Thursday, February 6, 2020

Graphic Facilitation - Another Form of Mapping

I've been using Twitter since 2009 and over the years I find it to be one of the most useful places to gather new ideas, connect and build virtual relationships.  I'm at @tutormentorteam and I encourage readers to connect with me there.

In one of my threads this week I was introduced to Aaron Johannes, @imagineacircle He leads an organization called ImagineACircle, I followed the link on his profile to try to learn what work he was doing and I see a focus on graphic facilitation. Below is just one of many visualizations he shares on the site.

See this visual in Graphic Facilitation article
I picked this one because the ideas reflect much of what I've been trying to do over the past 25 years and which I've communicated via many articles on the Tutor/Mentor blog and vis presentations that I host on the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC site.   I encourage you to read the article describing graphic facilitation, and browse other parts of the ImagineACircle site.

Created in 2011

I've had volunteers with different talents work with me off and on between 1993 and 2011 and had interns from various colleges work with me up till 2015.  I asked them to look at ideas I was sharing on blog articles and via ppt presentations, then create their own interpretations.  In this Tutor/Mentor forum thread you can see visualizations created by Sam Lee, an intern from South Korea, in 2011.

While I hosted Tutor/Mentor Leadership and Networking Conference in Chicago from 1994 to 2015 with attendance ranging from 200-300 in the 1990s and early 2000s, I never had anyone with graphic facilitation skills working with me to try to lead the conversation of "What are all the things we need to know and do to help kids in every high poverty neighborhood connect in organized tutor/mentor programs that help them move through school and into adult lives, jobs and careers?"


I've created a library of concept maps to visualize ideas and strategies, but these are work that I did, sitting alone at my computer, drawing from my own experiences and the library of ideas and research I've been building for over 40 years.

Thus, I'd love to see the type of graphic facilitation being done at ImagineACircle applied to the maps and graphics I've been sharing for many years, by a group of stakeholders, who might focus on Chicago, or any other city. Furthermore, I'd love to find a library where such maps are being aggregated. We could all learn from each other.