Humor is serious.

Why? I think humor aids learning. And who would argue that it's not a great way to relax people, get them talking, loosen up tense situations and get your brain working again when it's been sitting dormant or bored?

Every VTS should have a learning objective -- a clear and real goal -- that can be referred back to if things get off track or bogged down in details.

But first check out this excerpt from Todd Holm's web site at Minnesota's Concordia College:

Education teaches convergent thinking. We teach students to look for the answer. Thinking converges on an answer, through a formula. There are measurable, right-or-wrong responses.

Humor promotes divergent thinking. We are encouraged to look for the possibilities not the answer.

"Children start off life putting ideas together in all kinds of ways, creatively and freely. Not coincidentally, they also laugh frequently, 5-year-olds over 400 times a day. But as [they] grow up, [their] thinking gets more constrained, in part because it becomes more goal oriented and more bound by conventions (Morreall, 1991, p. 368)."

So what we don't want is for the session to be all work and no fun. It's OK to have a good time, too. And while there's no elegant, surefire way to inject humor into every VTS you can easily change the pace and pick things up with a quick round of "misinterpretations."

This is purposeful divergent thinking -- (almost) purely for fun. Here's how to try it:

1. Pass out slips of paper with different phrases on them or have individuals (or groups if you have a lot of people there) reach into a bucket to get one. These phrases should be prepared before the session and can be related to a specific topic related to this VTS -- or not. It's good to have some sort of a unifying theme, though, such as "common travel phrases" or "things said at technology conferences."


2. Have everyone visualize their phrase on a whiteboard or giant Post-It. Ten minutes should be enough. Try to do all the drawing in one room with the images up on the wall.


3. Now everyone walks around and makes at least one attempt to correctly interpret one of the drawings, in writing on the whiteboards or sticking up smaller Post-Its.


4. Once they've made an honest effort, everyone goes around to all the drawings and purposefully misinterpret them. Write what you think each drawing *could* be representing even if that interpretation is funny, unrealistic or downright ridiculous. Give this part another 10 minutes or so.


5. After everyone has contributed, go around the room and read off all the misinterpretations then tell the group the drawing was supposed to represent. Done.

Chances are you heard lots of chuckles and a few big laughs as people went around writing down their smart-aleck comments.

But the serious takeaway is how easy it is to misinterpret a drawing meant to have one specific meaning. Often visual communication work has enough context to help icons or illustrated scenes make sense, but this exercise reminds everyone that it is frighteningly easy to be too vague or too specific when visualizing something -- the right balance is difficult to achieve when you are trying to keep visuals simple but informative.

With a quick 20-minute exercise like this, you've gotten everyone up out of their chairs, moving around, talking and laughing. Getting back to business should be easy after this refreshing exercise/break.

Communicating effectively is serious business, but remember to have fun out there!

Visual Thinking School: Finding other visual thinkers

As Dave outlined previously, running a Visual Thinking School (VTS) style event isn't all that difficult, some supplies (pen & paper), a space and idea will go a long ways. That said, I'm sure some of you are thinking "Sounds great, but a party of one isn't going to be very fun".

Believe it or not, finding other visual thinkers isn't that hard - here in Toronto I've run four VTS events, dubbed "VizThink", with the fifth in the works for October 11th. Our first "VizThink" event was about 18 people and since then it's grown continually. Registration is up for VizThink5 and we're looking like we're going to hit our venue capacity again (we've basically had full houses since VizThink2), and this is for a Pictionary Tournament!

The reality is these events have grown through word of mouth using a few free tools online. In this post I'll outline some of the tools I've made use of to help promote the events and hopefully help you connect with the visual thinkers amongst us.

1. Uncover the ones you already know.
You probably know more visual thinkers than you think - it's important to remember that the VTS concept isn't just for artists, anyone can contribute and find value in these sessions and there's a lot of people out there who'd take a picture over the thousand words.

The easiest first step to take is to let the people you know what you're trying to put together. For VizThink1 I literally let my friends know (through email & other conversations) what I was planning to do and immediately had 10 or so folks respond and express interest. This was enough to give me that extra nudge to take the idea further and set up an event.

2. Facebook
There's an active VizThink community forming on Facebook - you will find it here. There's almost 200 members at this point from all over the world. This is a great place to see if anyone near you is participating and interested in helping you get an event off the ground.

If you do plan an event be sure to post it on that group as well. You can create the event in Facebook yourself or I'd be happy to add it as an event for that group.

3. Upcoming.org
If you haven't used upcoming.org before it's basically a site for posting event listings. It seems far more popular in North America then other regions of the world but there are events listed all over the place. Many people found the Toronto VizThink events through this site so I'd highly suggest that once you have a date & time post your details here as well (if you don't have a venue yet just enter TBD - usually someone will have already created a fake venue called "TBD" in your city).

4. Blog it!
Got a blog? Post it there. Also - let us know and we'll be sure to make mention of it here on the Visual Thinking School blog as well. Ask your registrants to blog about it as well - word of mouth is the best way to get people out.

Registration
The real key is to setup a central registration point - Facebook & Upcoming both allow people to indicate whether they will attend or not but in order to do that they will have to register with the site , which may turn some people off.

We're working on getting a dedicated VTS/VizThink Wiki setup but in the interim all of the previous VizThink event pages can be found here. Feel free to add your event here and use one of the previous event pages as a template. The format for naming your event page is VizThinkCity# - where City, is where your event is taking place and # would be 1 in this case. When we do get the wiki up I'll move everything across.

Also, if you need any help or just have questions feel free to drop me a line ryan.coleman (at) gmail.com or get involved in the mailing list - sign up using the form in the sidebar, or go here.