A playground with a PIG and lots of visuals!

Last Thursday the 29th we got to invite some of our good friends and some fresh new blood to the Innovation Playground 2007. The daywas started at 5.30... We had to pick up some stuff at the office and drive over to the ADO stadium in The Hague. In the car we realized that we forgot our printer...which made drawing on the WACOM cintiqs (digital sketchboards) a bit difficult to post up on the wall. Good feedback for future wacom prodcts... fit the screen with a printer!

The day was centered around the combination of Market and Solution. The abundance of inspiring demos (even a f**kin' big pig! and a remote controlled flying elf!) were crossed with a healthy amount of managers from all kinds of different specializations. When you put these ingredients together you get a playground for innovative thinking... ofcourse these thoughts of flying pigs and breathing cities needed to be visualized in order for all the visitors to be able to process the information which was coming towards them. This is where JAM came in! Thanks to the heroes that roam about in our little network, we were able to produce over a 120 visual interpretations of concepts which were created right there on the spot. The atmosphere was good...the coffee and the pepsi (tanx anna!) were FLOWING and the sketchers were going at it non stop from 8.30 until 16.30... amazing input...fun output!

Check out flickr for some cool pictures of the artists! and check out www.inspirationweek.com in the coming year... All the created content will be released there for all to see!

D.

KOOS Challenge : "to a give a course in visual communication..."

Thursday the 22nd of November was th first time JAM got the oppertunity to give something back to the visually oriented community. Koos Eissen invited Jan and myself to come lead a workshop, where the main goal was to try and get the attendents to communicate visually towards a shared presentation...within 2 hours! Their assignment was to come up with a way to get people who are about to enter a 2 hour workshop (at 16.00 in the aftrnoon!) into a focussed and fresh mindset.
In the spirit of the course, Jan and I created the assignment an hour before we were going into the workshop. The pressure effct still leads to littl diamonds!

What was good to see was that we as "professional visual translators" are used to thinking visually. You don not notice this fact until you see how difficultit is for people to communicate with sketches instead of words. Another great realization was that by telling these students about our experiences, we were finally creating a place for ourselves as craftsmen. If we keep this up, we'll end up giving body to the craft of visual translation.
The next day I looked back at our program and saw that I have been selling ourselves short, hen I was talking about visual translation. Our workshop consisted of 1 hour of visual thinking, 1 hour of visual translation and 1 hour of visual presentation / feedback. I must compliment Koos on his very correct choice of words when he cose the name for this course. Visual Communication summerizes these 3 pivital points perfectly and even paves the way for a plethora of other points which we encounter every day in our work environment.

Hopefully in a couple of years we'll be visual communication experts...with our own course at th University of Delft? You never know where this will lead. Especially when a seed like this is planted in MY head...

Thanks koos!
Check the pictures on flickr!

Pipslab at Energetica

At the museum night in Amsterdam the ENERGETICA wanted to pimp its heavy industrial and electrical image with a bit of co-created visitor involved lighting sessions. Lucky for me they were overbooked and I could play with light for a whole evening!
The idea of the LUMASOL by PIPSLAB is to create a way to make real-time light grafitti. By linking the result directly to a beamer the artist (which is YOU!) can create images painted with light. For more about this check the pipslab site!... I got to play with lights and lightsabers!

tanx Ramon for taking some pictures!

picnic backcast

This year at PICNIC JAM was fortunate enough to be invited by Favela Fabric to visually support KLM's "flight of the future". At this event, which took place in a dome filled with clouds, we met the sisters of MUZUS and got to make some cool drawings while enclosed in a real live white cloud envronment. During the last presentation LOOKAROUND took a 360 degree image of our cloudy context.

check out the links in the text!

MADRID got JAMMED

On the grace of innovation in 'telefonics', JAM got invited to help out the streative team at the Ambassadors for Innovation Conference in MADRID... spain... a comfortable 23 degrees celcius, some design hotels, high pressure newspaper coverage and a nice atmosphere of innovation supported by the PIPSLAB. This all made for some great ON-THE-SPOT CO-CREATION!
Check out some pictures on:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ripplevision/?saved=1

Old video...still a favourite

With respect to our quest for defining visualization... this would be amazing to be able to do!

SKETCHING... the book!

Finally after a lot of work (and a loty of fun as I understand it!), the dutch book about design and explorative sketching has been finished! Koos Eissen and Rosalien Steur have gathered a great diversity of design sketches and have crossed it with the DELFT INDUSTRIAL DESIGN way of teaching constructive and explorative design drawing. You can check out a sample on: http://www.sketching.nl/ and if you click on the book it will tak you to BIS publishing for a closer look!

We know the book will do well and are already working on an adendum to include visual tranlation during collaborative sessions! CONGRATS Koos en Roos! The game is on!

a quick thought

during the chi conference at the Eindhoven faculty of industrial design, I got the chance to explain to about 150 people what I do...in 20 seconds... I made this drawing on the Cintiq while facing the audience. The result was projected behind me...

JAM ... what do we do?

JAM is an all Dutch company specialized in on-the-spot visualization. We visually support processes which work towards decisionmaking and or result oriented objectives.
Our goal is to create mutual understanding through visual communication. We do this by sketching out the thoughts & ideas. We call this process visual translation. By visually synchronizing before, during and after communication moments, we help people to get their personal and professional thoughts & opinions out on paper. By doing this we try to create a platform which allows people to align with eachother. Once they are on the same level of communication they will be able to talk about decision making & exploration from a shared point of view instead of trying to convince eachother the validity of a personally loaded point.
By creating an image of what people think, you create a platform to which people can react and interact. They can take each others thoughts to a next level. We are there to clarify, unify and explore thoughts, ideas, concepts & structures…
Visual translation is a strong and effective tool in any innovation process. It leads to a unified vision & a more effective understanding of what it is that a group or team is working towards.

Body Beaming

Een tijd terug kwam er een dame op ons pad (http://www.verleidkundiginstituut.nl ), waarvan de broer weer in een band zit. Deze band heet SINAS (www.myspace.com/clubsinas) en is weer een afsplitsing van de New Cool Collective. De dame heeft ons met haar broer in contact gebracht omdat ze ons en onze "special vision support" wel als complementaire experience zag bij de funky spacy music van SINAS. Het idee "BODY BEAMING" werd geboren. JAM heeft SINAS nu 5 maal mogen bijschijnen in de BADCUYP(http://www.badcuyp.nl/) en in de SUGARFACORY(http://www.sugarfactory.nl/) en is er van overtuigt dat er hier iets leuks is ontstaan. Deze visuele impressies geven een beetje weer wat je met een beamer een CINTIQ of INTUOS bord van WACOM (www.wacom.eu), een tekenaar en een levend canvas kan bereiken.

JAM blijft JAM

Eindelijk hebben we een beetje kunnen levelen en we zijn er uit! JAM blijft JAM. Gelukkig hebben we een oplossing kunnen vinden voor ons naam probleem. JAM zal vanaf binnenkort te vinden zijn onder www.jam-site.nl (en www.jamsite.nl , www.jamholland.com en www.jam-holland.com ).

Het was afgelopen weekend eindelijk weer ouderwets JAM. Na hard werken en vakantie hebben we nu eindelijk weer eens naar elkaar kunnen luisteren. Het enige wat nodig is, is een kring en een praatstok (nu in de vorm van de ripple die ik van Guy heb gekregen voor mijn afstudeer). Ga zitten en je mag alleen praten wanneer je de "stok" in bezit hebt. Wat een feest! Eindelijk luisteren in plaatst van impulsief reageren!

Ik zeg bedankt ALOHA! (http://wiki.aardrock.com/Aloha:Hoofdingang)

En plakkerig gingen ze verder!

D.

JAM bij LEGO

Wat een feest!

Gisteren zaten we aan tafel met onze werkgever in het hotel van LEGOLAND, nadat we hem 2 dagen lang hebben geassisteerd met het verbeelden van een proces. Hij had voor ons een kadootje... een kleine LEGO auto. Moet je jezelf even voorstellen: 4 gasten aan een tafel die rauw vlees aan het eten zijn en met legoblokjes aan de gang zijn terwijl de kinderen aan de andere tafel jaloers toekeken... en hebben we onze LEGO met heen gedeeld? Nee... ho maar! Het is echt een feest om je innerlijke kind weer wakker te schudden met een LEGO product..echt fantastisch!!! Helaas is er geen foto of film gemaakt...anders zou LEGO een nieuwe markt kunnen aanboren! We hebben heerlijk tot in de late uren staan tafelvoetballen gecombineerd met mooie reflecties over ons beeld proces en ontbrekende filosofie!

Vanochtend aan het ontbijt hebben we nog net wat foto's kunnen maken van onze CINTIQ (http://www.wacom.eu/) samen met een LEGOMAN...kijk zelf maar...!

LEGO...YOU've just been JAMMED!!!

D.