I am thrilled that Carnegie Mellon University Design Professors Kristin Hughes and Wayne Chung invited me to do a guest workshop with CMU design students on the power and practice of hands-on visual listening.

When you are hands-on visual listening, you are doing your best to listen to what someone is saying and drawing pictures, diagrams, and words that describe what they are saying.

It turns out that this is very helpful for people.

Here are a few examples of work I have done recently that involved hands-on visual listening:

These are the visual notes I created of Jody Giles’ talk at a conference in Sweden. Jody is the Chief Information Officer of Under Armour.

That’s me over on the right side of the photo.

The audience seemed to like it!

This is an example of doing some hands-on visual listening to help someone do something better. In this case, I was helping a friend figure out her job hunt strategy. I do a similar process with companies to help them do stuff better.

I think hands-on visual listening is super useful, that’s why I teach students in the University of the Arts masters of industrial design program how to do it. Here are some students in action.

The visuals that you make when you are listening in a hands-on way can be used for all kinds of things. In the case of the conference I worked at with Jody Giles, we put my visuals into a slideshow and I gave a talk summarizing the key points from the conference.

I look forward to seeing examples of your hands-on visual listening as we go through this mini-workshop today. Ready, set, listen (imagine, visualize, create)!!!

If you are interested in learning more about hands-on visual listening, feel free to visit my blog at envizualize.com. A few other interesting sites: MAYA, IFVP, The Center for Graphic Facilitation. And if you find that you get seriously obsessed by this topic, we are having a conference about it in Pittsburgh this summer.