This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.
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.
XPLANE | Dachis Group and The Economist teamed up to create the “World in Figures” application for iPhone. Based on The Economist’s popular book, Pocket World in Figures, the application provides a unique, visual way to discover and display global data so that it’s compelling, understandable and easy to use. Here’s a quick video overview of the project.
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.
I should probably begin by explaining why we call it “Top Jeff” in the first place. Myself, fellow St. Louis designer Susanne and XPLANE Project Manager Lisa were discussing the strange phenomenon of Jeffs that orbit the XPLANE | Dachis Group world (we counted around eight or nine). It was determined a reality show should be created that would collect all of these Jeffs together and pit them against one another to find out who would be Top Jeff!
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…
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 more »
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.
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!
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.
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.
