At the end of 2017 I reconnected with an old client. After about 15 years of development in the Dairy Industry, he was ready to start writing a book about it all. The cool thing is that at the time I helped him to make his views on Precision Livestock Farming more clear and presentable. Now after all this time his views have all found fertile ground in the whole dairy industry and an introduction to Smart Dairy Farming was born!
Kees Lokhorst invited me to help him to make all of his thinking more engaging. For both the act of reading as for the more practical side of teaching in the classroom and online. It has been great to make this visions come to life and translating years of experience into a clear instruction on how to focus more on the individual cow to grow the industry.
His book will be presented on the 7th of June… Keep you posted!
Last Wednesday I was fortunate enough to receive the key to the “INSPIRATOR HOUSE”. A new location for inspiration hosted by Jake Blok.
After receiving they Key and driving to my next Interaction, I felt great Joy and welcome into a place where people are working hard on new valuable interactions for and between people! So tanx Jake Blok! Next week we start to make the light burn just a little brighter at then Inspirator HOUSE! Maarten van der Berg en Dennis Luijer…. pointing in the right direction!
A while back I met a guy in a castle who was quite possibly the most loud and articulate person I have met in the last couple of years. This man, who by the way can quote complete “Shakespearean sonnet’s without one drop of lubricating spirits, has recently finished writing his book about ENGAGEMENT. The SHAPES or thinking frameworks in his book have been cultivated over a period of 15 years. Check it out here.
The book shares a clear outline for different ways you can ENGAGE and build enduring relationships with people. These “Shapes of Engagement” help you to consciously designing & stage experiences, make smart choices with well thought out connective principles and make you aware of interpersonal boundaries to truly engage with others. All seen from the eyes of a man who has reinvented his own purpose… moving from local church minister to international business consultant.
Reading this book inspired me to rename what I do for a living. It became very clear to me that the work i do is rooted in the intent to ENGAGE. The visuals I make need to facilitate dialogue or challenge the norm. By making past present and future VISIBLE you ignite a connected conversation. This means that by designing the way you ENGAGE through a VISUAL LANDSCAPE you empower all participants to look across boundaries, spot energy or even see missed opportunities. All because the ENGAGE through a shared visual story.
This shift in focus translates to me being an engineer of VISUAL engagement.
The great thing about (finally) articulating what you do is that once it is out in the open, you need to define what is good and what is bad about the VISUALS or no… the ENGAGEMENTS that I create. Redefining my focus leads to a better frame to judge my self by. Where before I was looking at the drawing or presentation I now look at what the effects are of all my visual efforts on the way that people engage others? Suddenly a drawing is not the end result anymore. My success can now only truly be measured by a system that can gauge the way people react to an engineered visual and how that visual engagement drives interaction and eventually decision!
So thank you Scott Gould… for introducing me to your Shapes and inspiring me to start saying : I am a Visual Engagement Engineer!
Ik ben nu al zo’n 3 jaar bezig met de gemeente Den Haag rondom 1 project. Een samenwerking tussen de beleidslaag van stedelijk ontwikkeling & de groene stad en het ingenieursbureau Den Haag (IBDH). Het gaat om het duingebied dat VOOR Den Haag ligt… onze voortuin…;). Eindelijk is er een NOTA waarin het via burger participatie tot stand gekomen plan als brief vanuit Wethouder Revis wordt geschreven aan de commissie Leefomgeving. Een lang traject met mooie resultaten door leuke en gepassioneerde mensen, die ECHT geven om dit gebied.
Blader er maar eens doorheen:
Op www.haagseduinen.nl is een interactieve kaart te zien waarin ik samen met Jannis Karalis (www.janniskaralis.com) en de mensen in dit project heb geprobeerd om een plek te creeren waarin je het gebied online al een beetje kan verkennen. Het doel is natuurlijk om je nieuwsgierig te maken en er naar toe te gaan. Samen met de mensen rrondom dit gebied gaan we proberen om deze online plek uit te bouwen.
Doe je mee? Stuur me dan even een mail van wat je wil toevoegen. Samen brengen we dit gebied beter in kaart, zodat we er nog meer van kunnen genieten… ook mensen buiten Den Haag…;).
My thinking and my doing. I do however keep running into the same problem over and over again… I get stuck in the thinking part. Which is a bit weird, because my thinking usually results in a lot of visual notes & sketches. Lots of doing… without defined direction.
The reason for sharing this image with you now is that this image symbolizes the end of a phase. I have found my drive and am looking to balance all that thinking with more Doing. The new Time2Draw course I developed, the virtual narrative spaces I am developing, the book on event design I have co-written, the book on Images of Design Thinking was involved in and many more Visually Yours Projects are steps towards the Story of VISUAL.
All those projects are ways to Look at sharing…More VISUAL.
In the month of June and a bit of July, I had the privilege to share my thinking about drawing in the workplace with the marketing department of the dutch energy company NUON (now part of the swedish Vattenval). I teamed up With agile master Darmadji, with whom I had been developing a program within T-Mobile.
We were lucky enough to be hosted in both the Holiday Inn and the Marriott at the Amsterdam Arena locations. Both excellent spaces to get a marketing crowd to take a step back. The conference style spaces were transformed into visual work spaces with the help of both respective facility departments to create the most ideal SPACES for marketeers to make their thinking about present pains and future perspectives VISIBLE.
morning team
This is the second evolution of the Time2Draw course outside T-mobile; The ministry of Finance being the first. The energy and focus of both the morning and afternoon teams was totally different from that of any Telco Team or Finance Group we had encountered before. Our objective was to equip this department with a basic drive to draw, a simple set visual models to explore and synthesize thinking and reveal some of the secret visual tricks that help share all that visual thinking with others. These marketeers write propositions linking to customer need and marketing trend on a daily basis and delegate all visual content needed to support their ‘innovations’ to the communication department. It was great to hear that, during the weeks in between our physical meet-ups, the lessons were resulting in a visual buzz at NUON. The tricky part is keep making all thinking VISIBLE!
The biggest challenge however wasn’t the program. This visual learning lane works well in any working environment. Strangely it was to get this intelligent group of individuals to reveal their biggest pains and open their thinking spaces to offer them other insights when looking at the stuff they need to get done.
By the end I think they all did very well. Afternoon AND Morning…;).
We hope to be speading the visual fire after the holidays!
Thanks guys!
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Maarten van der Berg en Dennis Luijer…. pointing in the right direction!
