Monday Morning General Session

So, picking up where I left off with the last post - summarizing the sessions. First up, Monday morning general session. My first inclination was to just write about what happened. But wait! I'm supposed to be trying to re-awaken my inner visual thinker. So, I better do some drawing. Here we go...

The top half of this image shows what I'm calling the "Tom Crawford Table Scramble." Just as everyone had sat down and quieted down in the first sesion, Tom reminded everyone that one of the main purposes of the conference was to network. So, he asked everyone to get up and relocate to a new table and introduce themselves to their new table mates. Now, being a consummate introvert, I cringed at this. But at least my wife Karen (also an introvert) was with me.

A few minutes later, once everyone had done this and settled down again, he did again! Get up. Relocate. Reintroduce. Now, I have to say I appreciate the effort he was making, but the introvert in me was starting to get pretty annoyed. There's gotta be a better way. There needs to be special "Networking for Introverts" exercise for those of us who aren't really comfortable with the socializing. Anyway, enough of that.

Next on the agenda was Dave Gray's presentation which is represented in the bottom half of the image above. Dave's argument was that any 5 year old can draw. We were all 5 year olds at some point, therefore we can all draw.

To demonstrate, he led everyone through drawing some simple building blocks of drawings, which are shown in the drawing above. Then he had as draw (or attempt to in my case) a baseball player at bat. Then he discussed the concept of "Egyptian Perspective" where things don't have to be drawn to correct perspective for our brains to "get it." We can draw the top of a table, draw legs of the table from side view and draw items on the table as if from side view. It won't be a work of art, but it will be able to communicate the intent.

Next up was the Bob Horn interview with Cliff and Nancy.

Though it was an interesting discussion, sadly I didn't take any notes. I'll see if I can find any better coverage of that and link to it if I can.

The last activity of the morning session was to have everyone pick an everyday item you'd find in store. The idea was to start assembling a visual language library of objects. Matt Homan from Xplane led the activity and drew an example of a blender. Being the incredibly creative person I am, I could think of nothing else to draw, but a blender. So, there's my blender.