API Evangelist

The thing I love about this sort of work, is that there is so much to be learned from other people. Kin Lane (aka API Evangelist) knows what he’s talking about when it comes to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Not just how they work, or how to build them, but how they’ve evolved and the impact they can have.

Kin asked if I would help evolve the visual identity for API Evangelist.

Dialogue

We arranged a remote video session (Kin was in Los Angeles, whilst I’m based in London) and to make sure that I caught as much of what Kin was saying as possible, I recorded our video conversation for good measure. That way, I can go back through the conversation and let it dribble over my creative brain during the sketching phase of the process. I didn’t want our ideas to be restricted by my lack of API knowledge, and being a former software engineer, I’m very interested in this domain too…

Here are a few sketches the session:

A credential is more than just a credential

Artwork

Finding a visual identity is not easy. Like a new pair of shoes, how you see them changes as they become part of you. There’s much “stepping into it” required. Also, we’re trying to create something bigger than the person behind it, as its purpose will be to provide a stage not just to speak from, but to build other scenes on top of.

…and finally

Humour is often a great indicator of something worth creating. So when a thought tickles me, I try to capture it before it escapes. The artwork below came out of the conversation with Kin, and as a mash-up also allowed be to explore and understand some of Roy Lichtenstein’s work. This artwork ended up as a sticker and can be found on the back of my laptop. 🙂

Making an impact on the world. I enjoy seeing my ideas fluttering around, adding color, adding motion, and presence around the API community. At the moment where I couldn’t imagine any image to represent API Evangelist, Bryan was able to extract a single image that I think couldn’t better represent what it is I do. #VisualThinkery

Kin Lane

API Evangelist, Excerpt taken from this blogpost.

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

UNEA4

Activism, Conversations, Message

API Evangelist

Conversations, Identity

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CMALT Principles

CMALT Principles – a visual language

I always love working with ALT members. Openness is baked into whatever they do, so if I’m trying to capture ideas from dialogue, there is no shortage of members to get involved.

ALT asked if I would help them create a visual language for their CMALT programme, starting with the CMALT core principles.

Dialogue

ALT helpfully organised two remote dialogue sessions (using Google Hangouts), in order to involve a range of people in the collaborative process. Taking each of principles in turn, we discussed members’ understanding of each principle’s meaning and captured it using a live drawing method.

Here are the outputs of both sessions:

As you might spot, different voices produce a different conversation. Principles tend to have a degree of constructive ambiguity, resulting in multiple aligned but varied personal meanings. Of course, the more angles you can view an abstract principle from, the more chance of finding a visual metaphor that might fit.

Distill

The next step is to take those rough ideas and create a number of distilled ideas. This process culminated in the following three routes:

Artwork

The rough sketches allow us to see which of the ideas resonate, and how we can take them further. In the end, we settled on a mash-up of two of the routes. Here’s the final artwork:

Using a visual language to articulate the core principles of our professional accreditation scheme has had real impact: candidates are now much clearer about what the principles are, more advocates have been able to use the artwork to promote the scheme and there is a stronger visual and strategic connections between this and the overall vision of the Association.

Maren Deepwell

CEO, ALT

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

UNEA4

Activism, Conversations, Message

API Evangelist

Conversations, Identity

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Library of Things

I originally met the founders of the Library of Things at a Platform Co-ops conference a few months ago, and was really inspired by the enterprise they had set up. For me it’s in the sweet spot of my interests: community oriented, a mashup of physical/digital, technology for good, and of course a social enterprise solving real problems.

Their social start-up had generated (and still does) a significant amount of interest from organisations and individuals wishing to do the same or similar. In response, the team decided to organise a boot camp, inviting those serious with the concept to work though their ideas amongst friends and experts. As the bootcamp was conversationally oriented, the team asked if I would help capture some of the thinking that emerged.

The bootcamp looked at different lending models, and the ideation of a back-end platform, as well as looking at the similarities and differences of each interested party’s circumstance, environment and available resources.

As always, I came away having learned a thing or two. Here’s a selection of the final artwork:

If you’re interested in finding out more, then check out the Library of Things website, or subscribe to their podcast for a more personal perspective.

Documentary Cartooning

Conversations, Message

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

BFFP – Gloves and Masks

Activism, Message

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ALT – A visual strategy

CTRL-ALT-CREATE

No-one would set out to create a visual strategy. But now that I’ve facilitated the creation of one, it seems such an obvious way of engaging the troops and gathering alignment, creating something that is both of the people and for the people.

Values
Maren Deepwell, CEO of ALT invited me along to a meeting of the trustees in order to visually explore the organisation’s values. Now, many of us have been exposed to values in the corporate sense – culture targets inflicted from above intended to gel an organisation together. It’s of little surprise that such a values manifesto is treated with scorn by those who are supposed to live it out, even if they hold those very values in spades.

As is the way with charities, the trustees of ALT are not paid, so each trustee has a bunch of reasons why they give of their precious time. Some perhaps are obvious, but some are much less so, regardless of which, once a trustee, no-one ever asks. So in this case, the values we explored were more character alignments – and so where better to start than asking: why are you a trustee of ALT?

The Thinkathon
Capturing this facilitated discussion live using pen, paper, document camera and projector, allowed us to see the gems as each was uncovered, some of which resonated deeply with the group. Being external, I could contain the extroverted voices and bring out the introverted ones, as well as sidestepping any politics in the room. And as people talked, they got excited…

The Ideas Dark Room
Capturing a conversation leaves no time for taking ideas further – so I am always keen to drag the remnants from a Thinkathon into the Ideas Dark Room (my shed) and progress them further. The richer the conversation, the easier this part of the process is – but ideas can come from anywhere: a funny thing you notice, a subconscious metaphor with a hand gesture, an off-the-cuff comment after the session… There are questions to ask the page, and puzzles that are asking to be solved.

Bringing it to Life

I gathered up the sketches and sent them through to Maren and later we talked them through with some of her team. The ALT team had been working with their membership on the organisation’s draft 3-year strategy. Maren asked whether we could use the visuals from the Trustee conversations to give the strategy a feel – an aesthetic. What’s the format that will engage most members? It’s probably the same format that will engage the most yet-to-be members too…

ALT Strategy: Greater than the sum of our parts

Telling a Story
And so, this becomes the primary challenge for visual thinkery; can we:

ENGAGE: create something that people can get the gist of quickly
SHARE: create something that people can make some noise with
OWN: create something that people will tattoo on their laptop…

What we ended up creating really resonated with both members and non-members alike – but if you ask me, it was always going to. This is not magic – it’s artwork and aesthetic that’s rooted in a collaborative conversation.

If you want to have a closer look, here’s the published version in a presentation format designed to be delivered by any member.

That would look great on a T-shirt

Activism, Identity

Documentary Cartooning

Conversations, Message

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

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Open University

Open University

The team at the Open University got in touch to ask if I’d create some thinkery for a couple of different projects. Firstly, to celebrate the 10th birthday of the OpenLearn platform, the OU’s flagship open access learning platform, some thinkery was needed to articulate it’s achievements.

Secondly, the language learning team wanted to explore if thinkery could be used to explore some of the more tricky areas of their badged open course.

I travelled up to Milton Keynes for a day of conversations, and armed with my pen, A3 paper and a document camera, I met the team and dived headlong into rich conversation.

Here are some of the initial sketches following our thinkery session (click to scroll through).