Come out and get to know the community of New York area visual thinkers for an evening of socializing as we gear up for another great summer in the city.

Join us for a casual evening of food, drink, and fun, including:

• Sketchbook Show & Tell – Bring yours, check out others. It’s always a treat to peek inside someone else’s sketchbook, as well as to share the doodles, notes, and thinking in yours.
• Pen Swap – Got a pen, pencil, or maker you love and want to share? Bring a couple to swap with other pen geeks.
• Napkin Sketching – We’ll be sure to have a few stacks of napkins to jot down your ideas on.
• Graffiti Wall – Contribute your doodles to a wall of paper… and we will share the end results with the community.

When

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

6:00-9:00 p.m.

Where

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For VizThink NYC’s third workshop of 2011 BigBlueGumball brought the crowd on a fun and engaging trip into the world of visual communication. Steve and Todd Cherches (also known as Todd and Steve Cherches, or BigBlueGumball) showed us, through three hands-on activities, that visual communication is not all about drawing.
The evening began with a discussion about people’s hesitation to use visual communication, how we overcome that hesitation, and the value of images in expressing ideas. The group shared their thoughts on how to clear the first and biggest hurdle, “I can’t draw.” As we moved into the activities that would follow, we all learned how much more there is to visual communication than drawing..
The first activity of the night was a session of VizProvization where attendees improvised a presentation from the fictional company, smACME. Participants had twenty seconds each to talk about smACME’s new initiative guided only by an image projected on the screen. Beginning with an airplane cockpit, and continuing to display images like a taco, a bespectacled chihuahua, various random statistics and the odd alien here and there, the improvisers passed the microphone around the room and spun a story about smACME’s future plans and had a few laughs along the way. After the exercise, we discussed what had happened and realized the many ways we can use images to tell a story.
.The next activity of the session was VizBizPictionary where the room broke up into teams to play a variation of pictionary. Each team received a cup full of top-tier businesses and had 5 minutes to get as many of the companies as they could. Pictionary is a great way to show that when it comes to visual communication, your drawings don’t have to be pretty. After the game was over we talked about what goes on during a game of pictionary and discussed the various strategies we use. It turns out those strategies work even when you aren’t scrambling to figure out how to draw a picture that represents Walmart (try it.. it’s hard!) Two of the most powerful tools we use in a situation like pictionary, and with visual communication in general, are metaphors and analogies.
We continued our talk by examining how, even when we are only using words, metaphor and analogy conjure images in our minds and help us understand and communicate ideas. This lead us to the final activity of the evening, a brief introduction to sketchnoting..
Following up on our discussion of metaphor and analogy we watched Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a Dream speech and were asked to follow along with the speech, and draw some of the images described by Dr. King. This exercise showed us how much more we engage with a speech or presentation when we notice the imagery being described or shown and it gave many first-timers a taste of what sketchnoting is like and how doodling while listening engages different parts of our mind. Even though most of the audience were familiar with the speech, I’m sure listening in this way was a new experience of it for the whole group. We wrapped up the evening sharing our thoughts and sketchnotes and discovered how many different ways there are to hear, see, and communicate the imagery in that amazing speech.
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BigBlueGumball and VizThink NYC gave a great overview of visual communication without focusing on drawing techniques but instead showing us how much our minds play a part in the process, not just our hands. By engaging the crowd in fun activities we have probably all done before, and then looking back and analyzing how visuals play a part in those activities, we all left with a better understanding of the power of visual communication.
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Thanks again to Todd and Steve from BigBlueGumball and to Liquidnet for a great evening.

View event photos on Flickr (courtesy of VizThinker MJ Broadbent)

Special thanks to attendee Amanda Lyons for her fantastic blog post, in which she created visual notes of of the whole evening. Nice work!

In keeping with the subject of our book, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, we wanted to see how the people that attended the event connected and what the network that formed would look like.

To do this we gave each attendee a sheet of stickers with a unique number on them.

We asked that each attendee exchange stickers with anyone they “linked” with and stick that person’s number on to the back of their sheet.

At the end of the night everyone turned in their sheets and I entered the data into Many Eyes, a new initiative by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Visualization Lab whose purpose is to “democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”

Looking at a visualization of these results is all the more interesting as I think back on the event and remember that each of my links was a real life connection with a real life person. For me, this is one of the awesome powers of visual communication. The image itself conveys information in a way that words simply could not. But on a more personal level graphic representations of ideas or memories provide a depth of understanding I just don’t get any other way.

As with most of the other people who read the book, I wonder how this new perspective and understanding about how networks form and work can be used in my design work. Will it allow me to devise a way for a network to grow or to remain healthy and vibrant? Can I use my new knowledge to make myself into a well-connected “hub” or identify existing hubs to become a more active and connected part of an existing network?

One thing I certainly got from the book was a new perspective on how the world works and there’s not too much more you can ask of a book, right?

Finally, to wrap this all up in a neat bow that ties together networks and the book club, head on over and join the new UX Book Club NYC Ning social network.

Looking forward to connecting with you.

- Ray

At New York City’s second VizThink event, veteran public speaker, Jonny Goldstein, will show you how to use visual thinking as one of your tools to create and deliver a powerful presentation.

By the end of the session, you will develop and deliver a 2 minute mini-presentation, with visuals, to a small group.

Special Guest: Heather Willems of Image Think will capture our session proceedings visually in a mural which she will create in real time. Check this video below for a demo of Heather and Nora creating graphic recordings.

Registration Deadline: Noon, Sept 22. We need to provide Liquidnet with a list of attendees in advance, which necessitates this deadline.

Date & Time
Thursday, 24 September 2009, 6:30 PM — 8:30 PM

Location
Liquidnet
498 Seventh Ave, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10019
Map

Space is limited. Register here
Please register by Tuesday, 22 September 2009, 12:00 PM

Once I got the paper and pen in their hands eveyrone understood the problem and we whipped up a potential solution in under two minutes.

What this really drove home for me is that visual communication is not art. It’s not infographics, slide decks, or process flows. It may even be downright ugly sometimes.

What it really is is a way of thinking and connecting. Neither person in the video is an artist (sorry Dad & Paul) and the final product could hardly be confused for art.. but I still find it beautiful.