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VizThink Blog

Creating a Global Visual Thinking Community

Autism and Football?Today

What do autism and football have to do with each other?  How can we apply these lessons to our daily work?  On November 18th, we had the opportunity to ask these questions and many more to Laura Johnson from the University of Toledo.  Laura’s career has been very diverse from teaching autistic children to her current role as the academic advisor to the athletic department at the university.  It turns out that athletes have in common with autistic children.  They are both visual learners at a rate higher than the general population.  In this 22 minute, 22 second podcast, we cover a wide range of topics including:

What is autism?
How are athletes and autistic children similar?
Do other disciplines, other than athletes, tend to be highly visual?  
Can this technique apply to other disciplines?

Much has been written, especially on the web, about the relationship of visual thinking and autism, yet this is the first time we’ve talked about it publicly at VizThink.  Clearly, the topic is long over due.  Be sure to check out this very important podcast:

Hint: Use the Full Screen Button to see this video in greater detail.

You may also download the audio here…

MP3 Audio File

To learn more about the visual thinking lessons that

[Webinar] Creating Global Change with Visual LanguageYesterday

It’s just one week until the next FREE VizThink webinar entitled: “Creating Global Change with Visual Language, Thinking and Practice”

The world is reaching several tipping points. We are experiencing a financial, climate and energy situations which are unprecedented. The complexity of the crisis is immense and the need for clarity and actions is growing. For the visual thinking community the opportunity is huge, and our contribution is desperately needed.

During this webinar, we will discuss questions such as:

• What is the role of the visual thinking community?
• Imagine if the visual community were the catalyst. What could be our greatest contribution to this moment in time?
• We need a new language – what does it look like?
• We need new skills – what are they and how are they trained?
• We need new solutions – what do they look like and how are they created?
• How might we step up and offer our approaches, skills and tools to assist leading thinkers, politicians, business people and scientist in sensing deeper, communicating clearer and acting faster?

Climate change is an issue t

Because you asked for it: VizThink ‘09 Early Registration extended to December 15December 1

The end of the early registration period is usually an interesting time as we lead up to a conference - as the date approaches we start getting emails about needing approvals from bosses, sponsors looking for more time for their clients, and any number of angles that make people worry they won’t make the deadline for that early registration discount. This time around the situation had the added boost of people coming in after an extended Thanksgiving vacation in the US only to find our final reminder in their inbox from last week, a day too late. Whatever the reason we’ve had an unprecedented demand this year for “a couple of extra days”.

As anyone who has been to one of our events in the past will attest it’s not just the content, but the people at the event that make a VizThink conference what it is - and we want to do our best to make sure that we don’t just bring you the best content to our VizThink conferences but also a big group of passionate attendees to complete the event. So for that reason we’ve decided to extend the early registration for two more weeks to December 15, 2008. So everyone take a deep breath, send that boss a reminder, give that cli

VizThink Europe: Online ArtifactsNovember 28

The great thing about conferences these days is they don’t completely vanish when everyone hops in their planes, trains or automobiles to head home. Artifacts and media from the event show up online, and continue to appear weeks or months after the fact.

At the conference we asked everyone to tag their content with “vteu08″, at the time google returned only one result for that query (and it was our blog) - today you’ll find almost 500 results.

You can also view all of the flickr photo’s tagged with vteu08 in the slideshow below:

On Youtube, a few videos have shown up starring the unofficial mascot of the conference Peppet the Pencil - a creation of the guys from JAM Visuals in the Netherlands (who also organize the community there) - my personal favorite is embedded below - but theres a few more that you can find here. Peppet had several adventures during the event, including interviewing people on the street about visual thinking.

Radio Interview with Tom Wujec & Dave GrayNovember 25

About a month ago, I was privileged to speak amongst an amazing array of design experts at the Sarasota Design Summit hosted by the Ringling College of Art and Design.  Some of the great speakers included Michael Alexin, VP of Product Design and Development for Target; Timo Arnall from elasticspace; Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs; Philip Holt, General Manager at Electronic Arts, Dave Gray, founder of Xplane; and Tom Wujec, Fellow at Autodesk.  Of course, Tom & Dave are regulars in the VizThink community, and the three of us were invited by local Florida radio station 860 WGUL’s to do an episode of one of their shows, CEO Lounge.  The interviewers are Michelle Bauer and Jody Haneke.  In this 46 minute recording, you’ll hear from each of us as we talk about topics such as:

Tom Wujec (from 6:00 to 19:12):
- What is Autodesk?
- How are companies innovating and changing?
- How does graphic recording improve alignment?
- How does finish impact people’s collaboration? Dave Gray (from 20:30 to 29:55):
- How did Xplane get founded?
- Is it challenging to get businesses to build information graphics?
- How often do you find issues in the process you’re trying to visualize?
- How does visualization improve comprehension?