Excerpts from:

http://www.core77.com/blog/sketchnotes/sketchnotes_101_visual_thinking_19518.asp

This post is the first in a new “sketchnotes channel” on Core77 (www.core77.com/sketchnotes) that will explore the application of visual thinking tools in the worlds of design and creative thinking.

The recent rise of the “visual thinking” movement in business borrows from the natural ways designers work—using sketches to explore and express ideas, manipulating complex systems of thoughts on sticky notes, and using rough visuals to make sense of the world. Humans are, of course, wired to be visual thinkers from birth, so it’s only natural that people are attracted to these tools, and the power they have to help solve problems and explore opportunities.

In the long list of tools one could use for visual thinking, sketchnotes are one of the most exciting. Simply put, sketchnotes are visual notes that are drawn in real time. Through the use of images, text, and diagrams, these notes take advantage of the “visual thinker” mind’s penchant for make sense of—and understanding—information with pictures. Often these notes come out of lectures or conferences, and have gained a lot of attention and interest in the past few years when people post scans of their sketchbooks from events like SXSW or various design conferences for the whole internet to see.

This kind of note taking has an obvious appeal for both the coverage of the event as well as the aesthetic quality of getting a peek inside someone’s sketchbook—but good sketchnotes are actually much more than a set of beautiful doodles.

Sketchnoters aren’t reporters, information designers, or illustrators. They’re actually all three at once. This form of rapid visualization forces you to listen to the lecture, synthesize what’s being expressed, and visualize a composition that captures the idea—all in real time. A musicians’ “circular breathing” for the Moleskine crowd.

Instead of recording what’s being said verbatim, good sketchnotes capture the meaningful bits as text and drawings. Better sketchnotes use composition and hierarchy to give structure the content, and bring clarity to the overall narrative of the lecture. The best sketchnotes express a unique personal style and add editorial comments on the content—entertaining and informing all at once.

Sketchnotes serve a few purposes:

They’re PERSONAL: They act as a visual journaling tool so when you attend a lecture, you can remember the bits of information and images that have meaning for you. Sketchnotes are also a great way to record your ideas and observations—these aren’t reporter’s notes, they’re your thoughts and interpretation of the subject matter as well.

They’re PUBLIC: Great sketchnotes create a “map” of the presentation that provides a visual summary for others to read and explore. More and more sketchnotes are shared online, giving people views into both the content that was being presented, as well as the point-of-view of the sketchnoter.

They’re PRACTICE: Sketchnoting hones your skills in observation & listening, distilling and structuring information, creating narratives, and—of course—rapid sketching.

Consider sketchnotes to be the antidote for the age where lecture attendees only partially engage in the speaker’s presentation while they Tweet the last quotable quip and check their RSS reader for the latest update on Engadget. The sketchnoter is focused, singularly engaged in what’s being said, and is fully engaging their mind to shape something from that content on the blank page in front of them.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://poojastorytelling.wordpress.com/2010/04/20/kaavad-the-beautiful-story-telling-box/

The Kaavad is a portable shrine used by a teller to tell stories and therefore serves not just as a religious shrine but also a theatre of narratives with visual imagery.

watch?v=RHED-s0cDes&feature=player_embedded

watch?v=RHED-s0cDes&feature=player_embedded

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O2oXl6Z83zY

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20simon%20evans.htm

Excerpts

And of course there is development of the sector itself. As every producer knows, the only way to finance the serious investment required in all aspects of the business – from script development, through technical services to marketing and rights management – is by opening up new markets. As far as I can see, every Bollywood producer’s holy grail is therefore the ‘breakthrough’ blockbuster that will open up mainstream markets in America. But I wonder if these films will ever resonate with western audiences. Bollywood’s core narrative shows India’s young middle classes negotiating their new role in the world. As comedy, it proposes an ultimately successful reconciliation between traditional community and family demands and modern individualism. This optimism is totally at odds with Hollywood’s fundamentally pessimistic worldview, where the individual usually wins out, but always at great cost to community and the wider world. Instead of looking to the West, Bollywood should perhaps play a longer game, and focus on permanently capturing the growing middle class markets in Asia, much as Hollywood did with Europe in the 1940s and ’50s.

Across the world, the creative sector is booming. Economic development agencies everywhere have identified the creative industries as a growth sector, and most are supporting them through some form of cluster-based development strategy that understands the sector in both cultural and business terms.

Creative clusters are places to live as well as to work, places where cultural products are consumed as well as made. They are open round the clock, for work and play. They feed on diversity and change and so thrive in busy, multicultural urban settings that have their own local distinctiveness but are also connected to the world. Despite its many problems, Mumbai is ideally situated to adopt this approach.

An ambitious programme for change in Mumbai was set out in a recent report,⁶ sparking public debate about whether the city should follow the example of London, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Mumbai has many problems; the creative industries will not solve all of them, and no doubt it has much to learn from other cities. But Mumbai has a unique asset to help its transformation: a creative cluster at ‘critical mass’ level, ripe for growth. Civic leaders in other cities would be green with envy to have a success story like Bollywood to build on.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20simon%20evans.htm

Excerpts

At the vanguard of this new era of creativity are the cultural industries. But they behave in ways that are hard for traditionalists to understand. Most of the distribution channels are controlled by large multinationals: Fox, Time Warner, Sony, Viacom. However, it is hard to nurture creative talent inside these big corporate structures, and most new content originates with free-wheeling independent individuals and micro-enterprises. So the industrial ecology is one of whales and plankton: a handful of high profile global players, stars and multi-national companies, dependent upon vast shoals of project-based micro-enterprises. From the surface, only the bigger players are visible, but these big fish are wholly dependent on the small fry further along the supply chain.

New value is created in this sector when technical innovation, artistic creativity and business entrepreneurship are deployed together to make and distribute a new cultural product. Content creators must be quick to respond to changes in fashion and technology. Their assets are invisible and volatile: reputation, skills and brands. They operate in global niche markets. They evolve by getting better rather than by getting bigger. Key players are rewarded by lifestyle and reputation as much as by money. A good deal of their critical infrastructure is external to the firm. All this adds up to a business profile that is not widely recognised by banks, investors or government.

The principal strategy that the creative sector as a whole adopts to address these structural issues is to pool resources and band together: into networks, clusters, quarters and other kinds of informal groupings. These are characterised by both cooperation and intense competition, particularly at the interface between creators and distributors.

And thus it is in Mumbai. With no encouragement from anyone, a new generation of entrepreneurs has built a world-class cluster of cultural enterprises centred on film, television, music and fashion and extending into publishing, high-end cuisine, photography, design and more: Bollywood.

Bollywood is an unfortunate name, doing little justice to the golden age of film-making that India is now enjoying. It seems patronising, encouraging us to think of it as Hollywood’s poor cousin. Cultural traditionalists dismiss Bollywood as cheap and cheesy entertainment, investors simply don’t accept it as real business and politicians see only corruption and criminality.

There is some truth to the criticisms. Even in a golden age, every film is not a work of genius, though a few are: only time will tell which. The risk and investment landscape in the creative industries is indeed very different, and investors must get used to new financial instruments such as options and completion guarantees. And Bollywood needs to put its house in order, as Hollywood did in its youth, and embrace a culture of contracts instead of cronyism and criminality. Only then will the film sector be officially treated as the serious industry it is, and encumbrances like the entertainment tax be dropped – though this has not prevented the Information and Broadcasting minister from drawing up a co-production treaty with the UK.⁵

What should government do? After all, this concentration of creative entrepreneurs has grown up in Mumbai without intervention from the public sector. The problem is that development to the next level, where Bollywood makes the economic contribution to India that Hollywood does to the USA, is only possible through public-private partnerships. To take off as a creative cluster, sectors like banking, education, tourism, culture, property and transport need to recognise and align some of their activities with the entrepreneurial energy and potential of Bollywood. Only local level partnerships of public and private sector agencies can bring this about. Government should promote and contribute to, but not determine, a cluster development strategy.

Imagine the possibilities. Universities and research centres would be working with audiovisual producers and distributors to investigate technologies and business models for new distribution channels such as mobile phones and the internet. Property developers and film bosses would get together to build new studio lots (in some of the old mill sites?). As well as producing its own films, the sector would be attracting foreign film-makers to India by investing in training to improve the quality of its production and location services. With a programme of international film, fashion, food, music and design events, a Bollywood visitor attraction, and an archive of film memorabilia, Mumbai’s national and international tourism earnings would go through the roof.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20robert%20h.%20mcnulty.htm

excerpts

Traditionally, efforts to improve the living conditions of the poor have adopted an approach that focuses on the community’s problems and needs rather than their strengths, capacities, and assets. When most people think of impoverished neighbourhoods, a mental map of deprivation serves to represent the entire community – that is what they hear politicians and social workers discuss and what they see in the media. This one-dimensional picture has spawned an industry of social-service providers who perceive the community in terms of the extent of its problems and needs. Tragically, residents themselves share this distorted, negative picture of their community and succumb to pessimism and apathy. Citizens in these situations become consumers of services rather than producers of solutions. It behoves them to emphasize their deprivation rather than contemplate the possibility that they have some of the tools to improve their well-being.

In such a situation the individual in need of assistance looks to outside funders and experts to make things better, ignoring and diminishing the capacity of those human bonds that exist in church groups and recreational clubs, for example, to serve as sources of strength and provide the social glue to hold the community together in the face of adversity. When a needs-based strategy prevails, the best residents can hope for is survival. Energies go toward maintaining a marginal status quo rather than contribute toward visioning future growth. The pervasive sense of hopelessness bars any possibility that the community will have the confidence and desire to participate in shaping its own destiny.

The alternative to this bleak picture is a capacity-building strategy that identifies and brings into play those skills, assets, and human networks often overlooked and untapped by agencies seeking to improve living conditions. When the strategy adopted assumes an attitude of ‘seeing the glass as half-full rather than half empty’, decades of feeling inferior and without value can give way to a future where community members participate in their own improvement. A new mental map contains landmarks of opportunity, possibility and innovative solutions to the challenge of poverty. Community members must participate in generating this map and use it to formulate a development process that builds on their human, cultural and social capital present in individuals, informal associations and institutions.

An asset based approach to development must be driven from the bottom-up, in order to instill a sense of empowerment and self-sufficiency with community members designing and implementing improvement strategies; it must be comprehensive in cutting across and integrating bureaucratically distinct areas of social services, crime prevention, health, job creation and housing; and it must begin with an accurate analysis of indigenous talents, resources and networks. According to this approach, benefits only result when community members take an active hand in the process and assume a sense of ownership of the development agenda. The role of the outside expert is to advise and provide guidance.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20simon%20evans.htm

Excerpts

What are ‘cultural industries’? They are based on individuals with creative arts skills, in alliance with managers and technologists, making marketable products whose economic value lies in their cultural (or ‘intellectual’) properties.

There are competing definitions: some prefer the wider terms, ‘creative’ or ‘copyright’ industries. But all point to the same idea: that the key component in these businesses is individual creativity. In the cultural industries, what makes the money is a traditional arts activity such as singing, dancing, acting, telling stories, making pictures. Add technology skills and business acumen, and you get one of the world’s fastest growing business sectors. It encompasses architecture, crafts and designer furniture, fashion, film, video, graphic design, performing arts, computer games, music, television, radio, visual arts, writing and publishing.

Not so long ago, the world’s biggest companies were industrial manufacturers and raw materials suppliers: Ford, Standard Oil, General Electric, Philips, General Motors. Now there are some completely new names in the list of top companies: Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, News Corporation – television broadcasters, publishers, entertainers. And they are growing fast. In the world’s advanced economies these sectors are showing annual growth rates between 5 and 20%.¹ Today, industries based on singing, dancing, acting, painting and writing are very big business.

They are a major employer, and a major contributor to national wealth. UK Government research reveals that creative industries earn more, and employ more people in London than financial services.² In the UK, these industries contribute £55 billion in gross value added – six times more than automotive industries and nine times more than aerospace and pharmaceuticals.³ Since 1996, copyright-based goods have been the largest export sector for the USA, more than automotive, agriculture and aerospace/defence.⁴

This means that we need to understand artistic producers as generators of economic value, as well as of cultural value. To many this is a strange and unwelcome idea. We are used to thinking of economic wealth and power as totally distinct from cultural wealth and power. The distinction is an organising principle in education with our separate schools for arts, science and business, in government departments, and it is evident in the isolation of business from culture. With their high professional stake in the status quo, many business people, artists and policy-makers prefer it that way.

But this distinction only grew out of the needs of industrial economies. It did not exist before them. It would have been meaningless to Galileo. Today there are business people who believe that art has nothing to do with the real world. What would the engineer and weapons designer da Vinci say to that? There are artists today who say they are humiliated by the need to earn money, that society owes them a living. What would the entrepreneur and property developer Shakespeare make of that?

An economy based on mass production only needs to understand people en masse. An industrial business is successful precisely to the extent that it standardises its relationships with people, and does not use up resources treating each employee or consumer as a different individual. But we now see that as technology advances, the suppliers of traditional consumer goods and services find it harder to compete first on price and then on quality. Their response is to distinguish themselves by building lifestyle or cultural value into their product offer. This makes the cultural industries a contributor to all sectors of the modern economy.

In the past, if I bought a coat I would do so because I was cold, and I would choose it on the impersonal grounds that this coat is warmer and will last longer than that one. Now, if I buy a designer suit I do so to express myself, and the business that wants to sell me such a product has to appeal to me in a much more complex and delicate way. It must appeal to me as an individual.

Just as the industrial age replaced the agricultural age that preceded it, so too is the industrial age being replaced in its turn. We are moving into a different world now, a world where the raw materials are not coal and steel but information, where the most valuable products are ideas and meanings, produced not by machines but by the imagination.

Think of Nike, or Coca Cola. What do these companies actually do? They don’t make shoes or drinks, they get other companies to do that. Their whole manufacturing process is outsourced. It’s appropriate for them to do this because the shoe and the drink are incidental to the real sales offer – which is a lifestyle. Companies like Nike and Coca Cola do not manage factories, they manage narratives. And the language that they use is not analytic and impersonal, but intuitive and aesthetic. It is the language of the storyteller, the entertainer, the artist.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20robert%20h.%20mcnulty.htm

excerpts

SUCCESSFUL community development begins with the premise that the more people affected by development have a stake in its formulation and implementation, the greater is the likelihood that when the funding stops and the experts leave, what remains is a sustainable future for all community members. If development means giving people a maximum number of options and ensuring that a host of basic human rights are met, strategies to achieve it must combine adherence to universal principles of transparency, accountability, pluralism, justice and participation, while tailoring development projects to the specific realities of each community’s unique identity and condition. The challenge of sustainable community development is balancing the general with the concrete, marshalling a growing body of economic knowledge with the often complex dynamics facing project designers.

Any global agenda for community development that hopes to make positive contributions must be shaped within the context of four major trends or forces: globalization, urbanization, the spread of democracy, and an information technology revolution that promises to increase exponentially people’s access to information. In addition, the world has witnessed during the last decade a dramatic trend toward devolution, with traditionally strong central governments ceding to local governments both the functions and resources to deliver services in an efficient and effective manner. Especially in Africa and Latin America, a new generation of mayors has demonstrated the wisdom of local control over community affairs, in which city hall or the state capital functions as a mediator between the concerns of individuals, families, and neighbourhoods and national policy-makers in the country’s capital.

Increasingly, development strategies bring together players from within and outside the community and from various sectors – government, business and civil society. This means people are forced to work together in ways that may seem to them alien and threatening. But an accepted truism of the professional development community is that no one sector can do it alone – not government, not business, not civil society. A primary ingredient of this new mix of talents and voices is trust, without which partnerships flounder and dissolve into cynicism and bitterness. Each participant, and, above all, the members of the community being sustainably developed must feel that the other partners are playing according to accepted rules and saying what they mean. In other words, motives, operations and processes must be transparent, which in part depends on effective public disclosures of information. To ensure that participants understand each other’s values and methodologies, media presentations and use of the internet can prepare the ground for fruitful development work.

Successful projects recast the community from being the object of development – acted upon by international lending agencies and experts – to being an active subject in the process leading to the goal of a sustainable future. However, community participation requires a preceding phase of community consultation in which members can become involved in and share control of the development process itself. The community’s values and traditions should help shape the project, not only for reasons of upholding democratic principles, but because citizens possess knowledge that can dramatically affect the development process. Consultation leading to participation can unlock a storehouse of human, social and cultural capital, the exercise of which on their own behalf can solidify commitment and provide vital lessons in self-determination, empowerment, and producing the cultural self-confidence needed to ensure that development projects are sustainable.

When communities cease being recipients of aid and instead become partners for change, they assume ownership over the development process. Empowerment of this sort is infectious: it easily transfers to other aspects of community life beyond the scope of the development project. For these reasons, lending agencies and development organizations recognize that participation must be nurtured despite the frequent difficulty of arriving at consensus. Indeed, a 1994 World Bank study on participation concluded that ‘although lasting benefits from participation take longer to emerge, and are more difficult to quantify, over time they can be expected to offset incremental costs.’ Positive externalities include: fostering training in democratic decision-making; allowing community participants to supply ‘sweat equity’ to the project, hence stretching development dollars; and facilitating an evaluation process in which community members willingly help generate and assess data measuring the project’s success.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20john%20howkins.htm

Trade is an another important issue. According to the WTO, intellectual property, and issues like access to knowledge, are primarily matters of trade. The US and some other countries say ideas can be traded like anything else. They say all countries from the richest to the poorest must accept western rules for privatising knowledge, covering everything from indigenous plants to folklore and films.

To my mind, all countries should be able to choose and maintain their own policies on culture and the creative economy. Mahatma Gandhi said: ‘I do not want my house to be walled in or my windows blocked. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about the house as freely as possible. But also I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’

The West works through the global WTO and bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), mostly between the US and EU and developing countries. It’s worth noting, the World Bank has recently calculated that the 109 FTAs now in existence will increase world income by $112 trillion over 15 years but will cause a loss of $21 trillion for developing countries. Those are astonishing figures. I wonder why so many developing countries are so keen to sign FTAs with the USA.

I would like to ask: Did India’s parliamentary parties know these figures? Did the government know them? Did they calculate the costs and benefits of WTO membership and TRIPs obligations on India’s knowledge base? Did they carry out a comparative analysis of the effects on ‘access to knowledge’ in India and its overseas competitors in Asia? Did they do any research? Is the new law based on any evidence?

Few governments have good data on the creative economy. Too many governments apply old-style thinking, using such concepts as full-time employment, ‘value added’, productivity and interest rates. Frankly, any government that uses these outdated concepts will not succeed in the creative economy.

It is the same with companies. Although IP can be hugely important to a business, few companies are expert in IP law and licensing. Virtually every large company depends substantially upon IP, yet few have an IP expert on the board. Even fewer have a board member who is aware of recent thinking on creativity.

I come back to the point I made at the beginning. Recognise all kinds of creativity, not only the arts, as major cultural and economic processes. Success in the creative economy will come to the organisations that recognise and reconcile the personal, the spiritual and the economic. India can rightfully boast of its entrepreneurial skills, its software skills and its unique religious, spiritual and artistic strengths. Can it combine them? The nomads that make up the creative economy are waiting.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20john%20howkins.htm

What does it mean to say that all people can be creative? First, all creativity, whether in the arts or sciences, develops through the same physiological processes. The brain’s synapses fizz and splutter and make connections – or not – in the same way. Modern electronic scanning techniques show that the brain forms a new concept in the same way regardless of whether we, or observers, categorise them as art or science or business innovation. We need to integrate our ideas about creativity with recent discoveries of modern neuroscience.

All creativity also depends on the individual’s capacity to dream, wander, think, challenge, disagree and invent. Creativity expresses diversity, which is the source of culture. Without diversity, there is no culture. All kinds of creativity generate the same buzz of excitement, whether by artist, scientist or business executive. It’s fun. It’s seductive, entertaining, intriguing. This is something that many people, including many government officials, find hard to understand.

Another common factor linking all kinds of creativity is that all thinking is free and therefore creativity is open to all. Of course, in totalitarian, bureaucratic, or hierarchical societies, people are not free and creativity is crushed or shackled. But, because creativity requires so few external resources, it is open to everyone. In an open, classless society, it is meritocratic. Not everyone can be a farmer (you need land), or a manufacturer (you need money and factories) or a government official (you need to pass exams). But everyone can be creative. Of course, the quality will vary but the ambition, the ways of working, the inputs and outputs, are available to all.

This kind of creative thinking is now prevalent in a dozen cities round the world, such as Los Angeles, London, Milan, Tokyo and Paris. Even Shanghai, which is tightly controlled politically, exhibits great freedom in creative, intellectual and economic affairs. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, who defined our modern ideas about the entrepreneurial function, said in the 1940s that ‘Entrepreneurship in America is now routinized.’ It is the same with creativity. Creativity in these places is now routine.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org

http://www.india-seminar.com/2005/553/553%20john%20howkins.htm

CREATIVE imagination is humanity’s greatest resource, the foundation of all art, science and knowledge. It is the means by which we learn about ourselves and about others. Without it we cannot imagine our full potential, let alone achieve it. All this is well-known. At this level, creativity is a private and personal activity. But it is increasingly becoming our favoured route to economic status.

A significant number of people increasingly spend their time on, and earn income from their creative imagination. For them, creativity is not only a spiritual matter but something explicit and public. It is not only a matter of personal expression but a lever of social and business success.

In order to understand this we have to know what creativity is and how it differs from art, discovery, invention and innovation. I define creativity simply as ‘having a new idea’ and the ‘creative economy’ as an economy where ideas, not land or capital, are the most important input and output.

My definitions are broader than the normal ones. Creativity is usually more narrowly tied to the arts and culture: to art, architecture, craft, design, fashion, music, performing arts, publishing and so on. It is true these activities are highly creative and very important. Artists create beauty. They play around with beauty. They share beauty. And, in economic terms, in a network economy, they are economically important. By my own reckoning these activities add up to about 4-5% of global GDP.

But to say artists and performers are the only creative people in the world seems to me to be short-sighted and wrong. It ignores other people, in many fields, who also use their creative imagination. It shuts off huge opportunities, both spiritual and economic.

Surely creativity is found in many places in society. Planting, harvesting and reusing seeds; carrying out a scientific investigation; designing a school curriculum – these can be just as creative as painting a picture and designing a bracelet. They all use the creative imagination.

They all certainly count as culture. Culture has always had two meanings; the narrow meaning of culture as art and aesthetic, and the wider meaning of culture as a collection of values and beliefs. Among the most acute analysts of these twin themes were T.S. Eliot, the poet and critic, and Richard Hoggart, the writer and administrator, who differentiated between both, culture as aesthetic and culture as anthropology.

We need to recapture this wider sense. Certainly in the West we have become too focused on the artist as hero, the Romantic genius, the artist as an outsider. We need to accept that this notion is not the norm and is too restrictive.

- MAMTA MANTRI

mamta@archedu.org