The Center for Graphic Facilitation

Digital Anthropology's Web 2.0

As graphic facilitators, the tools that allow us to synthesize ideas into images--whether static or dynamic--are expanding exponentially.

In this video thought piece hosted on YouTube, Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch uses the simple, cheap digital tools at hand to weave an engaging narrative of the birth of Web 2.0.

Welsch expresses the miracle of that birth, writing: "We're teaching the machine, and the machine is us. Time to rethink the world. The network is the machine; the machine is us."

Digital Ethnography is a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

He literally draws the path of communication evolution from handwritten, linear text to non-linear hypertext, HTML, XML, RSS and mash-ups.

This is the most elegant and engaging description of where media is today. And to think, he did it without using a single bullet point!

[ via Jarrell McAlister ]

Jeff Han's Touch Interface Revolution

Can't Touch This   

Working all but alone from his hardware-strewn office, Jeff Han is about to change the face of computing. Not even the big boys are likely to catch him.

Video: Remapping the Universe In this video, Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how a multi-touch driven computer screen will change the way we work and play.

   

From: Fast Company Issue 112 | February 2007       | Page 86    | By: Adam L. Penenberg

Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

This is it, kids! The single resource for all the tools and methods out there for making ideas visual. Everything from cartoons to strategy maps. The map allows the user to get a visual image of each method upon rollover with the mouse.

[from Deirdre Crowley, forwarded by Jody Lentz]

This Periodic Table of Visualization Methods was created in Switzerland by the Visual Literacy folks. I thought you would enjoy it too. I was happy to see Graphic Facilitation right there at the top (G)!

XIGI = Social Enterprise Mapping

This is a very intriguing mash-up: social networks + visual mapping + on-line database + social investment + blog.

In their own words, "Xigi.net seeks to document and catalyze the shift in investor mindset, where more deals are happening more quickly and more easily in fields from microfinance to low income housing to social enterprise to clean technology."

This Wikipedia-esque site operates as a commons for any investor or entrepreneur in the social sector, and uses the on-line mapping tools for users to illustrate their value chain through creating visual links to other partners, customers, clients and collaborators.

Flock: The Blogger's Browser

There have been a whole gaggle of new browsers nipping at Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari. Barely a year after Mozilla's Firefox began creeping into the mainstream, some of its developer broke off on a new browser project, Flock.

This is the blogger's browser because it make the rapid integration of blog posts and phot integration extremely easy.

Digg Lab Swarm

One of the emerging issues with traditional graphic facilitation is this: How best do we integrate the ideas generated in collaborative sessions into a dynamic, visual and usable format?

Digg Labs has created a mash-up between Digg posts (user-generated comments on news and blog posts) and a swarm-like,  dynamically-generated network diagram.

SwarmSketch

SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. (Due to increased traffic sketches are currently being updated after about 1000 lines).

Many of the resulting images look like the works of German Expressionists or the New York Nuevo-Expressionist, Basquiat.

Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.

The Great IFVP Tech Debate: When and What to Use

The Tech Group at the IVFP 2006 conference is wrestling with technology. Within the group, there are folks who blog daily, are well-versed in digital photography, build PowerPoint presentations and live-or-die on the web.

Then there are those who are experts in the magic that happens when people gather together in person to tell strories and create large-scale maps and drawings.

The Virtual Card Table

There are hundreds if not thousands of graduate students and post-docs out there right now laboring to crack the most enigmatic conundrum of the modern age. You guessed it: Teleconferencing.

The main question seems to be, How do we create monsterously expensive machines that emulate what we see and do every day?

[IMAGE: Custom-made Jaron Lanier bobble head by HeadBobble.com. DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 07 | July 2006 | Technology]

Personally, I have test-driven scores of the by-products. These include virtual whiteboards, tablets, projection devices, touch-screen monitors, and--I'm not making this up--dry erase pen ifrared prophelactics. This gizmo requires the user to put big, bulky plastic covers over the pens, thus enabling two ifrared sensors to track every movement of the hand. Awkward, to stay the least. And the results are marginal.

Each attempt to make the tele-immersion experience of writing bulletpoints on a white board seems to miss the main issue--the human nervous system is a greedy bastard always clamoring for more input.

This is why even having a bad, but physically present lecturer is more interesting than the most engaging talking head on a computer screen.

The one exception is, however, grandparent + grandchild + computer videocam. Believe me, that combo never gets old, at least for the older demographic in the equation.

Jaron Lanier has been wrestling with this for a couple of decades. He actually coined the term "virtual reality" in the 80s and later served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative--the federally funded project to create the real world prototype of the holodeck.

 

Avian Flu Mash-Up Map

Declan Butler, a nature and science reporter, has compiled an example of the power that is now in the hands of individuals. Using commercially available software and data from an Excel spreadsheet and Google Earth, he has created an interactive map tracing the spread of Avian Flu in birds and humans from September 2003 - April 2006.

Butler details the process on his blog.

As Tim O'Reilly writes in his post How to Prepare for a Pandemic:

It's easy to dismiss ideas like these as unnecessarily alarmist.  But I'm a big fan of the idea from scenario planning that the goal is not to get the future "right", but rather to imagine enough challenging eventualities that you build a strategy that is robust in the face of a range of possible futures.