A study in sketchnotes
The brief in brief
Partnering up with ENGINE's brilliant women’s network, Beyond Her, who I’d done some artwork for in the past, I was asked to run a workshop based on my experiences of bringing visual thinking into my work. I designed a session for anyone feeling blank, stuck in a rut, or lacking creative confidence, to show them how drawing can help liberate the imagination, enhance your memory, and help you communicate with impact whether or not you have a “creative” role.
This first workshop was such a hit that I was asked to run it again for other teams across ENGINE.
The process
I based the 90 minute session on three pillars, simple tasks to get people drawing and build confidence, sharing the reasoning behind those tasks and how to practically put them into use, and offering some inspiration to show how far sketching has the power to go. I took the things I’d learned about group facilitation from co-design sessions like having clear task timings, offering a mix of listening, doing and discussing time to support all kinds of learners and doing a bit of my own arts and crafts before the session.
I produced custom worksheets for all of the tasks, which made the session feel more seamless. I prepped a couple of fun twists on bits that would have other wise just been me talking both to try and make them more engaging and to make me feel less awkward. But I think the thing I was proudest of was making a little sketchnoting booklet that people could add to as the session went on and take away as a reminder.
As I iterated the workshop for it's second run, I learned a lot about what really makes a learning environment come to life and what works for me when running a session.
The final product
There’s something kind of magical about being in a room of people drawing.
It was brilliant to be confident presenting a workshop. But seeing the impact it had on the people who came along was a whole other level.
I hadn’t expected such lovely feedback (I’m not sure I expected anyone to turn up in order to be able to give it, if I’m honest). I hadn’t expected to have lots of participants to ask to take extra handouts to practice with later, or to have people come up to me to proudly share how they’d started using sketchnoting just days or even hours later. I hadn’t expected to be asked to run the session again, and certainly not twice.
I’m so excited to hopefully run more sessions like this in the future and to see how this shift in my relationship to being more visual at the office changes my work for the better in the future.