| Agenda |
|---|
| 1. Introduction to Visual Thinking |
| 2. Part I: Build your iconography 🎨 |
| 3. Part II: Develop your active listening 👂 |
| 4. Part III: The graphic recording ✍️ |
| 5. Why develop your Visual Thinking? |
| Extended Version and more resources |
| Closing Notes |
What is Visual Thinking?
Visual Thinking is the ability that everyone has to connect ideas, emotions and senses at the same time through drawing. Even before writing, humans developed drawing skills many years ago, because the act of drawing connects many things to understand the world around us. Sometimes formal education prioritised other ways to communicate (writing, public speaking, etc.), and people used to think drawing is only a skill for artists. Visual Thinking is this ability to communicate to each other through visuals.
The humans from more than 35 000 years ago drew the first drawings in The Chauvet caves in France. We have drawing skills in our genes!
Visual Thinking is the ability to connect with other parts of you and improve your way to understand the world around you.
This ability, as any other one, needs time and experience to improve. During this workshop you'll learn just the basics.
What can you learn and achieve using Visual Thinking in your day by day? Clarity and order.
It's important to remark that Visual Thinking has many levels of application. In this workshop, we're hoping to show you how to develop basic skills. During each activity you'll draw and apply techniques that show you how to draw just for you, this is the basic level. When we think about drawing, we are used to thinking in beautiful illustrations because we connect drawing with aesthetic images, but for us, we need practical drawings - significant sketches that allow you to connect ideas, even if the drawings are not the most beautiful. So don't worry about your drawing skills, this is the best space for practice.
Please first read the instructions and read the last point, then follow the activity.
- You're going to use two sheets.
- Take one sheet and a marker. It doesn't matter which color.
- Open the first video Suite - Psicosis.
- Close your eyes, while the video is playing and use your hand to start to draw your feelings about the song. Feel free to use all the space available.
- Take the second sheet, and now open the second video Bohemian Rapsody.
- Again, close your eyes, and while the video is playing. Use your hand to draw your feelings about the song.
Examples:
After finish the activity
What do you feel about drawing your feelings of this songs? The first one is a famous song from Psicosis, a popular horror film, while the second song is more emotive and happy. What are the diffence between both exercises?
Takeaways 🏆:
- For this activity you should close your eyes, because you need to work with your other senses like active listening and drawing with your hands.
- The scribbles are just a visualization of how you're feeling the music. Music allows us to connect better with emotions. We need to develop this connection.
- What about practicing this during a meeting? Could you visualize your emotions?
- Open the following app that help us to choose a random letter Letter Picker Wheel.
- Take another sheet for this exercise.
- Choose a random letter.
- In 3 minutes draw all the words starting with the letter selected. Draw as many drawings as you can. They don't have to be perfect.
- Repeat this 3 times.
Example:
After the activity
Visual Thinking is practical, so we need to develop this skill and this activity is about that. Although the first part is about thinking about all the words that start with the letter, the hard part comes when you have to draw that words but in that short time you should be able to start to connect quickly meanings with drawings. That's the skill that we need! I recommend you practice this as many times as possible.
Takeaways 🏆:
- How easy or hard was it to draw practical icons? Sometimes it's hard find references for icons. I recomment you find your words here: Flaticon Icons
- Using timers involve another kind of complexity, but we're learning and we need this to show us how we're working in a short period of time. This could give us better metrics about our progress.
- Remember, we need easy and practical drawings to represent words.
- Take a sheet for this exercise.
- Try to draw your own version of the following image.
- Save this sheet as your visual dictionary.
- Take a sheet for this activity.
- Open the next video: Who Invented the Computer? | Computer History Museum
- Write a list of all the ideas that you're hearing. As many as you can. This exercise is about your ability to listen for ideas.
- Write at least 10 ideas.
- Take a sheet for this exercise.
- Use your previous list of ideas and select the most important ideas for you.
- Try to sketch an icon for every idea. Remember this icon is for you to connect drawings and ideas.
- You can use your visual dictionary.
- Draw at least 6 icons.
Notes:
- Search on google images for the computers mentioned to take as reference.
- Take your time and be practical. You don't have to draw in detail. Just put down your own references.
- You can use the following example as reference to draw your icons.
- Take a sheet for this.
- From the previous activity, select the 3 most important ideas from the video.
- In your new sheet, draw again the 3 ideas. Put a number to every idea.
- Watch again the video Who Invented the Computer? | Computer History Museum.
- Now write just the ideas related to your 3 main ideas. The goal is to complement this sheet with ideas to complement the speech. You don't have to write every sentence, just the most important ones.
Notes:
- You're creating your own understanding of this video.
- Give order and structure, you can use numbers and lines to connect everything.
- You don't have to write down everything, just what is most important.
- After finishing this, does your drawing reflects your understanding of the video or not? Do you need to complement this?
- Take a paper sheet.
- Open the next video History of Databases | Computer History Museum.
- Use the following design in your sheet.
- Play the video and fill the sheet with all the ideas that you're hearing.
- After finishing your sketch, select the most important ideas for you.
- Take a sheet.
- Use the ideas selected by you from the last activity.
- Draw icons for every idea.
- Take a sheet.
- Draw the 5 most important ideas from the last activity.
- Add the complementary ideas from the video close to the main idea. You can use text or icons or both.
- The goal is create a visual interpretation of your understanding of the video. You can play the video again as many times as you want.
- Add arrows and other notes.
Visual Thinking help us to build visual tools to improve our understanding capabilities and communication skills. All of this activities were designed to show you how to start to develop this skill, but it's just the beginning.
The most basic level of Visual Thinking is being conscious of your mental process to understand, order and structure knowledge. You need to be provided of a set of drawings skills to generate your own sketches. This level is not about drawing beautiful illustrations for others, it's about drawing symbolic sketches to help you to boost your understanding.
The first part was about creating a relationship between you and the drawing through simple exercises to visualize music: create icons and visuals. The second part was about developing your active listening because in Visual Thinking we need all your senses working at the same time. The last part is a summary of all the previous activities step by step. Creating a visual interpretation is what a graphic recording is. All the previous techniques are just tools that you can learn and improve to use together at the same time for any purpose.
Visual Thinking is a skill to connect with yourself. You need to be sincere and honest with your processes and work from there to improve it. Visual Thinking could boost any other kind of knowledge and it's a great combination in technology environments.
Some ideas about where to apply these techniques:
- Create visual summaries in meetings.
- Product discovery processes: you can document all the flows about this.
- Information flows: you can sketch entities and information exchange to clarify flows.
- Graphic Recordings in conferences.
- Sketch software components.
- Create presentation skeletons.
- Complement documentation with visual summaries.
If you want more exercises to learn Visual Thinking, please visit the Extended Version:
If you finish all or just some activities, please consider:
- Starring this repository ⭐️. (This will let me to know how many people are doing this workshop)
- Share your exercises on Twitter including
@visual_partner. I'll be happy to see your activities and even give you feedback. - If you have feedback to share, you can open an issue in this repository.
- Feel free to reach out to me for feedback.
- Stay tuned in social media for more workshops.
Congratulations! Thanks for following this workshop, I hope you learned something new and interesting and see you soon in another workshop.
Remember, these are a set of techniques that need time and a lot of practice. Be patient, specially with drawing. Most the people think that they need to draw beautiful illustrations. We're using drawing as an skill to connect with ourselves and with others. We don't need the most beautiful content because the most important part is the content itself. We're learning how to visualize our internal processes (emotional and mental). We're learning how to connect from other parts. Interesting, isn't it?
Keep drawing and tag me on social medio to see your progress! See you! 😊
Devices and apps recommended:
- iPad
- Procreate
- Adobe Fresco
Drawing Courses:
Procreate Courses:
- Art with Flo
- Procreate técnicas de ilustración creativa
- Composición creativa para ilustración en Procreate
- Diseño e ilustración digital de tatuajes en Procreate
Visual Thinking resources:
- Visual Thinking Domestika
- Pataleta
- Visual Thinking: Empowering People & Organizations Through Visual Collaboration
- Visual Thinking Rudolf Arnheim
- General Theory Systems by Bertanlanffy
- Drawing a Hypothesis by Nikolaus Gansterer
Content by @carlogilmar. January 2023.