The blocks between Children’s Hospital and Negley on Penn Avenue are crackling with character, invention, and reinvention. Every month I see formerly empty storefronts buzzing with new ventures. This is overlaid with businesses and institutions that have been around for decades. One of the newer entries on Penn Avenue is the Co-working Space, catapultPGH. CatapultPGH [...]

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Nice article in the Wall Street Journal on how businesses are using what I call “Hands-on visual thinking,” and what they call “Doodling,” to work more effectively. Here’s the link.

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I am really excited about the current energy around innovation in general and startups in particular. For me, one of the best ways to learn something is to attempt to distill it into a visual summary. I hope this will be useful for you too. One of the powerful things about creating a visual version [...]

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(Graphic by Leah Silverman) (Leah Silverman, Emily Marko, Jonny Goldstein at our first planning meeting for the IFVP 2012 Conference) (Jonny Goldstein with brainspill on the topic of the upcoming visual thinking for groups conference in Pittsburgh, AKA the 17th Annual IFVP Conference) The rapid approach of the 2012 International Forum of Visual Practitioners Conference [...]

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(video snippet of graphic recording workshop. 35 seconds) Graphic recording is a technique for turning transforming conversation into large scale visual notes composed of pictures, text, and diagrams as the conversation happens. I had the pleasure of giving 45 Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate design majors a taste of graphic recording with a mini-workshop I led [...]

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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, [...]

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Where: AVA Lounge, 5972 Baum Blvd. Map When:7PM Tickets: $5 at the door I am looking forward to giving a picture talk at Pecha Kucha Pittsburgh 10, Student/Faculty edition. This episode of Pecha Kucha is for students and faculty of any university. Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from multiple universities pulse their intellectual energies throughout [...]

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