We were so flattered at the overwhelming response to our work there. Doug Hanchett of EMC, writing for their blog, interviewed Nora following the creation of one of her visual maps. Nora described the value of having graphic recorders on site to transcribe verbal presentations:

“There are different modalities of learning,” she says. “And people usually have a preference – auditory, visual, or kinesthetic. Listening, seeing, or doing.  Any time you combine more than one of those modalities, you have better retention.”

Read the complete article, “BluePrints: A Low Tech Tool Dazzles A High Tech Audience,” here.

Thanks to EMC’s visionary staff for making ImageThink a part of this fantastic event!

Anon, photograph of the USS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage, 1918. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 1733

We’re usually on the lookout for ways that visual elements can make communication clearer. During WWI, the American and British naval forces found a way to use line, shape and color to obscure information — specifically, the location of their war ships.

The Dazzle Ships, as they were called, emerged in the 1910s as a solution to very real problem. German U-Boats were picking off American and British ships while crossing the Atlantic ocean. Attempts to help the ships blend in to the seascapes by painting them dusky shades of blue or grey failed due to the reality of changing weather conditions and smoke stacks made them virtually impossible to camouflage.

Scientist Sir John Graham Kerr described the confuse-not-conceal principle in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914. “It is essential to break up the regularity of outline and this can be easily effected by strongly contrasting shades,” said Kerr. “A giraffe or zebra or jaguar looks extraordinarily conspicious in a museum but in nature, especially when moving is wonderfully difficult to pick up.”

British and American navies began painting their ships with zig-zaging lines, checkered patterns and in bold, bright colors to create optical effects. While the Dazzle Ships were very noticeable on the ocean’s horizon, their odd markings made it difficult  to decipher the outline of the ship or which direction the ship was facing.

Due to the rangefinding technology being used at the time, the German U-Boats would find it difficult to accurately calculate the trajectories of their torpedoes. The torpedo gunner’s margin of error for hitting a Dazzle Ship was quite low. Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees.

Here’s a great gallery of Dazzle Ship images.

Nina first drew each by hand out on paper and then digitized the images so they could be utilized in place of their standard precursors. We love the way she brought a personal touch and breathed new life into the icons we see every day by transforming them into little works of hand-made art.

If you would like to read more about her creative process or to download a set of her charming icons for your own use on your computer desktop, you can find more about her here.

Desktop Icons by Nina Azzarello, 2013

The visiting Danish students are engaged in a program which focuses on developing innovative strategies, exploring social dynamics of retail operations, and managing the economic needs of starting a small company with a solid business plan. Pulling inspiration from the recent explosion of passionate young businesses in Brooklyn, Heather arranged visits for them with the some of the local entrepreneurial geniuses of Prospect Heights.

On their tour through this booming neighborhood, Heather Willems, the students and their professor, Tilde Valentin, visited several energetic young start-ups in Prospect Heights and met the entrepreneurs behind them, including: Jen Bokoff of Brooklyn Brainery, a purveyor of exciting and varied courses from beekeeping to pickling. They met Michael Sclafani of Park Delicatessen , who operates a hybrid retail space that serves as florist, design boutique and skateboard shop. Also on the tour was a chat with Mary Anne Brown of Owl and Thistle General Store, a unique retail space specializes in selling craft, art, jewelry and paper products all created by local Brooklyn artists.

Leading the students through the exciting and diverse forms creativity has taken in the Brooklyn business-world, ImageThink was elated to be a part of the students’s introduction to the DIY spirit of Brooklyn and to foster a dialogue with the next generation of young entrepreneurs. For more information about the courses offered at the Handelsskolen Silkeborg Business College of Silkeborg of Denmark, please visit their website here.

Heather Willems of ImageThinks presents to the Danish students of the Silkebor Business College

So we were thrilled to discover that the book has an accompanying iPhone app that put all of these wonderful tools at your fingertips. Frequently updated via the Gamestorming Wiki that lives on the GoGamestorm.com site, the app allows you to browse the game exercises as cards and create stacks of them tailored to specific meetings.

You can create a stack of exerises for a brainstorming meeting, one for a team offsite and another for the weekly status meeting. You can instantly access and flip through the virtual cards on your phone.

The Gamestorming book and cards will help you cut through the noise and complexity that so often clutters meetings and makes them unproductive. The techniques in the book harness visual language, mapping, improvisation and play to shed light on and solve real problems.

Read more and get the app here.

Fold-It-Game, www.gamesforchange.org/play/foldit/

Virginia, one of our newest team members here at ImageThink, has just started enjoying an online course with AlphaChimp called That Creative Space, a 6-month course for graphic recorders who want to deepen their facilitation skills.

One of the areas AlphaChimp is covering in this course is all of the ways that visual learning and facilitiation come into play. Gamification is one technique that uses visualization and visual learning extensively.

The term “gamification” refers using simple (or complex) game design principles to encourage people to complete tasks, solve problems or engage in other meaningful ways.

Gamification isn’t child’s play — though our earliest experiences with games often are in childhood. The image above is from FoldIt, and online puzzle game that challenges users of any age or background to fold selected protein structures using various tools. The highest-scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers at the University of Washington for possible real-world applications in biochemistry.

According to AlphaChimp:

Games work because they show a path to mastery and autonomy. Gaming takes advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in playing for points or overcoming challenges.

Visual imagery, from simplest stick figures to high-definition 3D renderings — often play a vital role in games. Both visualization and gamification help us grapple with ideas and problems in different ways, helping us engage and understand in new and enjoyable ways.

The First 3D Drawing Pen

Boston-based Wobbleworks went to Kickstarter, hoping to find $30,000 to fund their breakthrough 3D doodling pen — and wound up with over $2 million. The co-founders, Peter Dilworth and Maxwell Bogue, both have decades of experience developing toys and hope to have it for sale by this fall.

The 3Doodler is essentially a hand-held 3D printer. The large, plug-in pen extrudes melted plastic from a nib that’s as hot as a soldering iron. The plastic is then solidified almost-instantly with a built-in fan. So as soon as you lift your line of plastic off of a two-dimensional space and into the air, it stays there.

Wobbleworks is reportedly planning a version of the pen that could extrude molten sugar, allowing people to draw their own candy.

See it in action here.

Microsoft’s Self-Sketching Whiteboard

Click here to view the embedded video.

This year, when researchers at Microsoft unveiled their latest projects at the company’s annual TechFest, among them was SketchInsight, the intelligent whiteboard. The whiteboard helps you turn data into charts, graphs and maps and present data in a more engaging way.

The “data-enabled digital canvas” responds to drawn commands. For instance, drawing an L shape lets it know you want a chart, a circle will give you a pie chart. It’s essentially an auto-complete for data visualization. The presenter can also interact with the board, adding or subtracting data to tailor their message.

We find it particularly intriguing that while SketchInsight will instantly complete your charts and graphs, and use your own sketched icons, it uses the hand-drawn line effect. This creates the illusion that a human hand drew out all of the visuals. Nice touch!

Sketch Recognition Engine

Humans have the wonderful ability to recognize meaning in even a far less-than-perfect sketch of something. Stick figures for example — even if the head is square or the proportions are completely wrong, there’s a pattern we can recognize, that we read as “person.”

A group of researchers from the Berlin Institute of Technology and Brown University have created a “sketch recognition engine” that will do the same. As you draw, the program will guess — with increasing accuracy as you add lines — what it is that you’re drawing. Instead of feeding the machine a set of standard shapes and lines, they used data based on drawings made by hundreds of actual human beings.

While the engine still only can place drawings in the correct category 56% of the time, compared to humans at 73%, it still performs far better than random chance at 0.4%. You can watch it in action here.

We just want to know — what would you use a sketch recognition engine for? Perhaps you could use it as a kind of translator — drawing a picture to find the word in a foreign language. What do you think?

Yesterday was our first ever Drawing Day at ImageThink! Nora, Heather, Kelly and Virginia — our core graphic recording crew — looked forward to this day for weeks. Our goal was to set aside most of a day to pool the collective knowledge of all our graphic recorders. We were thrilled that Zane Groshelle and Steve Wishman from Prezi were in the neighborhood and came by to join the fun.

Since we need to draw fast in our work, we’re interested in building up our knowledge of simple icons we can render quickly when we’re creating live drawings at events and meetings. We started by brainstorming a list of things we wanted to improve or add to our communication toolbox. Then for drawing inspiration, we looked to each other as well as vintage Japanese clip art and photographs and drawings we found online.

We also talked about how to strip images down to the most basic elements. For example, if you want to communicate the idea of a cat — then ask yourself, what are the visual elements that signify “cat”? Two pointy ears, some whiskers — a collection of really simple lines can communicate the idea faster and just as effectively as a detailed rendering.

Lots of laughter and lots of paper later, we each came away with an expanded visual vocabulary. Keep an eye out — you might very well see more bears, chainsaws and bored millenials in ImageThink boards!

Click here to view more photos from Drawing Day on Facebook.

(Sign painter Chancey Curtis in Mankato, MN, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

Recently on the podcast 99% Invisible, Roman Mars examined the resurgence in demand for custom, hand-painted signage.

Hand-painted signage was once commonplace prior to the 1980s. The eighties brought the increased availability of digital printing on vinyl, significantly reducing the market for hand-crafted signs.

But why the sudden demand now for a product that shows evidence of the artist’s touch? As Roman Mars’ writes, the ubiquity of digital text and poor design has created “an environment of anonymity and impermanence.”

As a result, business are now rediscovering the value in custom, hand-painted signs and how these products differentiate one from a sea of competitors. Hand-painted signs allow for greater personalized expression, support local artists, and infuse individuality into products.

To listen to Roman Mars’ podcast, Episode #74 Hand Painted Signs, visit 99% Invisible. We’ve also featured Brooklyn-based artist and sign painter Seamus Liam O’Brien on our blog in this post about creating visual resumés.

(Ken Davis and Caitlyn Galloway of New Bohemia Signs. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)

Key Themes from SXSW Interactive 2013

Connectivity Burn-out is Growing. The giddiness of new apps, smart phones, and social media platforms has given way to the realization that these tools are transforming the way we relate to each other. We’re overindulging in connection, and the result is we’re becoming distracted from bigger ideas and our stress level is on the rise.

Information Overload is Making Us Stupid and Angry: Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com and Douglas Rushkoff both spoke of the perils of too much information. Clay Johnson warned of the dangers in overly-processed information. Silver reminded us that at other points in history when information became more plentiful due to innovation (i.e. the printing press) conflict also increased. The more information that is shared, the more people form opinions and take action. But the type of information we consume affect the conclusions we draw. Rushkoff coined the term fractal-noia for the erroneous connections we make from seemingly unrelated information.

Geeks are the Future. From cartoonist and keynote speaker, Matthew Inman‘s reverence for inventor Nicola Tesla, to Alexis Ohanian‘s cry for more geeks in office. Ariel Waldman of ScienceHackDay.com spoke wistfully of the hacker-age of NASA in the 1960′s. Appreciation and celebration of the geek ethos of curiosity, exploration and experimentation was a thread woven across the festival.

Disruption Isn’t Pretty. Bruce Sterling closed the five-day festival with a dramatic and critical talk during which he accused the audience of “killing” previously-lauded types of media. “You have to eat what you kill,” said Sterling. “Eat your dead media.” While electric vehicle and spacecraft pioneer Elon Musk urged entrepreneurs to “look for disruption,” disruption also was the driving force behind this so-called killing. Evernote CEO Phil Libin urged startups to make value the goal, not disruption, stating that it should be a side-effect of success.

Play Around and Make Stuff. MakerBot founder Bre Pettis, a prime figure in the Maker Movement, kicked off the festival, stating that “iteration is the MakerBot way.” Jessica Hagy of thisisindexed.com, Tina Roth Eisenberg (@SwissMiss) and Ariel Waldman all celebrated the creative process. The consensus was that play, intuition, and exploration feed creativity and innovation. Julie Uhrman of Ouya also touched on the importance of inviting your audience into your creative process to iterate and innovate.

Make Space & Time. Douglas Rushkoff’s explanation for the anxiety and franticness of our lives was the incongruous mapping of what he calls “industrial time” onto “digital time.” Tina Roth Eisenberg, the designer behind Creative Mornings and apps like TeuxDeux, reminded us that wonderful things happen with an empty mind so we should make time to think and breathe.

Would you like to see all the sketchnotes we created from the entire conference? Click here to view the entire gallery.