5 posts
Serendipity (and a poorly communicated change to the SXSWi programme) dropped me into an intriguing session entitled "Our devices: how smart is too smart?" presented by Genevieve Bell from Intel (referred to here as 'Intel's Secret Weapon').
I’ve swithered about posting these notes, given their visual inferiority to Tim’s. But what they lack in beauty, I hope they make up for in utility. I certainly had fun making them. And as someone more adept with a viola in hand than a sketching pen, I’m not too ashamed of my efforts.*
Enjoy.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve put everyone at Made by Many through a day of Agile Training with Simon Baker and Gus Power from Energized Work.
These guys really are the Penn and Teller of agile software development, and I thought the session was excellent. Most of us here have been trying to work in agile ways for five years or more but this was an opportunity to get better at it by broadening our knowledge and understanding. Another post follows containing some more considered takeaways, but I wanted to share these sketch-notes I made during the day. They petered out towards the end of the day as proceedings became more discursive.
There are 10 pages in total, including a ‘page of evil’ where I tried to capture all of the things that we decided one way or another were EVIL.
See the whole set —->
A few of us went to see Clay Shirky last night at the Royal Society of Arts. Some stuff we heard him talk about before, and some new stuff. I had sprinted from Embankment tube to make the 6pm start time, and I couldn’t face using Twitter — and so I tried the visual notetaking methods we enjoyed so much from SxSW (and some inspiration from awesomeist Len Kendall). My first attempts are a bit sh*t by comparison but I found it to be a much more thoughtful way of interacting with a talk than making snarky comments on Twitter. Not that this will stop me in the future…
Forget Scientology, Kabbalah or The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the growing Movement of Visual Notetakers is where it’s at.
One of my big hopes pre-SXSW was that I’d learn some cool stuff, particularly about how to present thoughts and ideas visually. A good few of The Many are skilled draughtsmen who easily loop and whirl their way into the thoughts that spring up during brainstorms, workshops and meetings. I’m not one of them. My notes are always predictably outed as bullet-pointed lines; I’m a word person.
