My friends know that I love the rush of public speaking—It’s even better when I can combine it with my visual summaries. So I was delighted that E Source asked me to give a talk synthesizing the ideas bouncing around the conference. I love creating visual notes all the more when I get to use them as a backdrop for a presentation.

At the conference, representatives of major utilities (mostly electricical, but a few other utilities participated as well) shared insights, successes, and challenges related to focusing on the utility customer experience. Utilities are in an interesting position where they are often operate without direct competitors. But they still have plenty of motivation to focus on the user experience it turns out. Since every household and organization in North America needs to interact with utilities, an improvement in their customer experience has a broad impact.

It was heartening to see the participants in the conference think about the big-picture reasons to value customer experience, as well as to explore case studies of how industries within and outside the utility industry are improving their customer experience.

(Our friendly Zappos tour guide and Customer Experience Magician, Rocco)

From outside the utility industry we heard from FedEx, Sprint, and Zappos. We even got a tour of Zappos, which maintains its office conveniently around the corner from our conference venue. The tour drove home the message the culture is bedrock of customer experience—Zappos is famed for both its creative and supportive culture and its focus on delivering a “Wow” customer experience.

I was wowed by the conference that E Source put together, they clearly care about the experience of their customer, and it showed.

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 is a membership organization that provides shared office space, facilities, and most importantly a sense of community for independent workers. At catapultPGH, we want to foster connectivity not only among ourselves, but also between the people behind the businesses and organizations that make this stretch of Penn Avenue home.

When: Friday, May 4, Noon-1PM

Where: Catapult PGH, 5139 Penn Ave (Just down the block
from People’s Restaurant).

What: People from the Penn Avenue Arts District show ‘n’
tell their awesome projects and obsessions. Jonny Goldstein will visually capture the conversation on a whiteboard.

Who: This month: The Bloomfield Garfield Corp.
Scenable.com, GlutenTox, The Tool Lending Library,
and The Sprout Fund.

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 of an idea is that it gives something tangible to discuss—”No that should connect to that,” “The sequence of that process is out of order,” “You’re missing X,” etc. So consider this a starting point, and feel free to chip in your ideas about how to best express whatever idea I am trying to distill.

This visual summary is based on my interpretation of the “Build, Measure, Learn” concept as expressed by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. He defines a startup as a venture which is creating a product or service in an environment of extreme uncertainty. To maximize chances of success in such an environment, the lean startup needs to create learning process where it can learn what works and what does not as rapidly as possible, engaging in a “Build, Measure, Learn” cycle. To go deeper, check out Eric’s book The Lean Startup here. Stay tuned for more Innovation Illustrated installments based on books and concepts gleaned from a variety of innovation thinkers.

Love to hear feedback or thoughts on this or other installments of Innovation Illustrated.

(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 (IFVP) conference in Pittsburgh is sending tingles down my neurons. The power-triangle of Leah Silverman Leah Silverman, Emily Marko, and myself are the Pittsburgh core of the planning team, with help from far flung members of the tribe of graphic facilitators, graphic scribes that comprises the IFVP. I will be sharing emcee duties with the fabulous Heather Willemsof Imagethink.

(Promotional video for the IFVP 2012 Conference. Video by Envizualize.

At it’s heart, the conference is for people who use visual thinking to enhance understanding and support action. There is a growing realization that words and numbers are inadequate for understanding and analyzing complex challenges. We are hard wired to process pictorial information, and harnessing that wiring gives teams tremendous advantages.

Some conference highlights:

Speakers:

(Sketchnotes sample by Mike Rohde)
Mike Rohde, will give a talk about how he catalyzed a global community of sketchnoters and his upcoming book on sketchnoting.

MK Haley, from the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center will discuss collaboration and how different generations approach it.

Christian Schunn, a University of Pittsburgh Cognitive Psychologist, will share current research on how using shared visual displays helps, and occasionally hinders, design and engineering teams.

Babs Carryer, a node in Pittsburgh’s biotech and pharma startup ecosystem will convene a panel on the intersection of visual practice and business.

Nahum Gershon, Principal Scientist at MITRE and expert on data visualization, storytelling, and technology mediated interaction will lead a closing dialog.

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Pre-conference workshops:

(Photo from IFVP 2011 graphic recording workshop)

Graphic Recording 101 with Rachel Smith and Lisa Arora and 201 with Alphachimp. These workshops will be a full day immersion in the art and craft of visual listening—-turning conversation into large scale visual notes. The 101 course is geared to beginners, and the 201 course is geared to experienced visual listeners.

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In-Conference Mini-Workshops (these might change a little in title and topic, but this is more or less what we have so far. We will have another couple of mini-workshops in addition to these).

-Sketchnoting and hand drawn type with Mike Rohde

(Interior of the Toonseum)

(Graphic scribing detail by Lloyd Dangle)

-Cartooning with Lloyd Dangle (at the Toonseum)

(Detail of Jim Nuttle work)

-Advanced Cartooning with Jim Nuttle (at the Toonseum)

-Sketch Video Creation

(Digital visual notes by Rachel Smith)

-Graphic Recording on the iPad with Rachel Smith

(Detail from a Bigger Picture hands on visual activity)

-Graphic facilitation approaches and practices knowledge swap Ole Qvist-Sørensen.

-”Doctor’s Hours” with a variety of successful visual practitioners to personally address your business questions

-Distilling your visual practice’s unique value proposition, facilitated by MAYA Design

(Visual by Eileen Clegg)

-Timeline murals using Prezi, with Eileen Clegg

-”Getting Pens into Peoples’ Hands”, a session on how to get word and number crunchers over the hump of picking up a pen and drawing, with John Ward.

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Panels:

1) Visual Practice and Design Thinking

2) Visual Practice and Business

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Open Space:

We are creating a time slot for self organized sessions where people can create impromptu discussions about topics of mutual interest.

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Book Presentations:

Conference particpants will have the opportunity to hear lightning presentations from authors who are part of the conference.
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Offsite at the Warhol Museum:

We’ll take a walk across the Allegheny River for Dinner and a private tour of the Warhol Museum.
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And more awesome stuff that we can’t quite announce yet.
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Sponsorship:
We have some amazing sponsors stepping up already. We’re thrilled to have Prezi as a top level Platinum sponsor. Look forward to sharing experiences, tips, and tricks in one-on-one time with Prezi evangelist, Zane Groshelle. We’re also thrilled to introduce you to Wizard Wall, a cling film that creates a portable whiteboard. Special thanks as well to The Grove for Silver sponsorship and Crowley & Co. for Bronze sponsorship.If you want to get involved in the conference on a sponsorship level, we would love to talk with you. And did you know that Sponsorship starts at the $100 level and gets you recognition online and at the conference while giving you the satisfaction of supporting the community? Sounds worth it to me, but that’s just my biased take on it:)
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IFVP2012 on Twitter
IFVP2012 Facebook Page
Conference info and registration

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 yesterday. I call it “hands-on visual listening” because the listener is using their hands and eyes (along with their brains!) to process, synthesize and make visible the ideas they are capturing.

The whole set of photos and videos are here.

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.

It was a pleasure and honor to be invited to speak at TEDx LeadershipPittsburgh a few weeks ago. The conference theme was “Power” in all it’s permutations. This video shows my talk “A Nomads View of Power.”

You can see videos of all the excellent talks here, assembled by the good folks at Leadership Pittsburgh.