VisualsSpeak blog

Testing the VisualsSpeak Tool was a long process of finding and organizing thousands of photographs. I started by cutting out and laminating thousands of photos from books and magazines. Some were squares and rectangles which I cut on paper cutters, while others were cut from their backgrounds with scissors. Thousands of books and magazines, many hours of cutting. Little scraps of paper everywhere.

Then I decided to laminate. I laminated over ten thousand pictures on my home office laminating machine. I loaded them into letter sized laminating pouches, sandwiched them in carrier pages and fed them into the machine.

I tested the photos initially by asking people to make collages of how they see their present and what they wanted in their future with a transition in between. Read the rest of this entry »

Front: Tom Tiernan Back from left: Claire Richtman, Wayne Baseden, Anne Reeve, Susanne Taylor, Antimo Cimino, Kathryn Reder

There have been hundreds of people who have influenced VisualsSpeak, and over time I will write about a number of them. But in the beginning, this is the core crew that sat through endless hours of testing, answered hundreds of questions, read and edited many papers that really needed clarification, and were my own personal cheering squad. I could never have done the initial testing without them. These are the earliest of the early adopters.

Read the rest of this entry »

So when did VisualsSpeak really start? In hindsight it has been forming for twenty-five years. But the moment that really stands out for me was in graduate school.

I was sitting in my professors office at graduate school trying to get her to explain to me why the grade on my paper was lower than I wanted it to be. She was going on about stating what I was going to say, then saying it, then saying that I said it, and something about my having to learn to WRITE LINEAR PAPERS.

I went to art school (RISD) as an undergrad. Twenty years before. We did very little writing, nothing was linear, and paper was something to draw on.

I asked if I could just build a webpage, or create a program, or do something else to demonstrate I knew this material. She looked at me and said something about my not understanding that WRITING LINEAR PAPERS was the only thing I could do, because it was the only thing she knew how to grade me on. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve been thinking about the significant influences over the years that have contributed to VisualsSpeak, I’m noticing a pattern. Many of the people who have been influential have been teachers of some kind. Most of the interactions have occurred around some type of learning environment.

However, it hasn’t been the content of the actual class or formal learning space. Isn’t that interesting? The significant pieces have come from those spaces between the formal learning, the seeming passing comments in a conversation, the significance of which often has not come to light until many years later.

What does that mean for an instructional designer, a trainer, an educator? Certainly my choice to engage in a learning community put me in the path of others who made those significant contributions. I trusted what they said based on a respect I had developed in a more formal context. Read the rest of this entry »

I had two amazing art teachers in high school. Marjorie Keary, who believed I could be an artist long before I thought I could, and Robert Enos. Mr Enos told me that if I wanted to be an artist, I should start saving pictures as references. Probably a simple suggestion made in passing, but one that would set in motion a passion for the inspirational power of visual images that spawned a business twenty five years later. I started cutting photos out of magazines back then and have never stopped.

When I went off to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, I jumped at the chance to work in the clipping collection of the library for my work-study assignment. I worked part time during the school year and full time in the summer, filing endless piles of magazine clippings into category folders. I watched hundreds of incredibly talented students, faculty, and alumni come in with their assignments and ask for folders of pictures to help solve a wide variety of design challenges.

My boss, Matthew Amaimo, patiently taught me to catalogue images by how people thought about them and searched for them. He then decided we would begin to laminate the collection. Hundred of thousands of pictures. I remember it taking a couple of years, or maybe it just seemed that way?

My personal collection grew. I kept cutting up magazines, and filing them into folders. I moved all over the country, and hauled that collection everywhere I went. Everytime I would feel stuck, or needed some kind of inspiration, I would flip through those pictures. What started as a box, became a four drawer file cabinet full of tens of thousands of pictures. My all-time favorite magazine which I have subscribed to and cut up since I was sixteen is National Wildlife.

It started with that simple question to our newsletter subscribers. OK, so we bribed them a little. We offered a drawing for a free VisualsSpeak ImageSet. Each question got an entry. We awarded bonus entries for suggestions. Having a website is a bit strange. You can look at the statistics and see that people have been on your site.

• Who are they?
• Are they finding what they are looking for?
• What do they think?
• Who knows!

But we want to know. We want to know if we are putting out ideas and products that are helping people. We want to know if we are giving you enough information to use our visual tools effectively. We want to hear your stories. This blog is the beginning of creating a space where people can get the info they need and have their questions answered in a timely manner. Our hope is that you will engage in a dialogue with us. How are you using visual tools? What makes your sessions come alive? What challenges are you trying to solve? How can we help? Dream with us. Together we can make the world a better place.