JAM have clients with diverse backgrounds, like financial, engineering, human resource, manufacturing, industrial design, governmental officers, etc. In a given assignment, JAM help their clients build up shared understandings in a one-day or multi-day workshop. Purposes of these workshops would be to use graphics to bridge gaps between diverse participants, and help to forge shared understandings for new ideas, solutions or visions, depending on types of assignments. JAM especially focus on interpreting all the information of the diverse groups and translating them into convincing graphics which reach mutual expectations. In JAM, they already accumulated abundant experience in their practice and want to contribute their knowledge in visual/graphic facilitation to a promising future.
However, due to busy schedule and demanding daily work in JAM, people in JAM could not share their knowledge at work. So, what happened in the process of workshops is like a black box, which is never deciphered with a thorough research. Based on a thorough research, we can unveil the magic of the graphic power and develop toolkits and guidelines for visual thinker without jeopardizing the magic leading to unlimited creativity and free communication. These toolkits and guidelines can help to improve the process in future workshops, and also serve to form a framework to document the workshop in a systematic way.
So the assignment of the graduation project is:
to decipher the “Magic” of graphic power in facilitation workshops and develop toolkits for Visual thinkers. The first half of the project will be contextmapping on the graphic facilitation experience in JAM. The second half of the project will be conceptualization and evaluation, which will lead to recommendations to the future development of graphic facilitation.
ok po... time to get a better grip on JAM. What you are descibing is a small but very imporatnt part of what we do. Ussully we are hired to visually support workshops, but when we do the visual harvesting ourselves we refer to the time spent on the puzzle as sessions. Workshops are ussually more about involvement and alignment then really solving the problem. (or at least in my experience).
ReplyDeleteThe assignment should be more written towards the use of direct on-the-spot visuallization as a tool for thinking. Graphic power is drawn back too far... it makes it too META. Our uniqueness lies for the greater part in the fact that we DRAW and guide poeple through their visual needs...challenging them to get their facts straight so they can tell the right story and convince people to ACT!
Dennis
Hello Dennis! It is good to have your comments!
ReplyDeleteI agree that the graphic power here is too general to depict referring to the field of the visual thinking.
I am also interesting in one of your quote, "Workshops are usually more about involvement and alignment than really solving the problem." For a complex problem that a huge or diverse group could face, it is possibly good to define or describe the problem first. To align every participants in a common understanding is really better than to hurry to problem-solving but not on a common ground.
In this case, the visual thinkers can draw to help people to get their own words to tell a right story and then convince others to act. People can then gradually build up their mutual understanding to the problem.
This outcome might be already the most valuable thing since the people can therefore work together towards a mutual goal to achieve or a barricade to overcome, instead of being divided in different directions.
Po-Chih