A super cool example of how visuals can help us see matters from differnt angles. Gridd is a dutch consulting company that help their clients see what they say – among other things.

Visit What the Gregg and The Gridd on Flickr

What does women’s fashion, politics and bird flu have in common? Not necessarily anything. But the biggest stories in our life is now available in visual language. Fast Company expands our idea of mindmapping in their new book The Visual Miscallanium. And it’s awsome!

Learn more at Fast Company

Here is a visual way of communicating stories – with dots. It seems that the simpler visual material you use, the better the message becomes. I like this one where Monday Dots explains behavior. Maybe we’d have to do one similar with stick figures.

You can see more photos from the first days in Barcelona in the sidebar of this blog.

We have come to experience 9 important steps (see further below) you as a visual practitioner can take to make to takeover a conference with visual tools and techniques:

Step 1: Visualise the main sessions on tablet, and project illustrations when and where possible

Step 2: Casually suggest presenters that you can put up a large piece of paper and start graphically recording what they are saying. Afterwards host conversations with anyone who come up to see the result.

Step 3: Ask everyone what Top 10 words / concepts they’d like to have a visual language for…and provide a space for them to write and seek visuals

Step 4: Collect powerful questions and organise them in a visual way, so that you start creating a visual dialogue tool (more and more people will want one for themselves

Step 5: “Attack” a stand and re-arrange the traditional type of stand into a living visual organisme, changing as people walk by and interact.

Step 6: Take the floor with a sandwich board (two boards put over you with big white paper). Walk around the conference premises and initiate spontaneous sessions where you facilitate a dialogue and create shared pictures.

Step 7: Start using social media to engage your community outside the conference. Invite them to contribute.

Step 8: Continue to create a hubbub around the visuals.

Step 9: Invent more and more ways in which the entire conference becomes visual and the participants can’t help get inspired to go deeper and deeper into the content and issues the conference is about.

Introduction

Part 1 Drawing People

Part 2 Drawing Places

Part 3, Drawing Process

Part 4 Drawing Speech

Part 5 Using Color

Part 6 Drawing Effects

Part 7 Drawing Everything Else

Part 1-7 Putting It All Together

Watch the video and see the numbers. I like the numbers. I like the message. And I keep wondering: If this is all happening to the hardware and software around us, how does this effect our behaviour and our ways of being together? If these are all technologial upgrades happening…what about our “social software” upgrades? What does this development mean for education? For adult learning? For the way we meet each other face to face? For having great conversation? For figuring out how to solve complex challenges? What do we need to be aware of? Who will invest in these social software upgrades? How? What (& who) risks being left out/behind? And what new possibilities are out there? And will be coming to a city near you soon? What a journey!