VizThink 2009

Drawing has been a part of my life since as early as I can remember. I did it to escape reality, and create other worlds-- and it was fun. Years later, after discovering industrial design, it became an important part of how I explored ideas and communicated them in my chosen career path. Now after 6 years of working, and drawing more and more everyday, I've found myself at a point where I'm beginning to look at my drawing abilities as more than just a means-to-an-end in design. Part of this has manifested itself in the visual facilitation and storyboarding work I've been doing at gravitytank and part in the teaching I've been doing at SAIC. I'm beginning to better understand the power of drawing, what I can do with it, and where I will take it in the future.

The end of February found me on the West Coast for this year's VizThink conference-- an amazing conference of people who use drawing and (mostly) lo-fi visualization tools to think through complex problems from design to public policy to business consulting. This conference stood out from most of the others I have ever been to since it didn't cater to any one particular industry-- in fact quite the opposite! It was more like a cross section through a dozen industries, that revealed the rare handfuls in each one that are great with communicating with a pen on paper (and to a lesser extent Keynote/PowerPoint and Adobe Suite). Many of the speakers and participants act as group facilitators in their everyday jobs, so consequently VizThink was in many ways a workshop-for-workshop-facilitators-- the overall quality of each session was quite high. In addition to some insightful sessions, I also presented a session on "Collaboratively Storyboarding Experiences", something I've been doing a lot at work over the past few years. It was well received, and it also seemed to be a somewhat unique point-of-view for the VizThink world as well.

With all that said, here are some straight up scans from the 10 spreads of notes I took at the VizThink conference. I wouldn't normally scan these so raw, but that's kind of the spirit of the conference, so enjoy and click through for the rest:

Labels: sketchbook

  3/29/2009