UNEA4 – #BreakFreeFromPlastic

There’s something about working with activists. They speak from the heart. I find them very easy to listen to – to tune in to. They’re often great storytellers too – and stories describe pictures…

The brief was to create visual assets for United Nations Environment Agency summit in Nairobi, Kenya.

Dialogue

Our virtual session spanned the globe. Jane was already in Nairobi at the pre-summit, and Jed was organising from the Philippines, and sketched and scribbled in London.

The number of ideas betrays the richness of the conversation – and we had no trouble creating collaborative ideas to that we felt people could align to.

Distill

Humour disarms, even if it’s sometimes pretty dark. I often listen out for those bits of insight that sit behind the humour as they’re often pictorial. Here’s some of the final artwork we created:

GO-GN

Aesthetic, Conversations, Identity, Visual Language

API Evangelist

Conversations, Identity

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Made with Creative Commons

“So tell me what this book is all about…”

I had pinned down Paul Stacey and Sarah Pearson, authors of the Made with Creative Commons book, for a transatlantic online meeting. I was playing the role of the grand inquisitor (well – a friendly, enthusiastic, grand inquisitor maybe…)

And they talked. And I listened; and asked some questions. I was recording our 2-hour conversation so that I could go back through it hunting for clues to an idea: a turn of phrase; a metaphor used; or something that resonated with my own journeys in business.

The name of the game is to sketch up as many ideas as possible – to see which ideas resonate. Having listened to Ed Sheeran on Desert Island Discs recently, he talks about a similar approach to making his music – he picks up his guitar and gets on with writing 4-5 songs in a day, and maybe 100 for an album – selecting the best ten for the album itself and putting the other ninety on the shelf. Go wide; see what resonates.

The more I learn about the Commons, the more I see myself as a commoner. With software businesses, I’d grown up with only one way to do business: start-up, get investment, scale up, exit. Of course, an Open Source model turns this on it’s head. Try to explain this to business executives, and they’ll look at you like you’re speaking a foreign language…

Here’s some of the final artwork created for the book:

Pre-industrialised - Market, Commons, State

You can order a print copy or download a free digital copy of the book by going to the Made with Creative Commons page.

As for me, I couldn’t resist bringing the cover to life…

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

BFFP – Gloves and Masks

Activism, Message

Open University – Open Degree Programme

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).

Language Learning: Understanding everything

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

Language Learning: Intercultural knowledge

25 Years of EdTech

Aesthetic, Conversations, Message

BFFP – Gloves and Masks

Activism, Message

Open University – Open Degree Programme

Message

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OER17

OER17 Conference

I bet the OER17 conference will be one of those that are referred back to for some time. It seemed like the right number of participants and the right mix of people. Although with so many parallel sessions, I must have missed out on a whole bunch of great insight.

I was there to run a workshop on “from Voice to Visual” (prezi is here), looking at the creative journey of the ALT visual strategy, together with Maren Deepwell CEO of ALT.

I like to visually process what I hear, and tune in to the messages that resonate with me. Hear it, see it, draw it (which also helps me remember it!) Call it my own form of active learning. The illustrations are below – just click for a slideshow…

Want to use an image?

The sketches and gifs below are available for use under a CC-BY 4.0 licence, which simply means that if you’d like to use them, all you have to do is attribute the creator (@bryanMMathers) wherever you use them. My business is dependent on people who attribute, so please do! To download a high-res version of an image, just click on the image to open it full size, and right-click / alt-click and select “Save image as…” or equivalent. 🙂