Urban Paintmob

What if you can use some simple graphics to communicate your ideas, instead of purely speaking and writing? Is there any special skill in drawing graphics? How is it related with arts? We explored these questions in a workshop co-organized with English First Life Club Shanghai.

English First is one of the leaders in teaching English as a second language worldwide. Its Life Club is an unique practice, that aims to bring students interesting experience which can broaden their horizons and practise English in a social way. We had the luck to work with Brendan Cooney, its programme coordinator, and created this workshop from scratch. (P.S. We knew Brendan in a very funny way. We added each other on Sina weibo nearly at the same time one month ago and started digging out what could be done together.)

The skills to visualize ideas for meetings, brainstorming and other business communication purpose have become more and more common in the west, gradually forming a discipline called graphical facilitation. However, in China, it is nearly a piece of white paper. What we would like to do is to show the students some basic skills that they can apply easily in their live and work, so that they will be confident to use graphics in future to gain better results.

In fact, Brendan himself is also a visual practitioner and he draws visual notes on his iPad!

After some warm ups and a brief introduction about graphical facilitation, the group tried their first exercise: To draw human figures and idea metaphors! These two elements are widely believed to be the most difficult part when people draw, mostly because facial expressions contain a lot of meanings which are difficult to express, and abstract ideas are simply not like an object that can be seen easily.

The second exercise was a pictionary game, where they quickly sketched out the graphics that represented the meaning of a word, like: process, deadline, accept, etc. For every word, there would be just 30 seconds and this forced them to be really spontaneous and visualized whatever that came to their mind directly. When we let them group the graphics drawn by different people together, it’s interesting to find out that some metaphors were very common. For example, nearly all of them used flow chart to explain the word “process”, or a lot of them used a couple in love to explain “accept”!

The final exercise combined what they had just learnt and an extra skill called image-ination, i.e. to use pictures directly to explain a meaning. We prepared a pile of magazines and the group started getting high when they could cut out any picture to show their dream life.

Again, when they finished, all the drawings and pictures were shown on the wall and the guys had a gallery walk to see what other people thought. We allowed them to tag their comments on other pictures with sticky notes, so that it would become an interactive session.

The workshop was a great success! Thanks to Brendan and the EF Life Club for their input, and Xindanwei for its venue support! More photos of the event can be found in this page.

Watch our graphical facilitation intro here!