain On Task

From NPR:

ABOVE: President Obama's doodle, sketched as part of a "National Doodle Day"

Bill Gates is a doodler, and he's not alone. Lyndon Johnson doodled. Ralph Waldo Emerson doodled. Ronald Reagan drew pictures of cowboys, horses and hearts crossed with arrows. Most of us doodle at one point or another. But why?

To understand where the compulsion to doodle comes from, the first thing you need to do is look more closely at what happens to the brain when it becomes bored. According to Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth, though many people assume that the brain is inactive when they're bored, the reverse is actually true.

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says.

The reason, she explains, is that the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

FULL ARTICLE >>