ConverSketch: Graphic Recording and Facilitation

ConverSketch provides high quality multi-media explainer videos for businesses and organizations to succinctly share their story or a product. These popular videos use hand-drawn illustrations and narrative to connect you with the right audience and encourage them to learn more about your story. Using graphic recording helps the group synthesize information, facilitates collaboration, creative thinking, sustained motivation for action, and brings energy to the group. Complex systems are visualized and the conversation is organized so that the group can free their minds from keeping track of details and focus on solution-making and innovative thinking.

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These graphics are an engaging way to:

• Help people track and engage with complex information
• See organizational systems and seemingly disparate ideas are connected
• Encourage action and maintain motivation after an event
• Distill and share the key ideas from an important event such as an executive retreat or strategic planning meetings
• Teach a new concept in a way that facilitates better memory of information
• See a different way to approach a challenge
• Find common ground between different stakeholder groups
• Get a group on the same page quickly
• Energize and have fun with your group!

More about Karina Mullen Branson
Karina_headshotKarina Mullen Branson is a graphic recorder and facilitator based in Fort Collins, Colorado and founder of ConverSketch. Graphic recording is a method of visual note-taking; simply put, Karina listens to your group talk and distills key ideas from the conversation/meeting/presentation/etc. She uses hand-drawn images and text to make a large-scale map of your ideas in real-time so participants can see the conversation as it emerges and develops. Karina was a member of the graphic recording team at NCDD’s 2012 conference in Seattle. She has also worked locally and internationally with clients including the United Nations University, BASF, the City of Fort Collins, the National Park Service, Colorado State University, and the Center for Public Deliberation.

Follow on Twitter: @ConverSketch

Resource Link: www.ConverSketch.com

The Future of the Arts & Society: A Guide for Public Discussion

The Interactivity Foundation has just produced a guide authored by fellow Natalie Hopkinson titled “The Future of the Arts & Society: A guide for public discussion.”

FutureOfTheArtsNatalie worked with a diverse group of people–sculptors and poets, curators and film scholars, rapper, playwright/actor, a waitress, graduate student, economist, an attorney–to generate these possibilities about the arts. They spent many months talking about the public decisions that we will have to make as the role of art in our communities continues to evolve.

They considered basic questions such as, “What is art for anyway?” (Please see the illustration above, for some of the ideas we batted around, rendered by the artist Calida Rawles.) They spent a lot of time talking about how financial support for the arts can and must change when it is harder and harder to control the flow of ideas and make a living on creative work. And they looked at arts education, cultural diplomacy and censorship.

The group came up with 7 policy possibilities it thought would be useful to frame discussions about the future of the arts.

This FREE download and printed copies are available as a tool for community organizations, churches, schools interested in having discussions about the arts and society from a variety of perspectives. The Interactivity Foundation is organizing a discussion series using the guide, starting West Palm Beach, Florida on August 21, 2013. Email arts@interactivityfoundation.org if you are interested in using the report and are seeking support.

Resource Link: www.interactivityfoundation.org/discussions/the-future-of-the-arts-society/