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!