Tag Archives: facilitation

Visual summaries as a gateway for exploration

One of the growing uses of hand-drawn visuals is ‘1 Page Visual Summaries’. These visual summaries, bespoke graphics, derive their source materials from all sorts of topics and for a diversity purposes. The visual summary distils key information into engaging and appealing visual formats. Information turned into a visual summary, intended to highlight and share connections, stories, data, and all serving as a gateway for further exploration.

Hand drawn. Why? Is this different to graphic design, or using AI? It seems simple to me, though I respect differing views on this, I think the literally uniquesness of every person and their many undefined, complex and beautiful differences is ‘why’. When a human is processing and creating a visual summary they are bringing so many different finely tuned knowlegde and skills into these moments to absorb, process and produce a unique visual summary.

The rise in the popularity of 1 page visual summaries may be in part due needng to condense messages and knowledge to reach people as the information is in competition with other technologies saturating our time and attention. Whether for personal or other reasons tech overload, information interrupting our attentions is a phenomena in a way it has never been before.

Their is so much potential to convey simple or complex information in a condensed and accessible visual way.

If you would like to explore Visual Summaries please do get in contact, it would be great to hear from

ECIS, the Educational Collaborative for International Schools Leadership Conference, Berlin. A different way to create graphic records.

I had great pleasure in creating these two graphic records for ECIS, the Educational Collaborative for International Schools Leadership Conference in Berlin. It was a brilliantly organised conference with keynotes and multiple choices of sessions with rich learning opportunities. And, plenty of time to network, discuss and talk.

We had two 3 metre graphic walls and throughout the conference, the boards were in the central circulation area. The first board was to be capturing a synthesis of the information about the conference, it’s core content and themes. I was given some pre-information to digest and use. I also audio recorded the two keynotes (morning and afternoon) on day one and I was also able to sit in the afternoon keynote for a while too. The second board was to live capture responses from the delegates; their comments, ideas and thoughts.

The aim was to complete both boards at the same time, working between the two boards throughout the time. It sounds straightforward now I write it down but it took some working through to pull together.

I began by setting up the layout and key themes, then in the lunchtime I found a quiet spot outside in the Berlin sunshine and listened to most of keynote 1, sketchnoting the key points, and then I began to add depth to the structure and I repeated this at the end of the day by listened to the second Keynote.

The responses for the second board from the delegates came from a mix of acting as a live scribe during conversations, responses written by delegates on post-its and from gems of conversations in the twitter feed.

One consistent comment made to me by delegates as they circulated back and forth through the two days was how useful and interesting it was seeing the boards evolve over the two days.

This was a vibrant and interactive conference as maybe you would expect of an international leadership in learning conference. We were also very lucky to have bright sunny spring days in a beautiful setting in Berlin to capture fresh thoughts in the breaks.

Thank you ECIS.