Wish List: NeoStory
(draft) A graphic recording app that links to deeper topics in The Big Fungus.
I love graphic recording, also known as graphic facilitation. Over the years I've worked with many graphic facilitators at the IDEA factory and the Institute for the Future.
The idea behind graphic recording is to have a scribe listening to what is happening during an event and translating what they hear into visual representations that capture the essence of what's being said. It's an art.
A really good graphic facilitator manages to capture the essence of what happened and make it memorable when participants look at the visualization later.
I think there's a drop-off for people who weren't in the actual meeting. What I mean is, for participants, phrases and images might be very evocative and might actually bring back memories of the conversation. But for people who weren't present, those same snippets may have much weaker effects.
The problem
One of the many reasons for the fall off in understanding is that each time a graphic facilitator writes a concept on their map, they're writing it fresh and new. They're not pointing to the concept in its greater context.
27 years of curating a context has helped me realize that when you take notes and can connect them to the "ur" concepts in each case, your knowledge accumulates, and your ideas just get better.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.