We are on our second day in the Barcelona Climate Talks. We have taken small steps in applying visual techniques to various parts of the conference. On the above photos you can see Stine working on what will become a display of visuals conveing the essence of WWF’s 10 steps leading to a successful COP15 agreement.

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.

During the next 7 days negotiations leading up to COP 15 in Copenhagen (the new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol) is taking place. We are supporting WWF during these days. For each day we will upload visuals of the main issues, ideas and messages which WWF find important to communicate. We invite anyone out there to join us. The above is from the premeetings this weekend. More to come here and on our Slideshare site.

We believe that any person can draw, it’s just a matter of putting the pen to the paper. We also believe that drawing and visual thinking can be a powerful tool in communication and facilitation. In order to help people use this powerful tool, we have come up with seven elements that will make you able of drawing almost everything.

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

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Our friends at Xplane just sent out a newsletter with the above big picture showing the Cap Gemini Accellerated Solutions Environment. This concepts originated from our heroes of MG Taylor and has since also been a key ingredient in what our heroes at The Value Web does. And here is a good quote for everyone in business to take in:

“The power that a single image has to convey an enormous amount of content is underappreciated in business today. However, the ability to create such a piece that is simple, clear and elegant is a real art”.

Chip Saltsman, Vice President, Americas Leader, Capgemini Accelerated Solutions Environment.

This was said in connection to the above Xplanation. We will here take the liberty to broaden it out as a statement around the field of graphic facilitation, visual dialogue and communication.

Supercool cartoon that makes it look SO easy!

Try out this cool thesaurus, that clusters the words visually – and makes you see the connections! Visual Thesaurus

Common Craft is a Seattle-based company, that explains complex concepts – in plain english. Simple, clear and funny! I love it.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Take a closer look at this american artist, Christoph Niemann, who creates images and stories using the simples means.

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/