A small collection of whimsy—pure and simple. Just cool stuff creative people are contributing to the world that catches my eye and lightens the moment. Might generate an idea here or there. Might inspire something. Might just be fun and remarkable.

Whimsy= dream+vision+flight of the imagination+hope+desire+just kinda cool+enjoy

A rainbow in your hand beats two in the sky.

Ever held a rainbow in your hand? You can.

Words crying out for attention. And they’re adoptable.

How can you not like something that’s called Save the Words? A collage of seldom used words crying out for your attention. “Me, me, pick me!” So many to chose from and learn about. And they all need good homes. Words like:

Divinipotent adj. Having strong divinatory powers
She discovered water beneath the well and now thinks she’s divinipotent.

Pessundate v. To cast down or destroy.
There are certain people who believe that the Berlin Wall was pessundated by some strategically placed termites.

Could spend days here and I might. Note to self: revisit before the next Scrabble tournament.

One day poem–catch it while you can.

I love installation art having created my fair share of it. Especially installations that are outdoors, using the changing elements as part of the work. Especially if they have words. This one has both: The One Day Poem. The artist, Jiyeon Song, uses the sun to illuminate words onto the surface below but it only happens during certain times of the year. *swoon* Love this! Love!

The doodling! The humor! The idea! The funny!

An action packed 3:12 minute video called A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything delivers on it’s promise. Wow.

An art student, clearly an overly ambitious art student, created this for a class from 2100 pages of flipbooks with cartoon drawings. A ginormous amount of doodling. It’s amazing and hilarious. Seriously, watch the whole thing.

Something a little more cerebral but just as ambitious.

And finally, another installation, this time a kinetic sculpture of 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires that move independently, creating shapes from seeming chaos. Cool stuff.

 

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How visual mapping enlivens conferences

by Julie on January 12, 2010

Two scientists at AGU's Fall Meeting 2009 discuss my visual map of the Geoblogger's lunch Back in December (seems like so long ago), I spent six days with 15,000 brilliant earth and space scientists from around the world who flock annually to San Francisco for the AGU Fall Meeting. I was invited to visually map parts of the conference after I visually facilitated a 10-year strategic planning process for the organization back in October. You can see the murals from both on my Portfolio page.

Because this was the first time AGU had a visual mapper at the conference, they didn’t quite know what to do with me. Aside from the first day, a day-long council meeting in which we reviewed the planning process, I had no idea what I was going to be doing for the next five.

The conference was very scientific. Very. There were sessions titled:

  • Exploration and Study of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments
  • Interhemispheric Similarities and Asymmetries in Geospace Phenomena
  • Empirical and Modeling Reconstructions of the Tempo, Mode, and Origin of Paleocirculation and Climate Change During the Holocene and Prior Periods

Uh dude, you wouldn’t laugh if you knew my day rate

Being a political science major with an MFA, I was entirely out of my element. (I happened to swung by the Purdue booth–they were there recruiting–to say hi to my alma mater. When I told the guy my major and year I graduated he laughed. I should have told him my day rate. That would have made him stop laughing, but I digress.)

What do you mean I can’t hang paper on the wall?

The day before the conference starts they tell me we can’t hang paper on the wall. Fine. I’ve been doing yoga for 12 years, I know how to be flexible. We can work around that. We’ll just use these big billboard things and have them set up in the rooms I need to be in.

What do you mean I can’t move the billboards to where I need them?

Nope. Once the union guys set them up the day before the conference, they can’t be moved. Um, okay, now what?

This is me starting to sweat a bit…I was looking at four big, two-sided billboard things set up in the middle of the atrium on the second floor where thousands of people walked by all day and no way for me to do my visual mapping live in the room where I needed to be. Huh?

You mean you want me to do my stuff in the open in front of everyone?

Here I must explain the difference between working live when I’m processing information so quickly that I don’t have time to notice that people are watching me because I’m in a magical flow.

And when I’m not working live and I have time to think about what I’m doing which sounds like this in my head: let’s see I can put the whale here and then put the fish there and then have room to list the objectives. What color goes with that red? No, that doesn’t look good. Crap. I need to erase that wave because it doesn’t look good.

That’s the kind of stuff I NEVER hear when I’m working live. Plus it takes me a lot longer because I think about what I’m doing. So it’s harder for me to get into a rhythm when I’m standing in front of eight feet of white paper and no one is talking.

In which I pull an old skill out of my bag of tricks

So I resorted to an old skill of mine from when I worked as a journalist: I became a roving reporter. I found interesting sessions to attend like the Geoblogger’s lunch and the Bright STaRS lunch with the smart high school kids, took notes, then conquered my performance anxiety and in front of passersby, started composing the first mural from my notes. It was from a workshop teaching scientists how to talk to Congress. Here’s a piece of it.
Snapshot of visual map teaching scientists how to communicate with Congress
And it turned out great. A little more polished than a live mural because I could take my time with it and be more precise. The roving journalism became my schtick all week. Attend a few sessions, take notes and turn them into murals. I also interviewed some folks who were presenting cool projects and programs and turned those into mini-murals like this one on the movement to set down the basic knowledge of what everyone should know about earth science like the earth is 4.6 billion years old. Take that creationists! Visually mapping Earth Science Literary Principles And being there in the atrium generated a lot of interest. People came by and talked to me while I worked to say they loved what I was doing. I got interviewed for a NASA blog.

Getting the visual maps onto the blogs and Twitter right away

I digitized the murals as soon as I completed them and posted them to Twitter with the #AGU09 hashtag. The AGU staff posted them on the Fall Meeting blog here and here. We disseminated them right away so that people following the conference from all over the world could see a tiny glimpse of what was going on.

People took pictures and blogged about it. When beer o’clock took place in the atrium every afternoon, tons of people gathered around the murals to learn about sessions they missed like How to be a Congressional Science Fellow.
Conference sessions visually mapped at AGU's Fall Meeting 2009
As the week progressed, the remarkableness of visual mapping filled the space in the second floor atrium. It became a place for people to gather and talk, infusing a boring conference space with color, movement and art making it feel more human. More lively.

This was the first time I’ve worked this way–due to constraints with the conference facility that I wasn’t privy to until I was at the conference forcing me to come up with a plan B and quick–and it turned out better than I would have thought. The old saying about turning lemons into lemonade comes to mind. And now I have a new process I feel comfortable with in case there’s another instance where I don’t have walls or billboards that move.

 

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A visual business plan teleclass

by Julie on January 7, 2010

So next Thursday I’m doing this thing, a teleclass, with my buddy Cairene MacDonald of ThirdHandWorks. I absolutely love Cairene and have participated in many of her Bite the Candy sessions where you carve out several hours to tackle a few of those things that have piled up—things that you don’t want to do–in a really gentle way. When Cairene asked me to be her January Guest Guide I jumped at the chance.
Visual business plan roadmap
I’m really excited about it but also kind of nervous because it’s my first teleclass.
And it being my first teleclass, I totally don’t have the I should promote this thing shouldn’t I if I want people to come figured out. So this is me promoting it. Or really just telling you a little about it to see if it sounds like something that might be helpful for you.

Business planning for creative people

Since its January, we’re going to focus on business planning. But not the sucky, scary kind that makes creative people like you break out in hives.

What we’re going to do will be way cooler. We’re going to envision where we want our businesses to go and then create a visual business plan to get there.

As Cairene says: I love mind-mapping. I encourage my students to use mind-mapping. I think it’s a really useful tool to have in one’s tool box. It’s a technique that is organic and visual and intuitive and relational—and can help you discover and organize ideas in ways that list-making just can’t.

Exactly!

How it will work

Before we get to the mindmapping though, I’m going to help you tap into your intuition and take a visual journey through the landscape of your business. Maybe a visual touchstone or totem will emerge for you, like mine did recently when I got a vision of my people as sailboats bobbing gently in the Caribbean Sea.

We’ll imagine what you want to do in the coming year (or if you prefer, in the more immediate next three months.)

Then we’ll brainstorm ideas about your direction and organize them into a visual framework with clear action steps.

You’ll get to play with markers, colored sticky notes and big paper. And any other kind of fun stuff you can think of that your visual plan might need.

You’ll come away with a customized-for-you visual business plan. One that inspires and delights you. One you’ll want to use it every day like I do mine.

But I can’t draw!

If you’re intimidated about not having the art gene (relax, there isn’t an art gene), no worries. We’ll be using colored post-it notes and basic shapes to compose our ideas. And you’ll receive a file beforehand with some simple icon drawings from me that you can easily copy.

Interested? Head over here to sign up. And find that pack of colored markers you have tucked away because we’re going to give them a work out! See you on the call next Thursday.

Oh, and the call will be recorded if you can’t make it.

 

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Happy happy. Merry merry.

by Julie on December 17, 2009

Wishing you and yours a fabulous holiday and Happy New Year!
Much love, Julie

Click the image to enlarge. Holiday card 2009 from Making Ideas Visible

 

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Feeling like a rock star here in San Fran

by Julie on December 17, 2009

My visual murals at AGU's Fall Meeting at Moscone West, SFI’ve been here this week working at AGU’s Fall Meeting, which is the largest gathering of geospace scientists in the world. There are thousands of brilliant earth and space scientists sharing their research findings with each other, networking, drinking beer (seriously, these folks like their beer–they tap the kegs every day at beer o’clock which is something like 4 pm and then the conference center smells like a frat party) and just being smart people who have serious concerns about global warming and climate change.

Way to welcome a girl to town!

The first day I walked into the conference center my jaw dropped and a big grin came across my face. The staff at AGU had taken my murals from the 10-year strategic visioning retreat we did back in October, had them reproduced and mounted in stand-alone frames and placed in the conference atrium so they can’t be missed by the 15,000 AGU members attending the conference.

(Oh, and the reproduction quality–Gorgeous!)

Seriously, if you’re a local, you could drive by the Moscone West conference center and see these things from the street. They are that big. OMG Julie-ness in life-size, panoramic color. I don’t think I’ve ever filled an atrium before!
Making Ideas Visible featured at AGU's Fall MeetingMy mural Closing CircleJulie Stuart's murals at AGU's Fall MeetingThis figures into one of the new goals: to have greater transparency about what the organization is doing for its members. They wanted everyone to see the new vision and direction for the organization. And what a way to do it!

Interestingly for me, I don’t usually see my work again, especially the life-sized originals, once I hand them off to the client. So I typically don’t revisit, in full-scale panoramic color, what I create for my clients. I mentioned this to one of the facilitators I worked with (we revisted the strategic plan during a one-day council meeting before the conference). And she said, “So how’s that working out for you?”

I could get used to this.

Seeing these murals from one of my favorite gigs of all time, reproduced so beautifully and used in such a powerful and relevant way–I’d have to say it’s working out pretty darn well, thank you!

Some of the murals I’m doing at the conference are on AGU’s blog which you can check out here.

Update: AGU’s membership is 55,000 and about 15,000 of them attend the Fall Meeting. The membership number in my newsletter was incorrect.

 

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