My Visual Resume

I finally created a visual resume – which focuses on my sketching journey as an addition to my traditional resume.

When making my visual resume, I first and foremost included a journey with highlights focusing on how and where I learned visual facilitation. I needed a way of presenting my skills that would challenge myself to think about my skills in relation to which I currently want to develop more. I thus created the “Tapas” diagram, a talent vs. passion matrice of my skills.

This functional drawing works great as an icebreaker for job interviews or mentor meetings. To frame it all, I included a Venn Diagram to show that my skills come from the overlap between the fields IT, Business and Communication.

Websummit 2018 teaser

This week I am in Lisbon, for Websummit. I am testing out new formats for my sketchnotes, one is a paper format which is easy to do standing up in a crowd and the other the iPad Pro. I want to use this opportunity to play around with the iPad format, and test out different apps. A review of these apps AND my wish for the ideal sketchnote app will come online later.

To be honest I have not have time to review my notes from this conference yet and a lot of my notes needs work done and cleanup before I can post them. Perhaps during my next holiday or if there is a special insterest in it, I will post the notes, along with a summary of the conference highlights.

Digital transformation @Advice

Today I had the pleasure of attending the digital transformation event at the agency Advice A/S. Carla Camilla Hjort took the stage to talk about their work at Space 10, and the art of pushing IKEA forward. Key quotes from this talk is “The only thing constant is Change”, “We strive to see patterns where most see chaos”, and “There is no innovation without a great story”. As always, I am a huge fan of NEON signs, so I was very pleased to find one in their office.

Space10 is one of the places I would gladly give up my nomadic freelancing lifestyle for – they manage to save the world one innovative design challenge at a time – and it looks like they have fun doing it. All their labs sound like incredible fun projects to be a part of.

At the event, Rune Dahlgaard (digital partner @Advice) also did a 30 minute talk on why the future belongs to those brands who dare to be different. Rune’s talk was full of facts about the benefits of making a stand as a brand. His most valuable point in my point of view, is the graph that frames the discussion of how brands make a stand, balancing between each end of the axis, from just standing for something to making a change, and whether the issue used makes sense or not at all.

Graphic Facilitation Literature Review

The featured image is of David Sibbet (image from this page).

An increasing number of books exists on the topic of Visual Facilitation, usually actively focusing on the sub practice of Graphic Facilitation (GF) or Graphic Recording from different practitioners point of view, outlining and sometimes even teaching their process based on personal experience. This is an overview of some of these books I have read (and based my short academic paper on). I will update the list, as I read more books about the subject.

David Sibbet, is one of the most internationally well known practitioners of GF, with more than 30 years of experience. His definition of his job with GF is “…using graphics to facilitate group communication” (Sibbet, 2008). According to Sibbet, GF has the ability to engage people, move people to big picture thinking as well as help them remember better. He refers to the sketch artifact created during this GF session as a “publicly-validated group memory” (Sibbet, 2008).

Aside from this article, Sibbet has also published a number of howto books I recommend:

 

visual-meetings-cover-300px     Visual-Teams-book-image

Another of the big players in the field is the GF practitioner Christine Valenza, the co-author, with Nancy Margulies, of the award winning book “Visual Thinking; Tools for Mapping Your Ideas.” This book is still on my wishlist.

In 2009 Valenza published a paper together with the illustrator Jan Adkins “Understanding visual thinking”, discussing the historical context, which gave rise to GF in 2009 (Valenza & Adkins, 2009). In their text they mention David Sibbet as a key influencer of the practise, citing him as the creator of the GF style they refer to as the “Big paper approach”, which they are clear advocates of. They go so far as to call the “big-Paper” artifact an additional member of the meeting (Valenza & Adkins, 2009).

That same year David Sibbet published a chapter for a book called “the change handbook” with the aforementioned practitioner Nancy Margulies. In this chapter titled: “Visual recording and graphic facilitation: Helping people see what they mean”, Margulies & Sibbet describe the real-time illustration of words and images used to guide a group to work together and communicate more effectively as both ‘Visual recording’ and ‘graphic facilitation’. The difference between these two sub-categories according to Margulies & Sibbet and is that:

“…people who focus on just recording are called visual or graphic recorders and those who combine facilitation and recording are called graphic facilitators. However, the combinations and variations are rich” (Margulies & Sibbet, 2009).

One of these variations that they point out, is that the practitioners sometimes visualize presentations outside of the group and other times work with a facilitators in front of the room (Margulies & Sibbet, 2009).

Sibbet, Marguiles and Valenca & Adkins all agree that the practices they discuss all contain a social group aspect, and involves creating visuals on a large scale in front of or with a group. This places the practice both within the field of creation of visuals and the practice of facilitating communication in groups.

 

References:

Margulies, N., & Sibbet, D (2009): Chapter 61 by Margulies, N., & Sibbet, D. from Holman, P., Devane, T., & Cady, S. (2007). The change handbook: The definitive resource on today’s best methods for engaging whole systems. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Link

Sibbet, D. (2008). Visual intelligence: Using the deep patterns of visual language to build cognitive skills. Theory Into Practice, 47(2), 118–127. doi:10.1080/00405840801992306 Link

Rohde, Mike (2012). The Sketchnote Handbook: the illustrated guide to visual note taking, Peachpit Press.

Valenza, C., & Adkins, J. (2009). TIMELINES Understanding visual thinking. interactions, 16(4), 38. doi:10.1145/1551986.1551994 Link