On Thursday 26th I attended Creative Capital at The Hospital Club in London for a session titled ‘Innovation or Bust’. Creative Capital has been running for a few years now and it hosts discussions of ‘hot button’  topics of the day from media to business, and design and how they impact society. There were four speakers for the evening who all presented their thoughts about innovation in the current economic climate: Ian Worley from Flow Interactive, Anders Gottlieb from Naked, Miss Grabowski from Steak Zombies, and James from Ideo

Thanks to Kofi Aidoo for the picture of me Scribing.

Please click here for a high resolution PDF download.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Scribe for the Kent County Youth Theatre Festival at the Marlowe Academy in Ramsgate on Sunday the 22nd of March. Young people from county-wide theatre groups were exposed to a broad range of theatre-based workshops and activities delivered by professionals. As a Scribe, I positioned myself and boards in the atrium of the Academy and I spent my time between the various workshops capturing the proceedings in my sketchbook and then transfering my lap capture to the boards to make a visual synthesis of the day.

The portion of the Scribing below captures the essence of the workshop phase of the day. The young people took part in workshops on Physical Theatre, Musical Theatre, Masks, Make-Up and Film. I was greatly impressed with it all. My favourite workshop was delivered by the Strangeface Mask Company. I was transfixed as the young volunteers from the audience donned masks and changed their whole physicalities. Their awkwardness of being in front of a group was transformed behind these amazing masks. It was interesting to “read” the conflicting languages being delivered between the mask’s expression and the young person’s gait. The dichotomy produced quite unexpected results.

I also captured the youth theatre leaders discussion. The leaders aired their views and shared best practice and discussed a whole range of topics, it was a real pleasure to capture this conversation. It flowed really nicely and was facilitated well by the KCC arts team.

Here’s the link to an article about Scribing and how it has been used at the Design Council. Thanks to Jess at the Design Council for writing the article. It was an enjoyable process talking to you on the phone and getting some of these thoughts down on ‘paper’.

Click for link to article.

I have just spent an excellent three days on a really inspiring workshop hosted by Future Creative. Future Creative are a dynamic social enterprise organisation and act as a creative agency throughout Kent to broker partnerships between creative practitioners and schools. A part of its mission is to engage with young people and help them ‘optimise their future’. This is something I have been interested in for a while and I am sure that a visual thinking practice has very strong links with education. If young people are aware of visual thinking tools and techniques then surely their communication literacy will be improved for the future?

I and eighteen other creative practitioners explored the landscape of Creative Learning. I gained fresh insights into my practice, myself and had fun exploring the possibilities for using my visual thinking practice and skills within a creative learning environment.Very inspirational stuff.