Co-Graphic Recording on Agricultural Sustainability

Last month I had the pleasure of co-graphic-recording with the amazing Mariah Howard at the ASI Agriculture Sustainability Symposium in Davis, California. I have some of the pictures here and am attempting a slideshow embed below!

First, I’ve been doing some work for ASI for about a year now and deeply appreciate their systems view of our food systems. It isn’t just agriculture – it is all the steps between the sprouting of the seed and your plate, and it includes a hay wagon full of policy as well. The people who care about this stuff are bright, engaging and committed. So it is great work.

The ASI team led by Tom Tommich had an ambitious three days planned, with the work from one day cascading and driving the next day. When Tom said I could bring in a second person, I said “A Graphic Recorder!” I had done some recording as I facilitated last year, but this time the content would be so dense and coming so fast, there was no way I could do it alone, nor do it justice. I’m still too new at this. So I sent a query to the International Forum of Visual Practitioners email list and found Mariah. I’ve known and admired her mom for many years, but we had never met nor worked together. So after one phone call I said “let’s do it!”

Now for those of you who have never co-graphically recorded, I have to say, it is not something everyone can do. It requires a very interesting collaborative dance and a certain “letting go” of one’s own habits and expectations. This dance is both physical (not getting in each others way), mental (co-processing the information as it comes in and deciding what to do with it), and for me, emotional (caring about the other person, respect, negotiate, push, pull, back off, drive forward.) It is an exquisite form of improv and I LOVE it. In this case, Mariah was a far superior artist, and I had a grasp of the content.

Over the first day we did 5 charts. We had spent a few hours the day before pre-planning and sketching out frameworks for each of the panels we were going to record. After the first panel – which was by far the toughest for me, we started letting go of our plans. By the third one we had totally let go of our plans and for me, things started to click. We also allowed ourselves the evening to finish off the panels and I’m VERY glad we did. They were still fairly raw at the end of the program day, but after some time adding color, connecting ideas and plain old “sense making” I think they turned out well. But the decision to “let go” of any pre-planning turned out to be critical, as was the simple act of getting used to each other as we worked. As a consequence, Mariah did most of the heavy lifting of key images, I did a lot of the content synthesis, and then we both colored and wove things together. But the images you see are far more her work than mine.

The content was dense so as you look at these, they probably won’t make sense as stand alone products. But they add a richness and can be very complimentary to the videos .

Mariah was a total pro and a champ to put up with “crazy Nancy.” I work fast, I switch directions on a dime and get really involved. I think it could be overwhelming to many. Not Mariah!

If you have co-recorded, what have been your experiences?

Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity

A couple of people have asked me for more materials related to the Community Orientations Spidergram activity. I have embedded them into some slides now up … Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity. [Edit June 2011 – here is an updated pdf of the activity! Spidergram Worksheet 2011 ]

Here is a hint I should have shared earlier. The “context” orientation is a bit odd on the spidergram. You need to decide if internal orientation is in the middle/exterior towards the outside or reversed. I tend to use internal towards the middle, but I realized my instructions weren’t so clear.

Another way to do it is to ignore the “context” spoke from an internal/external perspective and then do one layer on the spidergram around your internally focused activities. Then with a different color, do another layer on externally focused activities. I’ve done this with a few test cases and it quickly showed that some communities which have both internal and external contexts have very different internal and external activities.

Northern Voice Visual Recap

Northervoice 09 is now history – thousands of tweets, images and blog posts. It is time to reflect a bit. I enjoyed every minute of NV again – there is something warm and welcoming about it. I don’t mind the bits of chaos. I love the diversity – especially for a tech oriented gathering. And there are plenty of women! It was another visually oriented gathering for me. Continuing on from my “writing on the walls” from ’08, I again did a lot of visual work in this digitally focused gathering.

On Friday, as already noted, I ran a lightening fast Graphic Recording 101 session which was pure joy. There is a video here. And lots of pictures on Flickr. It was great to hear people say they not only enjoyed it, but were able to move their own practice forward. Yay! More hands on pen and chalk! We started by drawing circles using our full bodies, then horizontal lines, then text (with the tips about headlines the width of your palm, text the width of 2 fingers), then the terror zone – human figures. We practiced start people and squiggle people. The the final burst of color with the application of chalk. It was glorious how color brought even simple practice sketches to life. It was a think of beauty to watch. The artifacts we left behind were then a backdrop for the Photocamp session. Fitting, eh?

A first for Northern Voice, I graphically recorded a keynote – and what a performance it was to try and capture! The seriously funny Rob Cottingham had the capacity crowd in stitches talking about the funny side of social media. I had to draw as fast as the wind. It ended up being two panels, even though the keynote was just under 45 minutes. Thanks to Roland Tanglao for helping get up a second sheet.

It was interesting to think about the process. Prior to the talk all I knew was the title and©Tris Hussey, 2009. Non-commerical use permitted with attribution that it was mostly stream of consciousness stand up comedy with some “serious stuff at the end.” I got this information from 5 tweets from Rob, so you know the information was under 700 characters. 😉 I’m glad I just went with the flow. It was risky, but fun. I had thought about some sort of timeline image in advance, but that would not have worked. And because they ended up having me draw from the front of the room right behind Rob and under his slides, this felt a bit more like preformance art than just graphic recording.  (Some coverage of the keynote here, here and here.)



Photo by Tris Hussey on Flickr cc some rights reservedAfter it was over, I needed to go outside and lay on the grass and have a quieter conversation with a friend. I felt like I had just run a race, or taken a really hard yoga class. I was physically tired.

Later I noticed something as I skimmed the Flickr pictures tagged “northernvoice09” — the vivid social media chart was behind all the subsequent speakers. It provided a different sort of backdrop and I found great pleasure in that. (Photo by Tris Hussey)

I had the great pleasure of being on a “trio offering” with  Barbara Ganley and  Laura Blankenship. Our topic was “Doing the Limbo: Navigating the space in between – Create relationships, not distance.” How is that for a long title? Sheesh, what WERE we thinking?

We wanted to give an experience of boundary crossing, so we startePhoto by choconancyd the session with a paired drawing exercise (for details, see  here and here) for the technique I learned from Johnnie Moore.) The basic premise is without talking, people take turns drawing facial features until they have created a shared face and named it, one letter at a time.  As always, this great exercise gets people interacting with each other and then people are amazed at how they let go of their preconceived notions about drawing something and how beautiful their images are.

Then we moved into videos from Barbara and Laura which again set a very multisensory tone – images, poetry, music. As we moved into conversation, I then captured the conversation visually. We wrapped our session with an invitation for everyone to come down front and dance!

After the session the three of us sat down, along with my friends Dave Pollard and Sue Wolff, and did a debrief of the session. We all really enjoyed it and realized we opened a huge pandora’s box that we could not even begin to explore in a 40 minute session. There was so much everyone wanted to say. How about a whole day? Sue twittered out our comments. Later, Laura blogged about it here. I’m waiting for Barbara’s blogged reflections.

The Livescribe notes The last experiment of Saturday was with Alan Levine using his Livescribe pen/paper to visually annotate his presentation, which itself was on the role of visuals in blogging! For the details, see Nancy LiveScribed Me on Flickr – Photo Sharing

By the end of the day, my chalk was down to the nubbins! It was visual, collaborative, somewhat chaotic and fun.

Just in — Laura made a “Thank you NVoice” video!

just to be in the presence of others who understand

image by 2-dog-farm on Flickr ccA few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to jam in an impromptu telecon with Jessica Lipnak, Luis Suarez, Jenny Ambrozek, Lilly Evans, and June Holley about all things online. It was a sort of a net-worker’s jam. Thursday Feb. 26th, at 10am PST we are doing it again. Leave a comment if you want to join us.

Today at 3pm PST, we are doing something similar with a handful of visual practitioners and those interested in the role of visuals in our work.  You can find the details here

These ad hoc gatherings came out of connections on Twitter. Wondering out loud, finding each other and then moving to action. Pretty cool. 

More importantly, they fill a hole that Jessica articulated beautifully with this comment “just to be in the presence of others who understand.” This may mean with people who know us deeply. Or with people who care about something we care about – deeply. These are two kinds of “knowing” – one relational and one domain related. But there is a deep pleasure in basking in conversation with people you “know.”  A joy. A happy dance. 😉

So if you want to join us, let me know. Find your way and connect!

 

Photo credit: 

view photostream
by 2-Dog-Farm

Penmachine’s Pictures of the Graphic Recording Session

Nice photos Derek, aka,  Penmachine!You really captured the energy and the vibrancy of the people and the beautiful images people made together today at Northern Voice. Yes we CAN draw! And express ideas, tap into different thinking and have FUN!

Search results for visual_thinking…