I recently came across this really great six week program happening this summer in NYC. Impact: Design for Social Change is for a great place for creatives and all professionals who are seeking for ways to create social change within design strategies. It’s really good to look into initiatives like this — not just because it’s obviously inspiring, but also it pushes us proactively.
This is from a PDF you can download on their site:
This is a program at a level on par with graduate studies. The intensive offers advanced students and working professionals a unique opportunity to study with faculty composed of leading designers and social entrepreneurs. In addition, weekly lectures and field trips will allow students to directly interact with a dynamic range of innovators in the field.
This is a rapidly growing area of design. This program will instill in participants the confidence, self-motivation and collaborative spirit which will be needed as they continue on to work as design activists.
Professionals, educators and advanced students in the following disciplines are invited to participate: advertising, graphic design, product design, information design, interactive design, fashion design, photography and illustration. The program is oriented towards these design disciplines but we have had architects and social entrepreneurs participate
We take a lot of complicated issues, ideas, initiatives, products, plans and processes and visualize them so that people can better understand their world.
When we started back in the 1990s, we designed a lot of charts. Now we help businesses redesign — and communicate those changes to all involved. We’ve been pretty busy because business is changing pretty quickly. And in big ways. As we say at Dachis Group…
Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds, but businesses are not keeping pace. When these emerging trends work together, they call for a new kind of business — one that is distributed, collaborative, agile and better positioned to succeed.
The 2.0 Adoption Council (also part of Dachis Group) recently completed a survey of its members and we worked with them to represent the results in a meaningful and interesting way. The survey was purposefully simple, but highlights some key changes happening in social business. It was just two questions: What department do you work in and what’s your salary? Here’s what was learned… Read the rest of this post »
We often have successful Visual Thinking School nights that yield great conversations and ideas. Sometimes those ideas blossom into a new process, product or service. Of the ideas that become real, very few of them are as important as one that was created in Portland earlier this month.
Just a little over a month ago, I happen to be on Maui when I heard the warning sirens go off at around 11 p.m. on a Thursday night. It was the day the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis hit Japan. Although Hawaii was left with incidental damage, the experience left a lasting impact on me. At the suggestion of my coworker Roel, now I had a VTS topic I was passionate about: Designing for the greater good.
At XPLANE|STL’s public Visual Thinking School on April 7 we thought the time had come for a little character building. Specifically, cartoon characters and how just a few pen strokes can convey emotion and tell a story. We were inspired by Ivan Brunetti’s YouTube trailer for his new book “Cartooning,” below, and decided to do a few related drawing exercises.
WARM-UP
Everyone took dry erase marker in hand as I read through the following sequence, one line at a time. Remember — no one knew what was coming next.
A little girl has just woken up, dizzy, cold and crying.
She had a nightmare that she threw up…
all over her cat…
and the cat died…
and now the cat’s ghost haunts her.
What can I say, I like dark humor.
For the main exercise we took Brunetti’s video exercise linked above and changed it slightly. We had 14 people so we paired up into seven groups to create a few Wordless Stories.
PART 1 (30 minutes)
Think of a character, any character.
Now think of a location, some place or setting for your character.
Take four index cards and draw a four-panel strip of your character without using words.
Draw the character in the location that you chose facing a challenge.
PART 2 (20 minutes)
Go back to the beginning of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to make the motivation behind the character’s action more clear.
Then go to the end of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to show some consequence of the action depicted.
One of the characters.
A full panel. Click to view larger.
Rapid creation (and beer — VTS runs 4-6 p.m.) always leads to very lively and unexpected results. Visit our VTS Flickr Set to see more examples.
FINALE
After going round the room and reviewing each other’s work, we sat back and enjoyed Matthias Hoegg’s beautiful animated short, “Thursday.” We marveled at how much story and emotion he was able to create without using a single word.
Although I always say I very much need music to do creative work, it’s scary how many times I catch myself, headphones on, cranking away… even though the music stopped playing an hour ago.
That’s because for the most part I am an album purist — I like to listen to every song in the order the band chose. But sometimes I really need to crank on a project — so I put one amazing song on repeat and get into the zone. Here’s what have turned out to be my top get-things-done tracks (each of these show hundreds of listen in my iTunes):
‘Rifles’ by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
‘Snowden’ by Doves
‘In Mind’ by Do Make Say Think
‘Duress’ by Swervedriver
‘Chemical Wire’ by fIREHOSE
‘All Her Favorite Fruit (Orchestral)’ by Camper Van Beethoven
VTS (aka Visual Thinking School) at XPLANE’s St. Louis office.
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!
We’ve been running these quick Q&As in our email newsletter XPRESS and now we’re cross-posting them here. Meet the people of XPLANE… Chris Roettger: XPLANE veteran, cycling champ and designer extraordinaire!
Who: Chris Roettger, Senior Designer
Education: Washington University in St. Louis
Started at XPLANE: September 1999
Office: St. Louis
Why XPLANE?
Dave Gray was my illustration teacher at Wash U and I was lucky enough to keep in contact post-graduation. At first, I wasn’t keen on doing all the thinking behind the drawing. I just wanted to draw and this whole extra level of work wasn’t immediately attractive to me. But then seeing and understanding the impact of visuals that could really tell a story made me want to play a part in developing the whole piece. I genuinely enjoy taking a mess of information and organizing it into a compelling message that integrates with a visual. I use my experience in everyday life. I’m constantly breaking down complicated ideas into understandable metaphors — especially with our 8-year-old twins!
Wow. Visual thinking practically took center stage this year at SXSWi. Ogilvy hired visual note-takers, graphic facilitators and artists to capture many of the talks, panels and workshops during five days of interactive sessions. I too made lots of notes, sketches, scribbles and scratches and am cleaning them up and boiling them down into my own sloppy style of sketchnotes. Here are the first two:
XPLANE teamed with Kronos, a global leader in workforce management, to create new video to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. It’s a visual homage to women and how their role in the workforce has changed throughout history, making all of our lives exponentially easier, safer and more productive.
Do you know who Melitta Bentz was? Or Ida Forbes? Or Ruth Wakefield? No? Then watch and learn.
Doors + file cabinets = Desks! XPLANE circa early 2000s.
When I was combing through dusty hard drives and ancient project folders the other week looking for that old Robonaut XPLANATiON, I found an old text file (saved in BBEdit!) called “Core values: Things we believe in.”
It came from conversations and emails with Dave Gray, XPLANE’s founder. It was shared with all employees, even back when we were just five or six people working on desks made of doors and file cabinets. I’m pretty sure it dates to 1999… Read the rest of this post »
This 3-minute overview animation is being used to drive adoption and usage of IHG’s Green Engage program, which helps individual hotels analyze their energy usage and devise action plans to reduce their environmental impact. Check it out on our YouTube channel.
XPLANE | Dachis Group drives breakthrough results with Business Design Thinking. Our approach includes a set of comprehensive business architecture solutions that combine research, collaborative consulting, design thinking, social media technology and incredibly effective visual communications.
It’s what makes us different. And better. The world’s biggest brands have found success with XPLANE. Are you ready for results too? Contact us.
Founded in 1993 by Dave Gray, XPLANE has evolved from an information design company into a global communications and business transformation consultancy. As part of the Dachis Group XPLANE drives results for the world’s leading corporations through the sophisticated process of Business Design Thinking.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written a playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers. It's called Gamestorming and it's filled with useful, fun knowledge games — games designed to help you get more innovative, creative results in your work. More info at gogamestorm.com.
At XPLANE | Dachis Group we have some of those fun perks you often hear about at great workplaces -- wine every Friday, free M&Ms, a pool table, and a duck pond to name a few. But we think the reason our workplace is so great runs a little deeper than that. For us, building a great workplace is a big commitment, and it’s all about building trust, pride, and camaraderie. We wanted to share a few of our practices with the hope that it might inspire you to think about how you could build a better workplace -- wherever you work.
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Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
Azure poster
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
XPLANE founder Dave Gray, along with XPLANER James Macanufo and our friend Sunni Brown, have written 
