My Tool Collection

This post is the masterlist of my growing physical design tool collection, which I will go back an edit as I acquire new tools. At the moment my wishlist is longer than my collection. If you want to sponsor a tool, contact me. Eventually I will indicate how often I use each of these and categorize them. Reviews will follow for each of the tools as I get a chance to properly test them.

My tool collection

Toolkits created by me

My tool wishlist

 

See both my BOOK WISH LIST and my BOOK SHELF for a list of my book recommendations.

 

 

 

Book wish list

For christmas this year I am wishing for some nice visual thinking books. I especially want this Visual Thinking by Willemien Brand which came out here in 2017. I have been wanting to get my hands on it since then, but have been too busy with my Master thesis.

The following books are on my wishlist for my physical collection. Some I have read in e-book or heard in audiobook format already, but wish for the physical copy. Call me old fashioned, but I love to see the books on my shelf and be able to hold them in my hands. Most of these books I have borrowed from the library (some of them several times). Some of them I haven’t read yet, but skimmed through. Some I just think look good. I will update this post when I find more books that I want to own.

I plan to do book reviews of my favourite books and sketchnote summaries, you will be able to see the overview of those here on my Book shelf.

 

book_drawtowin back_of_napkin_book visual-meetings-cover-300px Visual-Teams-book-image  51vsAK6onSL._SX392_BO1,204,203,200_       

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