[xBlog] 5 live sketching tips every designer should know
The Designer’s Desk By Drew Crowley, XPLANE designer
This is the first in a series of tips, tricks and recipes for
designers, artists and other visual thinkers working in meetings and
other sessions where large amounts of complex information need to be
collected and visualized. It’s a peek into how XPLANE approaches
discovery and uses visual thinking to communicate key ideas.
Why we do it:
Live sketching gets people engaged in the discovery process and leads
to ideas that may not have presented themselves via normal note-taking.
The response to visuals being created before a clients’ or colleagues’
eyes is energetic, and that leads to a natural desire to fill in the
picture, completely. The result: Understanding and alignment, quickly.
Materials you’ll need:
Whiteboard or giant stickies
Variety of small, colorful stickies
Markers
Digital camera
How to do it:
GET STARTED | Start drawing as soon as you can. The earlier you
start drawing in a session the better. It will get the momentum going
in the room, the energy level will jump and you’ll start getting real
content.
VISUAL NOTES | The key to live sketching is understanding that it
isn’t “drawing” in the traditional sense. It’s visual note-taking.
Instead of writing “there was a room with a couch and a lamp,” you draw
a couch and a lamp and label it with the word “room.” This simple
distinction between drawing and note-taking helps alleviate the fear of
drawing in front of people.
MESSY IS OK | Yes, sloppy is good. The sketches don’t have to be
pristine. The sketchier they are the better. By keeping things fast and
loose you’re subconsciously telling the audience that these are just
notes and not final images. What’s drawn in session isn’t necessarily
going to show up in a final XPLANATiON or another visual communication
piece. Keeping things sketchy will help drive that point home, and
allow everyone to feel like they can add to the pictures themselves.
ASK | Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or detail. If things
are moving too fast, and you aren’t catching everything, let your
partner — or the group — know. If the description doesn’t make sense,
ask more questions. If you’re not sure whether you’ve captured
something correctly, ask your client or colleague. It’s better to ask
and be sure, than to assume you’ve got it and have to fix things later.
LABEL | Remember that you’re the one that will have to make sense
of these notes after the fact, so annotate/sketch/label in a way that
makes sense to you. Label people, label scenes, label arrows, label
labels! Live sketching can be fast and sloppy, as mentioned above, and
the squiggle you draw in a session might make complete sense to you at
the time — but two days later it will just be a squiggle. Labels make
the difference between a “centralized supply chain database that
everyone has access to” and a bunch of mysterious boxes, lines and
stick figures.
When you’re done, document everything with a digital camera being
careful to avoid window and flash glare on the whiteboards. It’s a good
idea to organize and annotate all of the relevant captured info soon
after the session.
Live sketching can be done remotely too, using software like Webex or Adobe Acrobat Connect — but that’s a whole other article.
It is surprisingly rare for those of us steeped in sustainability to actually speak directly about what will happen if we don't halt and reverse the effects of global warming in just a few years' time. It's as though we're all on the Titanic; it's slowly filling with water, but we're having such a grand time that we don't want to be a buzzkill (after all, isn't this ship unsinkable?).
That is, until we're fighting for life rafts in the middle of the ocean.
The following video blows that "gentleman's code" right out of the water -- and appropriately so, given the reality of the fate that awaits us should we continue with our current trajectory.
The video was produced by The Big Ask, a massive, multi-country campaign to permanently cut carbon production in the world in the next 5 years. As of right now, 18 countries are partnering to bring drastic carbon-cutting initiatives to the UN Climate Conference in December of this year. Not surprisingly, the US is not on this list -- but it's up to us to change that.
Given the severity of the issue, why are videos like this one not a common occurrence? I suspect that our refusal to speak the truth aloud reveals a much deeper, instinctive, emotional response: we, at this moment in our evolution, are collectively experiencing the five stages of grief for the loss of life as we know it on this earth.
We already knew that Guy Kawasaki was a business guru, but who knew he was so Zen too? Maybe that's what makes him successful at everything he touches. Here's a clip from an interview you most definitely should read in entirety.
A 2007 article published by MIT/Sloan and compiled by Peter Senge, Benyamin Lichtenstein, Katrin Kaeufer, Hilary Bradbury and John Carroll stresses that cross-sector collaboration is the only real means of addressing sustainability systemically. [Click here to download PDF].
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 25 March 2009 )
Efficiency is the new Green
Shelton Group, a green energy think tank, just completed a study that indicates a movement towards green efficiencies in a slow economy:
"'Green' may have been the buzzword of 2008, but 'efficiency' will be the buzzword of 2009. Despite lots of press coverage to the contrary, Americans are willing to buy. And they’re willing to buy green. The difference is they’re now willing to buy green products that immediately put green back in their pockets." [Click here to read the full article on Shelton Group's site]
This is very exciting news indeed, and dovetails nicely with the A.T. Kearny study highlighted below.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 26 February 2009 )
Stay the green course in a slow economy
So, recently a few of you (maybe more than a few) have been asking the following question:
"So, now that the economy is tanking, do companies stop "going green" because it's more expensive?"
I'm so delighted that you asked that question. The answer is, it depends: If you are merely purchasing offsets to compensate for all of your carbon output, well, then yes. But if you're approaching "going green" from a reductionist, cost-effective perspective, then "economic downturn" and "sustainability" go hand-in-hand. Essentially, it's environmentally beneficial to cut consumption (yes, it's true, contrary to the norms of our consumerist culture), re-use materials, turn off the lights and unplug the appliances. And that's just the small-scale, easy-pickings stuff.
A recent A.T. Kearney study shows that "companies
committed to corporate sustainability practices are achieving above-average performance in the financial markets during this slowdown." Click here to download the full report [PDF 680KB].
How to do it:
