Graphic facilitation workshop

I just received an announcement that may be of interest. "Deconstructing Graphic Facilitation" is a two-day workshop being offered in Sausalito at the end of September, with a half-day follow-on session in January.

Great news for visual communicators!

Robert Horn's Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century has just been republished, by Xplane, "the visual thinking company"! It's been out of print for at least 4 years. The best way to get a feel for it is to look at some of the sample pages, and read about it on Horn's site. It's written in visual language (which Horn defines as "the tight integration of words and visual elements") and arranged in two-page spreads.

I could write a description and review, but that's really going against the spirit of visual communication! That idea is succinctly captured in this sample spread:
The reason I'm so excited about it is because I believe visual communication has enormous potential to solve problems through improving understanding between individuals, groups, even nations, because, compared to the serial nature of text or spoken words,

"Visual language opens wider the gates of communication. It lets more data through, with greater complexity, accuracy, and nuance."

(p. 242) If more people start to consciously use visual language, more people will adopt it as their "native" language, and we will all have an easier time understanding each other. This book is many books in one. It is practical, with a lot of examples, plus a lot of reference information, history, and research citations. It must have been a huge amount of work, so I'm glad it has been republished so more people can benefit from that investment.

If you want to read more about it, check out the announcement on Dave Gray's CommunicationNation blog. And for more background, see Horn's websites here and here.

If you want to buy it, you can order it here.

For a terrific example of crisp, clear, concise visual communication with a touch of whimsy, check out Xplane's website.

Color arrays

A basic concept in the Albers/Nelson color curriculum is the color array. An array is a "family" of colors, consisting of two "parent" colors and at least one "child" color.

Using arrays makes it easier to start thinking of color relationships.

Color classes

Over the past 6 months, I've been learning a lot about color. I've been taking classes from Dick Nelson, a watercolor painter and digital artist who studied with the famous colorist, Josef Albers, at Yale. Expanding on Albers' teachings, Dick has created a series of experiential lessons in which students discover for themselves just how relative our perception of color is.

Relative? Isn't red, red? No, how we perceive a color depends on what other colors are around it, how bright the light is, the color of the light, and individual characteristics. What we call red could look like orange, brown, or gray. I'll show some examples later.

Because my mission is to make ideas visible, I plan to summarize my learnings in a series of blog posts. This will also help cement the concepts for myself.

Simple but powerful

I've been working on a project this week to critique a number of websites, prior to planning a site redesign. To help ensure that I was thorough and consistent in evaluating each, I developed a form to use. This is a simple idea that can have a big payoff.
For each site, I pasted in a copy of the home page, then printed out the form so I could mark it up, noting the areas my eyes focus on first and other striking or unique features, and filling out the objective and subjective design critique.

My next steps will be to review all the critiques, noting ideas I want to try for this website, and developing some thumbnails or rough sketches based on these ideas.

What is your definition of success?

We chase it, usually unconsciously, all of our lives. If we stop to think about it, we may define it in terms of career achievements, or luxurious possessions, or talented children. Usually, one aspect will dominate at any one time, then some event will bring another area into focus, perhaps health or family. To me, it is multifaceted, with the whole adding up to an overall feeling of peace of mind, contentment or satisfaction. I once defined it for myself in nine elements, which I depicted in a circular, mandala arrangement, with colorful images and evocative fonts. Later, I came across other definitions with eight elements which map almost exactly to the nine I had defined. Last week, I created two sheets which can be printed out and filled in by anyone wanting to explore their own definition of success.

You can use the "Wheel of Life" to define your idea of success in eight areas of your life, and rate how your current situation compares to your ideal. This may provoke some ideas to change in some areas to better align your life with your goals. Sometimes it only takes a small change to make a big difference, and just being aware of the mismatch or desire provides all the motivation necessary to make the change.

The "Table of Life" uses the same eight areas as the Wheel of Life, and can be useful for evaluating a proposed major change, such as a career move or geographical move, to see how it might impact all areas of your life. This allows you to "try on" the change, and can give you a better feeling for whether it's a good idea for you in the long run. I used this approach once when I felt my life felt out of balance, and I was considering options for improving it. Enumerating the impact in each area supported my gut feeling about why the change made sense.

Using tools like these is effective because they involve your head and your heart, engaging both logic and intuition. The whimsical images encourage a light-hearted, fun approach, which is a productive state of mind for exploring options. The structure ensures that all areas are addressed, and provides space for exploring the answers in your heart.

The eight areas of life used in these tools are:

1. Career, life purpose
2. Money
3. Health
4. Family and friends
5. Romance and intimacy
6. Personal growth, spiritual alignment
7. Fun and recreation
8. Physical environment

(When I decided to write about this topic, I remembered a poetic definition of success attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. When I investigated, to see if I wanted to tie it in here, I found that it was actually most likely written by a woman named Bessie Stanley for a magazine or newspaper contest. There are theories about how it became associated with Emerson, but no one knows for sure. There is an interesting investigation of the topic, with several versions and theories, here. There's a humorous take on the evolution of what defines success in various stages of life at the bottom of the page.)

Plowing the Dark

Here's a description of an economics simulation made visible in a virtual reality room:

A crimson comet, at ten o'clock, just above the horizon, paints an upturn in third-quarter commodities. A rose of starbursts means stubborn unemployment.
Hidden relations spill out, suddenly obvious, from a twist of the tabular data. Tendencies float like lanterns across the face of a summer's night.
...
In this room of open prediction, facts flash like a headland light. The search flares burst around you where you stand, lost in an informational fantasia: tangled graphical dances of devaluation, industrial upheaval, protective tariffs, striking shipbuilders, the G7, Paraguay, Kabul. The sweep of the digital – now beyond its inventors' collective ability to index – falls back, cowed by the sprawl of the runaway analog. Five billion parallel processors, each a world economy, update, revise, negate one another, capsize the simulation, pumping their dissatisfied gross national product beyond the reach of number.

(From Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers)

This is from a book I'm reading in which the author imagines the power of visualization which may soon be available through further advances in computing technology. The beauty of this is that it is a NOVEL, not a dry technology forecast, or glossy marketing brochure. The power of storytelling triggers our emotional and imaginative response, allowing us to connect with this future as a reality. It reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, in which people interacted in the online "metaverse" via "avatar" personas – a vision of Second Life ("SecondLife is a 3D online digital world imagined, created, & owned by its residents"). While Plowing the Dark is strictly in prose (no graphics), it paints a vivid picture of the power of visual representation to extend our awareness and understanding. I'm not far enough into it to know whether he explores the potential of the technology to further our wisdom, or explores its downsides as well as its benefits. I suspect he examines both sides, as there was already an example of one programmer developing a black eye from a "collision" with a virtual branch!

This book illustrates the principle behind scenario building. A vivid, multi-sensory, plausible scenario causes us to feel the impact of a situation, motivating us to take steps to bring it about, in the case of a desirable outcome, or prevent its occurrence, in the case of an undesirable future.

By the way, you don't have to be a computer geek to enjoy this book. The technical details are described at a high level as an artist character seeks to understand her role in the project, and to contribute to it, and to explain the excitement and dedication (or obsession!) of her fellow researchers.

The bottom line: Whether through story, or scenarios, or graphical representation, visualization is extremely powerful for an individual or group to create a desired outcome, whether that is a new product, a solution to a tough problem, or a better world.

Ram Dass

I saw Ram Dass speak this weekend.* He was not much more than a famous name to me before, but I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to see for myself why he was famous, and whether he had anything to share that I might want to learn.

His manner of speaking was unusual. Most speakers rush to fill every second with words. His rate of delivery was glacially slow, maybe 10 words per minute sometimes. I wondered at first if this were due to some age- or disease-related issue, or deliberate. I wondered if he was just making this up as he went along, and waiting for the words to come to him. I had time in between words to wonder about a lot of things, and to think about the actual words and their meaning, and why he was giving each one so much importance. I think it was a way of letting us experience living in the now, living each moment, really hearing each word. He never said, "Just live in the now", though he wrote a book called Be Here Now, which I assume conveys that message. He created a space for us to actually experience it. This is what the very best teachers do: design an experience so students can create their own learning. This is what I aspire to do in my teaching and facilitation. There were other master teachers at the event, who used their manner of presentation (body language, rate of delivery, repetition, emphasis) to deliver their message more powerfully than through their words alone. I have a lot to learn.

* See my post on HonuaOla, below.

HonuaOla

This weekend I attended an event called HonuaOla*, subtitled "Earth, life, and all things sacred". When I tried to describe it to my husband and friends before I went, I had a hard time, even though I'd read some publicity on it. My description sounded vague and new-agey, and didn't explain why it seemed compelling to me. But after reflecting on it afterward, and reading more about it on their website, I felt they'd been remarkably successful in conveying a single message through many voices and media, and that that was part of their message. We are diverse, and each have to craft our own journey through life, take action, celebrate life, and support others in their journeys. This sounds cliche, but experiencing it was profound.

The organizers requested that each attendee fill out a survey. I did, but felt my brief response was superficial and didn't capture the depth of the event's impact on me. This post addresses my need for a more thoughtful response.

The event was very well organized. The presenters and performers were excellent, and it was professionally run. The location, the Maui campus of Kamehameha Schools, was stunning. I liked the main stage format, with its variety and liveliness, and the separate panel discussions, which went into more depth, but again from multiple perspectives.

On the main stage, short performances and lectures alternated, a format which worked well. I've been to similar events, such as Bumbershoot in Seattle, where the genres are segregated. This may be due to the vastly different scale of the two events, but for HonuaOla created serendipitous reinforcement of their theme, as, looking through the schedule, one might have identified some particular draws, and then found interesting parallels or new ideas while sitting through a couple performances they might not otherwise have chosen.

One aspect that didn't feel as well integrated, though, was the "non-profit row". Various non-profit groups had tables set up in the shade of buildings surrounding the quadrangle between the stage and the panel discussion building. It felt like a type of ghetto, segregated: one had to have a reason to go there, and then felt trapped. If they were trying to reach people who weren't already familiar with or sympathetic to them, they needed a way to interact with them, to draw them in. Maybe each could have a slot on the speaking/performance schedule, or just a teaser in the announcements between acts, like when a puppy was featured from the Humane Society. Another way to improve the already excellent event would be to offer more ways for the attendees to interact with the presenters, like associated short workshops or seminars, to make connections with each other and the presenter, and put their learning into action – which was one of the main messages of the event.

* In the Hawaiian language, Honua = earth, Ola = life

Testing text & image placement

There's no interesting info here today, I'm just testing!



Text that I want to be to the right of the first image.




Text that I want to be below the first image but above the second one.



Text that I want to the right of the second image.




Text that I want following the second image.