Wow. I have only really got back to the studio this week, the floor was quite dusty! We have been on out travels, supporting events in Frankfurt IMEX, a conference about conferences – seems a bit like Being John Malkovich going inside his own head. We were also in London supporting the Open Mobile Summit, I will put some images up here when they are processed.

I really should have posted the Zimbardo video up here when we completed it but the RSA You Tube channel is getting a lot of hits for the Animates, which is really encouraging for us!

We are currently working on ’storymapping’ Matthew Taylor’s keynote to be delivered on the 17th at the RSA. We will post up video of that live event and also the Animate from the talk too, when it’s up and ready. We are also working on talks by David Harvey and Slavoj Zizec, both on capitalism.

Anyway this post is meant to be about Mr Zimbardo and the great work Oliver did on making the animate. Well done Ollie, this is really great stuff!

In April we were asked to attend the Sustainability Live Conference at the Birmingham NEC to help support Arup at their stand. We helped them to build a large picture ‘vision of the future’  encapsulating thoughts and ideas from the conference goers about what a future transport system and ultimately a city of the future might look like. We split the image into three main areas – Problems, Desires and Solutions. We took three artists with us to the conference as we needed to finish the drawing in on the day and leave it therefor the rest of the conference. 

It was handy to have one of us interview the public and Scribe visually capture what they said and feed back those ideas to the other two artists in order they could visually incorporate those ideas into the big picture. Arup have their own page to showcase the conference, which you can see if you click here.

Making the Visual Synthesis for Arup Sustainability Live

Here’s the final piece in all it’s coloured-in ness.

It really is a privilege to be able to document this type of content. I found Mr Rifkin’s talk such a joy to listen to and I had a lot of fun drawing this one, not least the fact that I got to draw a monkey and also a talking fox.

However, this leads to a serious point about how sometimes humour can get you into trouble when you are trying to visually understand a point.  These videos are housed on the RSA website too and here they do sometimes receive comments, which is good for feedback for us as artists and how some content can be held to task, especially in the scientific realm. The comments on this can be viewed here. I think it’s definitely a point to consider in the future. Images are powerful and the suggestions they can make can be misleading and sometimes what you might think is a neat way to tie something up visually, might really be creating misunderstanding or promoting the unintentional ideas. I will think on!

I was also delighted to have the work appear on Scott McCloud’s blog. Scott is a artistic hero of mine and his book ‘Understanding Comics’ has and continues to be a big influence on the work we do. Thanks for your kind words Scott!

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Here’s our latest effort in the video Scribing arena. I say arena, but there seems to be very few of us doing this sort of thing. This is for the RSAnimate series we are doing. We are getting a great response from it and we are fortunate to have great sponsors at the RSA. We thank them and the great speakers we get to listen to and translate. If it wasn’t for the rich content they provide, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do.  Anyway, Dan Pink gave great talk at the RSA in London about what motivates us and here’s how we translated what he said. We are just about to start work on another two ‘animations’ and they should be up very shortly.

We are proud of the work we have been doing for the RSAnimate series. I really do enjoy Scribing the RSA sessions. The content is engaging, relevant and has wide appeal. I had a great time drawing this. I particularly like George W Bush as a cheerleader. I also liked drawing Darth Vader being magnetised to a fridge.

We seem to be hitting our stride with the process of video Scribing now and the output is improving.

I have just finished working with Damian Hughes. I have heard Damian talk a number of times now and so I am quite familiar with the content. The challenge I like to set is to see if I can depict it in a different way. There is always a new way of interpreting the information.

I don’t get asked to draw outside very often. Last weekend was different. I was working at the Kent County Show. I didn’t know what to expect before I arrived, only that I’d be working on blackboards and whiteboards. I imagined them to be separate, but as you can see from the picture they were an interesting combination of the two. I soon found out that I was drawing in the Skanska show garden. The garden was designed by Learning through Landscapes and built by Skanska RM and designed to encourage children to learn outside. There were storytellers and people making a clay oven and a very popular set of scales which used bricks to calculate weight. I was there to encourage children to draw on the blackboard. I really love the Sonic the Hedgehog, seen in the photo. I also listened to the storytellers and transcribed some of their tales into pictures. I really liked it when the children picked up on what I was doing and finished off some of the stories themselves. The Garden won ‘Top Gold’ at the show. Hurrah!

I didn’t have the opportunity to post this at the time it was made, but I am proud of the work that Mark Calderbank  (Reason design) and myself put into Damian Hughes’s new book, “The Liquid Thinking Survival Guide to Change.” Damian is a fantastic speaker and I always enjoy working with him. This book is the fourth one we have collaborated on and is the first one to be in full colour and packed with illustrations. I always learn something when I read Damian’s books and he always loads the text with highly visual examples, which are a joy to illustrate. I particuarly enjoyed trying to capture the likenesses of some of the people Damian cited. Here’s a few examples.

I love working with Audiences South! Here’s some Scribing from the NI11 session they ran in Wokingham. Wokingham is another local authority which have adopted the NI11 (arts engagement) as a priority. This session entailed looking at different segmentation within audiences to develop possible new ways for engagement in the arts.