Winston wrote: What I am really considering is doing away with the computer (for the purposes of creating text) completely...
and now this thread for us goes much further than digital cameras. Hewlitt Packard Int. deleeted pc-written records of meetings totally in favour of huge wallpapers with graphic recording (still with a lot of handwritten texts in it, though). There are problems with legability, if you reproduce these wallpapers in brochures (after taking digital photos of them), and problems to "get the whole picture" if you break it down into peaces in the pc. I recently recorded two of their European meetings, with hundreds of participants each. Not os, but world cafe stile. I found a solution to use many small picture cards instead of the huge drawings and put these under the wallpaper headings, so they were easy to reproduce! And no written textbooks! People liked it a lot. We did kind of os with Bauteilbörse Basel in Switzerland, an agency for unemployed people, and the only documentation were our picture cards, about 100. The most important ones, 14 cards, were printed as leporello afterwards and they use them in many ways. The unemployed really took possession of the process. We documented a board meeting in Munich to gather ideas from schoolchildren for an adventure playground and translated the wishes of the children directly into handdrawn pictures. Each child had three red points to glew them to mark his/her favorite proposal. It was amazing how easily the children could work with the picture wall. The proposals were adapted directly by the city authorities. The regional leaders of a consulting company discussed their future. We made them paint their expectations themselves on flip charts, astonishing results - they never would have dared to show their fears as open in words! And we made a handdrawn picture record, no texts. We interviewed 174 employees of Mercedes Benz representing 8000 others to prepare quality standards for a huge building project. In 25 workshops they gave their view of desired qualities, reaching from the company future to technical details of production lines. Because the company did not really trust our method, they sent their chief recorder to take minutes by hand. After the first interview he refused to continue, because our handdrawn record was already ready, while he would have had to compress his notes and formulate a text. A text, as he confessed, that never could reach the complexity of our result. So we continued and made 1.300 drawings, compressed them into 800 drawings, clustered and grouped them into 36 sections, gave a short introduction and method description and printed the final report (three volumes). Both the directors and the planners got a detailed insight into the company they could not have got by any other medium. These are examples for conference and meeting records without written texts. We integrated some words in our drawings, that together with the pictures seemed to satisfy the clients and participants to understand and remember. With all these projects we are just experimenting with the effects of drawings with little amounts of words and no separate text, an item nobody else so far could provide any insider knowlege. So we would like very much to hear from others if they can contribute, and thank for any comments. Reinhard VISUELLE PROTOKOLLE Kuchenmueller & Dr. Stifel Munich Germany Tel: +49-89-202 447 48 http://www.visuelle-protokolle.de * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected], Visit: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html
