Start with a piece of blank paper and a pen

Image how children doodle on a piece of blank paper. Drawing lives since you sense that you are creating something. The fun spreads when the results are shown. It is also a time for sharing and responding. The essence of hand drawings lies in inviting people to see and share.

As an adult, we lose that ability to draw for different reasons. We are in pursuit of something more sophisticated to solve problems. We are so serious about producing solutions presented in neat computer graphics or a profound report. We ignore the truly sparkles of our wisdom which happened in the process. Visual Thinking/Graphic Facilitation (VT/GF) offers a way to help people reflect deep and respond openly in the process. If we want to duplicate the inspiring and evoking moments in the other sessions, we will have to find out how VT/GF triggers people being more creative and involved.

Nowadays, there are many terms in general using to describe what the graphic professional does when visually representing a group’s process. Some call “visual thinking”, “graphic facilitation”, “graphic recording”, and “graphic consultancy”. For the purpose of this study, the approach will be called Visual Thinking/Graphic Facilitation (VT/GF) in the fact that these two terms are mostly chosen by the facilitation companies internationally.