Drawn Together Through Visual Practice: An Anthology Edited by
Brandy Agerbeck, Kelvy Bird, Sam Bradd & Jennifer Shepherd
Copyright © 2016 by Visual Practice Publishing
Cover by: Brandy Agerbeck
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0692726006
ISBN-10: 0692726004
www.visualpracticebook.com
Printed in U.S.A.
Drawn Together Through
Visual Practice
An Anthology Edited by
Brandy Agerbeck, Kelvy Bird, Sam Bradd, & Jennifer Shepherd
This anthology contains exciting and varied contributions to the growing literature on visual language and its power to “draw us” together. The authors offer a wide range of experience, powerful illustrations and the core message that visual language enables us to learn, think, and grow in new ways – especially when considering the complex relationships that words alone can’t illuminate. Drawn Together through Visual Practice reflects the power of this field to help transform organizations and communities in life-affirming ways.
– Juanita Brown PhD, Co-Founder, The World Cafe
After 45 years of drawing on the wall it is extraordinary to see this field bloom in such rich and contributive ways. The authors are the cambium layer—advancing and shaping it with practice and questions—providing inspiration for all of us who are living into this emergent, hopeful, phenomenon.
– David Sibbet, The Grove Consultants International
The field of visual practice has long been nurtured by the quiet presence of artists devoted to listening and serving the groups with whom they work. It is high time that they turned and faced the room and shared the depth of artisanal practice and craft that underscores their devotion to the work. This collection is a stunning revelation of the heart of this practice. Whatever your role in group work, you will be made better by listening to these voices and stories of experience, sensitivity and careful attention.
– Chris Corrigan, Art of Hosting and Harvest Moon Consulting
A first-rate look at the new world of visual practice. I know from personal experience that capturing content and discussion in real time imagery can help create communal understanding and memory. The images give participants a shared visual vocabulary that help capture complex ideas and enable the move to new discoveries and innovations. The book is a delightful dive into understanding the background and development of this new teaching/art form. Enjoy.
– Deborah Ancona, Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center, MIT Sloan School of Management
I’ve seen visual practice map ideas, refresh memories, and provoke insights in many meetings involving dozens of professionals from business, government, and education. So it’s a special delight to discover this collection representing the art, craft, and inspiration of visual practice from multiple perspectives.
– David N. Perkins, Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., Research Professor of Teaching and Learning, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Graphic facilitation is a powerful way for a group to come to know themselves and the work they want to do together. It is no wonder that it so quickly became a part of any good meeting, conference, or problem solving session! Drawn Together is a valuable book, timely and well thought through. It should be read and employed by all wanting to improve and accelerate the rate of change and innovation within an organization, executive team or community. The more diversity in the room, the more powerful visual imagery becomes.
– Gail Taylor, Co-Founder of MG Taylor, Inc., Founder of Tomorrow Makers, Inc.
At last! A compendium of stories, helpful approaches and mind sets that reflects the diversity, the richness of scope and the broad impact of the growing field of visual practice/visual language. Our visual practice not only encompasses ‘making the invisible visible’ and ‘making the visible visual’ through many artistic means, but also, it incorporates all the human elements of working together, listening, and inclusion that our world is crying for. The potential is unlimited. This is a must read for people who are looking for ways to make substantial change and impact in our world as a group or as an individual and who are looking for paths to go ‘from my way to our way’.
– Susan Kelly, Visual Practitioner
Drawn Together offers me tools to reflect and improve on developing campaigns for Lush, and encourages personal reflection on my process. A tremendous job bringing together a picture of the evolving work and sharing best practices.
– Carleen Pickard, Ethical Campaigns Specialist, Lush Handmade Cosmetics, North America
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Contents
The Visual Now
An introduction
We find ourselves in an age of unprecedented complexity, with increased globalization and access to information, while boundaries all around us dissolve. Visual practice helps make sense of this changing landscape by shifting our relationship to self, other, and society. Drawings give shape to our ideas, provide sharing of methodology, and reframe what is possible.
Visual practice makes the fleeting and ephemeral nature of spoken conversation concrete. Drawings can take infinite form: brushstrokes expressing gesture, metaphors that offer common ground, maps to guide a system, and devices for reconciliation. Individuals and groups alike make these meaningful marks. Communities of thousands can access key content through the aid of images. We see our thoughts from new perspectives through visual interpretation, and we relate with fresh eyes to ourselves and others.
Visuals draw us together. They allow us to consider where we have been, who we are, and who we want to be in the future. We mark these transitions through the acts and artifacts of drawing.
Visual practice is a rich and diverse field. This anthology connects ideas and practitioners at a moment when our practice is dramatically expanding. Let’s pause and survey the field to date: What work is being done? What questions currently guide us? Which theories inform us? Who do we serve, and what is the impact of our craft? What do we learn from our individual experience? And how do we contribute back to the greater field? Now is the moment to embrace visual thinking, practice, and facilitation as a defining technology of our time.
This anthology brings 27 voices together to paint a broad picture of our evolving work and the audiences we serve.
Our imagery generates meaning and shared understanding. It opens possibility, fosters discovery, and facilitates change. For example, educators share an art-based inquiry for children and a curriculum for first-year college students. Improvisation shows up in sketchnoting and through dance. A filmmaker describes how storytelling strengthens listening. Mark-makers trace early use of graffiti and calligraphy as seeds for their current work. Climate justice, personal planning for people with disabilities, conflict resolution, and cross-cultural communication all employ visuals for societal transformation.
We also explore the development of new tools and methodologies, such as photo cards and visual dictionaries, sharing the invention and process behind products geared to facilitate.
Skilled non-visual facilitators share insights on forming strong partnerships for seamless collaboratio
ns. Articles on harvesting and organizational development convey integrated, holistic applications of visuals within change initiatives. Kinesthetic modeling and art therapy demonstrate practices which move beyond verbal language. And a research-based review names the mindsets needed to re-envision our ways of working.
As editors, we also bring our diverse experiences to this picture. Brandy Agerbeck’s article “Making Room for Making” shares best practices as we lead others to draw together. In “Steady, to Scale,” Kelvy Bird turns our attention to the role of “containers” in how we hold ourselves and the spaces we support. In Jennifer Shepherd’s “Discovering Wisdom Within and Between,” we examine how storyboards, portraits, and visual explanations can help us tap into our existing inner wisdom to solve the problems of our time. Building on his experience working cross-culturally with Indigenous communities, Sam Bradd shares tools and observations for building cultural safety. And in the final chapter, Jennifer and Sam collaborate on a series of questions to guide practitioners in reflective inquiry.
the visual now - an introduction
How we were drawn towards this anthology
Visual practitioners frequently travel from event to event, and it’s no surprise that the genesis of this book logged many air miles, too. It started in July 2013 when Sam (Vancouver, Canada) and Jennifer (Ottawa, Canada) shared a cab to the airport after an International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP) conference in New York City. The ride provided just enough time to discover mutual interests in adult education theory, and within six months the two had hosted an international, online conversation series.
Powerful questions are contagious and lead to more questions. Attending EuViz in Berlin the following summer, Sam and Brandy (Chicago, USA) wished aloud that more colleagues would share their experiences and expertise in writing. Then at the 2015 IFVP conference in Austin, Sam invited Brandy and Kelvy (Cambridge, USA) to further dive into this exploration. Through these connected conversations, an anthology was born.
From four home cities we sought geographic diversity and reached out to visual practitioners around the world. Though we know no single book is ever complete, we hope this volume shares some perspectives with which you already resonate and opens alternative lenses.
We also hope these pages inspire new drawings, new methods, new connections, new conversations, and new writings on our practice. As editors, contributors, and readers alike, we all take part in shaping our visual future. More than ever, visual practice has a power to shift what we see, how we think, the stories we tell, and what becomes possible for us to create in the world.
The editors,
Brandy Agerbeck, Kelvy Bird, Sam Bradd, Jennifer Shepherd
Making Room for Making
In praise of imperfect drawings and the humans who make them
Brandy Agerbeck
During a breakout session at a business’s strategy meeting, I saw a group of four colleagues huddled around a flip chart. They were all deep in discussion, writing and drawing with a yellow marker at the top of the paper, where the curve of the previous page cast a shadow on what they were making. As an outsider, the graphic facilitator for the day, my eye is always on making sure the group’s work will be tangible and visible when I stand at the front and map their plenary discussions. I was concerned that the small scale and yellow ink they drew in wouldn’t be visible when their team reported to the whole group. I offered them a darker marker to draw with.
One of them politely declined. “No, we’re whispering.”
In nearly 20 years of working professionally as a graphic facilitator, and four decades drawing personally and studying art both low-brow and high, here was one of my all-time favorite moments of drawing. This group had a perfect ease with their materials and their task. They were creating the visual equivalent of hushed tones, allowing them to work out their thinking in private together.
It is in these messy drawings that work really happens, clarity is found, discoveries are made, and we understand each other and our work in new ways. And yet, most people will say they can’t draw. Therefore, they don’t draw. How do we cultivate the spaces that allow individuals and groups to make the drawings that help them make meaning for themselves? Let’s look at this from five angles.
1. Drawn towards
Relevance of visual practice
With access to more media than ever—including YouTube, the world’s second-largest search engine—our culture is unstoppably visual. I am 42 and I think about how in my lifetime, video games have gone from the lines and dots of Pong to fully immersive experiences. When I was in sixth grade, we were the last family to own a VCR; now I use a $300 camera to shoot videos in my home that reach a global audience. Production barriers fall away as every smartphone has a camera and we find that human connection overrides problems of lighting or audio quality. Our sophistication as viewers and makers gets ever stronger through experience, whether we have the language to talk about it or not.
Brandy Agerbeck • Making Room for Making
With this teeming access comes information overload. We now expect ourselves to keep up with more media than we can reasonably handle. At best, one shifts from ordinary consumer, to curator, to critic, and learns to filter and sort all these inputs. At worst, one feels chronically overwhelmed and overstimulated.
The world itself, not just its reflection in accumulating media, is getting more and more complex. A common model I hear about more and more while mapping meetings is VUCA, a 1990s American military term that stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. These conditions are now the state of things and the old methods of navigation and making sense no longer serve us.
We muddle through with old tools and methods that don’t support us. Linear thinking can’t accommodate the interdependencies and spatial organization needed to understand this complexity. Text-based mediums can’t convey the nuance that a video can. Meetings are derided as time-wasters as the ephemeral nature of a conversation is lost in memory.
Increasing an individual’s or a group’s capacity to think and work visually, spatially, and kinesthetically is the key to navigating the complexity in which we now live. Visual practices and methodologies are crucial tools that enable us to learn and grow in this shifting world. They are what transform us from a passive consumer, to a discerning consumer, to an active producer.
2. Drawn in
Attraction and delights of visual practice
For those of us living within established visual practices, it is easy to forget their novelty. There’s something magical about seeing a graphic facilitator turn your live conversation into a large-scale drawing. There’s something new and fun about picking up a colorful marker and making a mark, or bending a pipe-cleaner into a new shape. These hands-on activities are a pleasant disruption to business meetings as usual.
Using materials from our childhood taps into a strong sense memory. The joy a grown-up feels popping open a tub of Play-Doh and sniffing it, transported to youth; the smell of sharpening a pencil, or the scent of a Mr. Sketch marker; these evoke positive, playful feelings.
These physical materials also harken back to the time in our lives when we sensed the world through our whole selves, before we turned into thinking machines carried on top of a body. Tactile materials tune us back in to inputs of touch and smell—maybe even taste, if you catch someone eating the paste.
I lead interactive keynotes on the powers of drawing as a thinking tool. We discuss concrete tips, then the whole group splits into smaller groups to use their fresh, new drawing skills to tackle real issues at work. On one occasion, a big, tall man came up to me, arms crossed, shoulders pulled up by his ears. “This is so great,” he said, “I feel like a kid again.” His body language didn’t match the excitement in his words—he was still adjusting to this new, old way of working. In t
he same group, a company president sat back, watching me with suspicion at the start of my talk. Intrigued, he slowly leaning forward over the course of the first hour. When we shifted into work, he pulled the paper off the table, onto the floor, ready to draw like a grade-schooler on his hands and knees.
Although manipulating physical materials is often neglected in many adult business and educational contexts, it gives one a sense of being in control of one’s environment. Look at the zooming popularity of coloring books and Zentangles. These are simple, repetitive actions that give one a calming sense of being creatively capable—being fully present in a practice and in-the-zone. When people are set up to use visual materials and succeed with them, they can gain a sense of autonomy and accomplishment.
Developing visual practice gives a sense not just of capacity, but of command. When one gets past the initial “shiny toy” phase of drawing, and through hands-on practice discovers its adaptability and usefulness, one taps into deeper work.
3. Drawn out
Benefits and value of visual practice
In my second book, The Idea Shapers: The power of putting your thinking in your own hands, I describe four inherent properties of drawing that make it a powerful thinking tool. First, it is simple. Drawing only requires something to draw with and something to draw on. In our increasingly digital culture, there’s a lovely reliability in using your four digits and your thumb, available any time there’s paper and pen within reach.
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