People need understanding and connection, not just information.
If all you’re doing is blasting your community with content, you–and your audience–are missing out. Both the Future of Context and How to Spark a Movement panels beautifully explained this point. Help someone truly undersand something, connect your community members with each other and unite people around a common mission. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

Think Visually
Three of the best sessions were about this. Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work explained that we’re all visual thinkers, and pictures are key to solving problems. Interactive Infographics showed off how data can come to life if the visualization is done well. And they pointed out that infographics have gone mainsream: How I Met Your Mother uses them regularly (Marshall even needed a charts and graphs intervention because he was using them so frequently) and comedians like Demetri Martin use visualiztions in stand-up. In other words, infographics are cool.

And Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect primer and call to action for all of us budding artists.

Stories are powerful
Storytelling, experiences, journey, quest – whatever label you use, a narrative arc is going to resonate with people. A panel about enhancing the museum experience asked “What’s the epic win for your user?” In Narrating the Crowd, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his brother showed off their project, The Kahani Movement, which is capturing the history of Indian-American immigrants by asking people to record their own family’s stories. “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share,” they said.

Stories help us remember information. In his Perfectly Irrational presentation, Stanford prof Dan Ariely explained how we are motivated by short-term rewards by telling the story of how he treated himself to a movie day every time he gave himself a painful injection he needed to treat his liver disease. That kept him on track and made sure he got his medicine. I”ll never forget that story, and as a result, that lesson will stay with me.

Open Up
NASA has embraced President Obama’s call to government agencies to become more transparent, and as a result this massive, aging organizations is connecting with new fans in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time. All of their content is in the public domain, which means anyone can participate in space research and exploration.

Embrace Contradiction
You can be a cool science museum, an open bureaucracy, a warm-hearted business person, a funny girl, a designer who fights malnutrition. In fact those apparent contradictions are often where we find the most interesting people and projects.

Bonus – 5 Cool Web sites
Each of these was mentioned in a SXSW talk. Click and explore!

Apture.com – add contextual multimedia content to any site
www.Walking-papers.org - print maps, add notes and scan them back to share with others
www.Futureofcontext.com and www.explainthis.org -making online journalism more relevant
http://www.data.gov/ – more data than you could ever ask for

Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect follow-up to Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work session. The session kicked off with free sketch books (pictured left) and tons of enthusiasm from panelists Kleon, Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde and Dave Gray. They each have impressive drawing portfolios, but Brown tried to demystify it for the drawing newbies in the audience.

“It’s actually not that sophisticated. It just looks like it is when you’re finished.”

Each panelist took a turn offering basic tips to get started taking visual notes:

• Use bullets, frames and dividers to break up the page and organize information. (“Bullets are for guns AND sketch notes,” Kleon quipped.)
• Tie your bullets to the theme of the talk. Taking notes on healthcare? Use little red crosses for your bullets.
• Look at comic book pages for ideas on how to frame a page and call out dialogue.
• Adding a shadow is a simple way to enhance your drawing and “make it look like you know what you’re doing.”
• Take notes for yourself–don’t worry about what other people think.
• Use font size, underlining, etc. to emphasize certain text and create information hierarchy within your notes.
• You can “sketch” text, not just pictures. Make your words visual. Rohde is a master of this.
• Slow down when you’re drawing. This helps you filter out the crap you don’t need to write down.
• Practice! When you’re sitting at the bus stop or the airport, just start drawing the alphabet or straight parallel lines. One established artist the panel mentioned practices drawing the alphabet every day.
• Develop your own key to call attention to portions of your notes. For example always use an asterisk to note that something is an action item.

My sketch from the session. Rohde explained how to draw text and Gray taught us how to draw people.

Related:

Kleon: How to Draw Faces
Gray: How to Draw a Stick Figure

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