One of the exciting things that we are doing differently this year, is that we have some wonderful artists donating their time and talent to the Summit as Graphic Recorders. Dan Jumanan, Diana To and Julie Gieseke from Visual Ink, and Susan Rankin, an independent artist. They will be producing a visual story map of the conference, as well as graphic summaries of interesting points from the speakers.

At the Singularity Summit, we encourage you to talk to Dan, Diana, Julie and Susan during breaks. Please ask them questions, comment on what they are doing or make suggestions.

What is a Graphic Recorder? A person who uses words and images to synthesize a visual representation of a speech, a meeting, or a conference. This person is able to attend to and use multiple levels of communication, including content, emotions and group dynamics to create their visual summary.

The content, or information level captures things like what the speaker is saying. The emotional, or feeling level picks up on the level of excitement or passion a speaker may have or the mood of the audience. The group dynamics level may pick up on the interactions between speaker and audience, a conversation or debate, or may also encourage audience participation in the form of making corrections or suggestions to the story map or summaries. Additionally the final product has the ability to capture the interest of people who were not able to attend in ways a video or written summary cannot.

Introducing our Graphic Recorders:

Visual Ink, headed up by Michael Stark and Kevin Woodson, kindly provides three of the Singularity Summit’s Graphic Recorders, Dan Jumanan, Julie Gieseke and Diana To. Visual Ink is a company that designs and delivers communication programs with long term value by bridging internal and external business communication. They can act as the ‘glue’ in massive change initiatives because visual communications aid in the delivery and focus on specific outcomes over the scope of a long-term process. They can also enhance communication between the company, their shareholders, employees and their clients.

Dan and Diana show an example of a Story Map

At Visual Ink, Diana strives to simplify concepts and data in order to bring forth an idea or story through images. Diana focuses on taking pencil sketches to color, enhancing images on the computer, and producing visual tools as communication pieces. In addition to her art foundation, she also included general business and informational technology & society in her education. She has kept some impressive company over the last few years with several Fortune 500 companies as well as non-profits through her work with Visual Ink.

Growing up in the Bay Area, Diana was drawn to the varied cultures, the vast artistic influences and, of course, the delicious food of San Francisco. A long time foodie and cook, Diana spends free time exploring the world over in search of her next meal. She strongly believes that creative expression is within grasps of everyone and we all need to hone a medium, whether it be food or a pencil.”

Dan, at Visual Ink, has used art to engage a wide variety of audiences throughout his life as a painter, printmaker and graphic designer. Currently, as a designer for Visual Ink, his artwork focuses on communication, change and engagement in organizations. Dan has been combining art, facilitation, and strategic thinking to create business illustrations, used to tell the story of change, make the complex simple, and get people on board and excited. Dan’s objective is to capture, clarify, and portray the your ideas.

Julie Gieseke is a graduate student in Organizational Management and Development at the Fielding Graduate University. She works as a visual facilitator for corporate and non-profit clients as well as private consultants and facilitators. She uses visual mapping in her one on one practice as a Coach and Master NLP Practitioner. She is launching the first graduate level academic offering of Visual Facilitation courses for Fielding’s Organizational Management and Development program this fall. She is currently writing her thesis on the use of graphic facilitation by the OD community as a systems thinking intervention tool. She hosts conversations among the visual practitioner community, looking at the Tipping Point of the work of visual practitioners and ways in which the community and its members can contribute to the advancement and use of this powerful tool. Most recently this conversation occurred at the annual conference of the International Forum of Visual Practitioner in August 2008

~ ~ ~

Susan Rankin is a sketch artist residing in San Jose, a transplant from Pennsylvania. She attended Moore College of Art and Design, and graduated with the class of 1995 with a BFA Illustration. Corporate Event Sketching is a new venture for her and one that she’s latched onto with much enthusiasm, especially with the aid of new technology. With the use of a ModBook, the first ever tablet Mac, she’ll be sketching what goes in her ear and tickles her brain while listening to the various and amazing speakers appearing at the Singularity Summit. Look for cleaned up and colored versions of those sketches here after the conference!

A raw sketch of Susan's interpretation of Exponential Growth.

Again, we encourage you to talk to Dan, Diana and Susan during breaks. Feel free to ask them questions, comment on what they are doing or make suggestions. They are friendly people!

If you’d like to get in touch with our artists, you may contact Dan, Diana and Julie via Visual Ink, and Susan via her website SueRankin.

See you at the Summit!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 3:49 pm by alexisbright and is filed under Behind the Scenes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.