Mapping the Possibilities

For Tuesday afternoon's breakout session, I attended John Grimwade's "Mapping the Possibilities." I arrived early while John was still setting up and testing. He expressed relief that someone had shown up for his session and echoed that each time a few more people entered. He needn't have worried as his session was pretty full.

The majority of John's session was a multimedia showcase of some of his wayfinding graphics with lots of explanations and stories accompanying them. Pretty interesting stories and I was impressed with the clarity of John's portfolio, of both wayfinding graphics as well as information graphics.

While I don't have a lot of notes of John's session, I have to credit John with driving home a concept that Lee and Sachi LeFever had mentioned. I had noted it in there session, but John's examples and discussion cemented the lesson. That lesson is, to distill the message down to the really important stuff, the essence. Boiling or distilling it down to the essentials was such an important lesson for me that it was what I put on the second 3 x 5 card in our final exercise of the general session.

Toward the end of John's session he suggested a hand's on (or maybe feet-on would be a better description) exercise of walking from a hotel room back to the classroom and developing a wayfinding graphic for that. I thought that sounded like a great idea, but I was so tired that I opted to wayfind myself to my own room and take a nap.

Regardless, fine job John! Thanks for distilling it down to the essence!