The Center for Graphic Facilitation

The Hive Group: Visualizing the Stimulus Honeycomb

This interactive "honeycomb" diagram by The Hive Group was generated from publicly available data on the breakdown of the Federal stumulus package. 

(Thanks to M.Frisse who blogs on health IT and policy at http://www.markfrisse.com/policy/)

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. 

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.

Blagojevich Corruption Network Map

Spotted by Der Networkmeister, Valdis Krebs on  The Washington Post:

A Tangled Web

Operation Board Games - the sprawling public corruption probe that led to the recent arrests of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff - has already brought eight convictions, and it is far from over. Here's a who's who of figures ensnared and how they are connected.

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:

West Bank Grafitti Wall

“Art has been saying with more and more intensity: the nature of the painting has become less interesting than the nature of the relation of painting to society.” - Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti

As graphic facilitators, we cannot underestimate the power of an image--created in a specific cultural or political context--to contribute to fundamental change.

In the photo to the right, a Palestinian woman and her children walk past a drawing by notorious British culture jammer and graffiti artist Banksy, along part of the controversial Israeli barrier in the West Bank city of Aram. Reuters has a slideshow of art created on the tall, concrete security wall seperating Palestinians and Isrealis in the West Bank. 

In 1984, I visited divided Berlin along with 15 students from my US High School. We were taken to The Wall with its machine gun towers, armored personel carriers, and scrolls of barbed wire. At the age of 14, I was captivated by the bursts of color along the grey facade... grafitti!