On the heels of our post celebrating 4,383 days online (that’s 12 internet years!), I want to let everyone know that we’ll be importing key posts into Dachis Group’s Collaboratory blog, and we’ll continue publishing our thoughts and work on visual thinking there. In fact, my first post went up yesterday and other XPLANE alumnus have started blogging there as well.

We won’t be transferring all 8,333 xBlog posts. So many of them are outdated and linkrotted. But we will make sure key posts redirect to their new homes on the Collaboratory and all other posts don’t 404.

It has been a wonderful, amazing, enlightening ride here at xBlog, from hand-coding it starting in 1999, to embracing the first release of WordPress .7 in 2003, to today — a world where blogs are more than commonplace — they are ubiquitous. I don’t know that I could give a better rundown than I did for last year’s 11th anniversary, so if you want a trip down xBlog’s memory lane you can read it here.

Blogging has been core to me and XPLANE for a long time and we’re not going to stop. I truly hope XPLANE’s fans and xBlog’s readers will continue to follow our work as Dachis Group. We’ll still be doing that visual thinking thing, just as we have been for all these years, only now we’ll be bringing to it many more people and businesses.

So on behalf of xBlog… so long, and thanks for all the links.

See you at the Collaboratory.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 19, 2011

This change prompted us at XPLANE | Dachis Group to take a look at a few other long-standing charts, graphics and diagrams and ask whether they could use a bit of sprucing up.

So, as we are wont to do, we turned to our monthly Visual Thinking School (VTS for short) and the public to see what kinds of new design thinking could be applied to some old standards.

To start with, we sought to explore the food plate further. Due to its simplicity, the new diagram doesn’t indicate which foods fall under what categories. To remedy this, we did some rapid concepting on a mobile app that would dig deeper into each food group. The group was broken into teams and each team chose a food group.

One team chose the Fruit food group and came up with an app called “Shoot the Fruit.” The app encouraged the user to take photos of fruit. Using the photo, the app would then generate tons of information on that specific fruit: info like preparation, food pairing, recipes, and nutritional information.

See more app concepts on our Flickr stream!
 

So, having gotten our hands dirty with the food plate it was time to take on something from scratch. Again, in groups, we looked at three different, existing graphics: airplane safety guides, food nutrition information labels and the periodic table.

Airplane Safety Guides
The group that worked on this graphic decided that a lot of the information on current safety guides is no longer relevant. This was most evident in the list of devices that are and aren’t allowed during flight. To remedy this, the group designed a new list, both updating the devices as well as distinguishing what is allowed before, during and after the flight.

Food Nutrition Information Labels
As the Food Nutrition Group concepted their design, they came to the decision that the current design doesn’t generate recognition of what the food consists of quickly enough. They set out to create visuals that would be recognizable, at a glance, and would indicate how much of particular component was in the food, and whether that amount was good or bad. An overall assessment of whether the food was healthy or unhealthy would also be given through color-coding on the right. (Think terror alerts, but for food)

Periodic Table
Two groups took on the Periodic Table and both came to the realization that it’s already a very functional design. The main issue was found to be its approachability. Each group tried to make the periodic table a little less imposing by focusing on specific aspects of the information.

One group created a prototype for a rotating periodic wheel, below (I stress the word prototype). The wheel is meant to reveal the information about the elements through an explorative experience. By choosing random attributes of elements, the wheel would eventually reveal what element you’re looking at.

The second group tried visualizing the elements in a comparative fashion, below. Their concept shows the each element represented by a circle the size of which represented its atomic mass.

One member of the group, Alex, went the extra mile after VTS and took the concept even further. Check it out:
The Periodic Table of the Solar System.

Overall, it was an interesting exercise. Reworking familiar design structures can be illuminating in different ways. You’re forced to decide what information seems superfluous and what is vital. A decision that is often informed by what current-day society deems important. Many of the decisions around information for the graphics we were redesigning were most likely made many years ago, when they were originally designed. But over time, the context around them has changed, and the need to reassess becomes evident when you take a good look at them in light of modern day values.
 

Special bonus do-overs:

• Take a look at this sales receipt redesign XPLANEr Susanne LeBlanc found: http://flowingdata.com/2011/07/05/sales-receipt-redesign/
• And Tara Pham of Eleven Magazine sent us a link to a food nutrition label redesign that is a lot like the one our group came up with: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664668/infographic-of-the-day-a-food-label-that-actually-teaches-you-about-food.

As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.

We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.

The idea for a history-themed VTS came from discussions at home (full disclosure: I’m married to an XPLANE designer) about how I was — and was not — using the chalkboard in my classroom. Chalkboards and whiteboards are ubiquitous in education, yet there’s precious little attention to how college educators like myself should use them. I never thought much about what I was capturing on the board until a colleague pointed out that a student writing only what was on the board would have a poor grasp of that day’s rich discussion. The board was basically a list of nouns in no particular order with a few pathetic arrows. Clearly, there was room for improvement. But I went into history because I loved stories and words, not drawing. And I’ve always been a little self-conscious of my stickman presidents and maps of the United States with Maine the size of South America. And with PowerPoint or Keynote slides available to present pre-planned material, there are even fewer opportunities to capture ideas visually in real time in front of a classroom.

Enter VTS. During the session, we divided into two groups and everyone live-sketched while my colleague Buddy Paulett and I discussed a tricky historical topic. I explained why St. Louis lost so much population in the twentieth century and Buddy covered the origins of the French and Indian War. The resulting visuals were great. When presented with a brief lecture by the person who sketched, they quickly tell a complex historical story.

Here’s one of the sketches describing St. Louis’ 20th century population loss. See more sketches of this and the French and Indian War in our Flickr VTS set. Each of these was drawn live over the course of 20-30 minutes while listening to guest historians speak.

The takeaway for me was that live sketching, cartooning, and creative doodling are all useful tools to communicate complex stories. I’m not going to stop using words, but I’d like to add more visual skills to my toolkit. So I’m going to try to implement a few new things this year:

1. Develop a small icon set that I can draw quickly and effectively in real time during class. For a modern U.S. historian teaching in the St. Louis region, this might include the outline of the U.S., outlines of Illinois and Missouri, the St. Louis skyline (thank you, Arch!), a two-dimensional factory, a car or truck, a person holding a picket sign, etc
2. Spend a few minutes planning how the board will evolve during a class session. As a writer, I tend to start at the left and move to the right but live sketching seems to work better if I start in the middle and grow from there.
3. Encourage students to capture class notes via drawing. I’m still not sure how this could work, but I like the idea that artistically-inclined students could sketch their notes and somehow share them with the class. Doing this might encourage more creative students to see history as stories to be communicated rather than lists of names and dates.

Baby steps for now, but we’ll see where they lead.

Oops, looks like I gave away the ending… also, some slightly NSFW alt-weeklyish writing appears at the beginning of this Pacific Northwest Inlander article.

Cut to Spirit Week at XPLANE, a week where we do fun, silly things to raise money for local charities. We needed a name for our Top Chef-style quickfire competition and Top Jeff felt right. Instead of Jeff vs. Jeff it became XPLANEr vs. XPLANEr. Events were devised which tested an XPLANE employee’s most basic skills: Scheduling, live sketching, rendering and more! The St. Louis staff was split into two teams and we gathered in our main conference room. What followed was an hour of teeth-clenching trepidation and gut-wrenching tension! The defeated were downtrodden. The victors, proud. Here follows an account of the events that took place that fateful April day in St. Louis…

✪ ROUND 1: SCHEDULING
The competition kicked off with Ashley Rath, seasoned Project Manager taking on plucky upstart, Susanne LeBlanc. Susanne the designer faced quite a challenge, given her total lack of experience in the competitive field of Project Management. Each was given a set of cards that detailed several calls, timelines, and deadlines for a specific designer. The challenge: Schedule that designer’s week! Ashley and Susanne stared down an oversized, week-long calendar and at the word “go!” launched themselves into a world of meeting times, conference calls and iteration cycles. Against all odds, relative amateur Susanne came out on top, edging Ashley out for the win!

“Nervous for the first challenge! I wasn’t sure what we’d have to do, but it seemed pretty familiar once I got into it.” –Susanne LeBlanc

✪ ROUND 2: AFFINITY MAPPING
Client-session staple James Macanufo eyed down long-time XPLANEr Bill Keaggy with a cool confidence. The contestants were each presented with twenty-five individual items on sticky notes and were required to sort them into five categories. A flurry of arms, Post-Its and curses followed as James and Bill moved at lightning speed. Stickies were grouped and ungrouped. Arranged and rearranged. When the smoke cleared, James stood victorious.

“I love finding patterns and the affinity mapping challenge was a fun way to mix work and play. Then I lost.” –Bill Keaggy

✪ ROUND 3: LIVE SKETCHING
Ashley saw her chance for revenge as her fellow teammate and known whiteboard wizard Ted May went up against Susanne. Susanne, having to compete in a second event given her team’s smaller number of members, found herself in more comfortable territory with Live Sketching. But with a win already under her belt, was she too comfortable? The event presented Ted and Susanne with 10 vignettes, described on index cards. Both would have to draw the vignettes as quickly and accurately as possible. The felt tips flew as they knocked out each vignette one by one. Amidst flashbacks of sessions past and the rabid screaming of his team, Ted won the round.

“Up against Ted. Yikes. Good thing we’d both practiced drawing the U.S. map before.” –Susanne LeBlanc

✪ ROUND 4: CONCEPTING:
XPLANE intern Zoë Scharf was faced with an Everest-like challenge when going up against concepting juggernaut Chris Roettger. In front of each contestant were fifteen words. Zoë and Chris were to concept an icon for each word, and each had to be unique. Zoë surprised everyone as she danced toe to toe with Chris on icon after icon. But experience won out over spirit in the end, and Chris took the “W.”

“Under pressure you start to realize that as far as icons go, clichés might just be the best bet for quick recognition.” –Chris Roettger

✪ ROUND 5: STORYBOARDING
Motion master Jacob Heberlie went up against XPLANE founder Dave Gray in what was sure to be a fight to remember. Jacob had plenty of storyboarding arrows in his quiver but he was up against an intimidating competitor. Tall both in stature and wisdom, Dave loomed above Jacob as the round began. The challenge? Storyboard, in ten frames, the children’s rhyme “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Pan up! Zoom in! Jump cut! After a tense bout of camera moves and stage direction, Dave won gracefully.

“I was shaking like a leaf, the pressure was on and I felt compelled to deliver for my team.” –Dave Gray

✪ ROUND 6: PRODUCTION
The gloves came off and the MacBooks powered on for the final round. David “Hotkeys” Vordtriede took on Jeff “The only actual Jeff in Top Jeff” Wilson. The contestants were given five sketches of icons and a color palette and told to digitally render them as fast as possible. The keys clacked and the mice clicked amidst the roar of both teams. Jeff closed one final path and with it, closed David and team’s chance at victory.

“I was filled with excitement, competitiveness and sheer panic.” –David Vordtriede

At the end of six rounds the times of each contestant were added together to determine a total team score. The winning team: Susanne, James, Chris, Dave and Jeff. The runners up: Ashley, Bill, Ted, Zoë, Jacob and David. A mere two minutes separated the winners from the not winners.

They entered as enemies but left as friends on that fateful day. Hands were shook and backs patted as XPLANErs congratulated one another on a job well done. Both teams played their hearts out on that tough playing field known as the whiteboard. All that was left to do was to begin planning for Top Jeff 2012.

At XPLANE’s public Visual Thinking School on March 3, we were looking for a new “live sketching” challenge. In the past, we’ve had people describe children’s book scenes, or tell personal stories while others would stand by dry erase boards taking visual notes. It’s always interesting to see just how unique each drawing turns out.

Anyway, having just caught El Monstero’s Led Zeppelin tribute at the Pageant in St Louis, I thought it would be fun to do some live sketching of “Stairway to Heaven.” The lyrics are so rich with imagery it seemed a natural. So we played the song, pausing every few lines to allow people time for interpretation. We learned that it’s one thing to listen to the song but it’s another to see it in sketch form!

“Stairway To Heaven” visualized on a whiteboard.

While this was going on, others were taking smaller visual notes on stickies to see how that approach might differ. Then we mapped the small drawings to the large wall drawings. What’s interesting is that those drawing on a wall felt constrained working big and those drawing on stickies felt freed up by the smaller modular format. The people drawing large felt a lot of pressure to make one cohesive sketch that captured everything while those drawing smaller felt free to skip less important details and just sketch key scenes, phrases and characters.

We repeated the exercise later by drawing along to “The Trees” by Rush.

A scene from Rush’s “The Trees” drawn on a sticky note.

It was a lot of fun so a couple weeks later we expanded on the exercise. This time we had everyone choose whatever song they wanted and then take an hour to interpret it visually. Some XPLANErs chose to work on dry erase walls while others worked on paper. Afterward everyone presented their artwork while their song played along.

The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus” in visual form.

Go to the VTS Set on our Flickr page for more photos.

I think this approach could work well for summarizing movies, news reports, speeches and more — so stay tuned… and sign up to get on the VTS invite list if you’re in Portland, St. Louis or Amsterdam. If not, maybe you can find a VizThink chapter in your area.

As Chuck Frey put it over on the Mind Mapping Software Blog:

Dave’s concise explanation makes a lot of sense to me. Here’s why. As human beings living in a post-modern era, we’re overwhelmed by the amount of communication coming at us. As a result, we’ve gotten into the habit of constantly filtering it, distilling it down to just the essential information we need to survive and thrive.

In business, if we don’t understand something, we’ll ignore it, or at the very least, refuse to make a decision about it. The sooner we understand, the sooner we can act on it. And that, simply put, drives results.

Speaking of results, we received a Stevie Award for Best Motivational Video in the video awards categories of The 2010 American Business Awards for our Did You Know? 4.0 video and there’s a little feature in the latest Stevie newsletter on XPLANE, Dave and Gamestorming. Check it out.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Update: Th video is related to an interview Dave gave on change management for the management journal Organizations Entwicklung. You can read the article (and comment) in English and in German.

• http://vimeo.com/18880751
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mrtu4MmthE

For the most part, the video was created with markers, whiteboards, sticky notes, paper and other “low-tech” tools commonly used in Gamestorming.

Written by XPLANE founder and business design mastermind, Dave Gray, XPLANE consultant James Macanufo and Sunni Brown of Bright Spot Information Design, Gamestorming is a collection of 80 games to help teams break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies.

Drawing largely from the visual thinking techniques that have made XPLANE famous over the years, Gamestorming is for anyone who wants to engage a group in collaborative, creative thinking. The book is for sale now on Barnes & Noble, O’Reilly Media and Amazon where it is ranked 4.8 out of 5 stars, is the number one book for etiquite in business life, and number two for running meetings and presentations and for business as related to computers and the Internet. For more information check out the Gamestorming blog at www.gogamestorm.com.

Enjoy!

PS: There’s a free Gamestorming webinar on January 26 — sign up now!

We’re all familiar with the problem of the rising tide of information.

But how do you wrestle with that wave? The growing magnitude and complexity of information is not going away, and yet by most accounts the bandwidth we possess to process that information is going to remain fairly constant (barring any long-overdue cybernetic enhancements.) How do you parse that wave into a channel fit for human consumption?

There are plenty of ways, but I’m only going to focus on one theory here. I’m also going to have some problems with it.

What is a chunk?
As someone who designs information, I’m interested in understanding how the brain receives, processes and remembers stuff. One trusted explanation goes by a more-or-less scientific term: Chunking.

A chunk is any meaningful piece of information. It can be as simple as a digit in a phone number or a word in a sentence. The chunking theory comes from George A. Miller’s 1956 article on information, memory and the brain. Miller delivered the studies and data behind what by now seems like common knowledge: That at any given time, we can focus on seven chunks of information, plus or minus two.

It makes sense, it’s backed by science, and as a rule of thumb it’s useful: When working with any information you want people to understand, try to break it down to seven chunks, plus or minus two.

That’s just a rule of thumb. I’d invite anybody interested in chunking theory to read Miller’s article and explore some of the dilemmas it presents.

The problem with chunks
Chunks are not definitive or discrete, and their boundaries are relative. Unlike a binary bit, which is absolute and measurable, a chunk is made so by its context. A sentence is chunked into words, but words are chunked into letters, and the typographically inclined will further chunk a single letter into its shapes, lines, and marks. But it seems ridiculous to chunk a sentence into its letterforms; it’s an interesting exercise but it’s not how (most) people carve understanding out of it.

Where a chunk begins and end depends in large part on its context and the person who processes it. They can’t be crafted in isolation. There’s no such thing as a singular, well-made “chunk” of information. Chunks are fractals, and they change when you look at them from different angles.

This is especially relevant in pictures. A substantial part of Miller’s article includes “multidimensional stimuli” and I put pictures in this category. In the picture of a human face, how many chunks of information are presented? And why do we find faces so easy to remember, when we find it so easy to forget the names?

My best guess here is that pictures are about something else. They are about chunks for sure, but maybe more so, pictures are about relationships. Just as a sentence’s meaning is in the relationship between its words, a picture’s meaning is in the relationship between its parts.

This might seem like a pedestrian conclusion, but I think it’s worth exploring. Here are a few assertions I’m trying on for size:

1. All pictures define relationships, but a picture that is about relationships is more meaningful (and more likely to get through and be remembered) than any isolated imagery. A simple diagram is better than any orphaned, lonely icons (chunks.)
2. The number of possible relationships in a picture is far greater than you probably anticipate. It’s potentially powerful and dangerous work. If you have a picture to make, make it good.
3. We would all be better if we understood how the brain parses visual relationships. We should unearth the studies that have been done and take them for a spin. We should make newer and better ones. We need more collective mental energy focused on what’s already working on us — the language of visuals — and how we can work on it.

Chunks are a good start. What’s next?

Originally posted at viznotes.com.

Whenever we start a new client engagement, we begin by working to understand our target audience. Who are they? And what is it that they are looking for?

Another way to frame that question is to ask, “What keeps them up at night?.” If you can figure that out, then you can begin to understand how to best address their needs. If you’re striving for solutions, it’s best to begin with the end in mind and work backward from there. So what keeps you up at night? How about a little Visual Meditation doodle therapy to clear your head?

Okay pencil and paper ready?

Sketch it, scan it and upload it to our xBlog activities Group on Flickr.

• Exercise: Draw a big head and fill it with the things you worry about
• Optional: Add a speech bubble
• Flickr tag: xworries