VizThink 09 Highlights I

My plan for global ninja domination through photography and music 

is given away by my VizThink 09 Badge... oh well...

For the past three days, I've attended the VizThink 09 conference for visual thinkers my back yard of San Jose.

It was a great event. I was able to participate in sessions by visual thinking rock stars Dan Roam, Jessica Hagy, Nancy Duarte, John Ward, Karl Gude, Dave Gray, Colin Ware, Bob Horn, and Tom Wujec.

Despite that impressive list, I still missed sessions by David Sibbet and many other fine experts...

Over the next few days, I'll post some photos and comments about the sessions I attended.

Today, I'll just summarize my 5 top learnings from the event.

This Colin Ware slide pretty much sums up the 

advantages of visual communication over text in certain situations

My top five learnings were:

1. Kinesthetic Modeling Rocks! - John Ward led an outstanding session where we silently built a collaborative model that expressed the recession and it's impact on the visual thinking community and VizThink. Very powerful discussions emerged quickly. This is a tool that's going right into my kit.
2. Tableau May Expose Me as an UberGeek - Tableau demo'd their 'data sandbox' software that lets you play with data and explore graphic possibilities in real time. Yes, I said "play with data" - how's that for an oxymoron?
   I (sadly) couldn't have been more excited if Lindsey Lohan had done a table dance in front of me. I'll be playing with the 14-day trial of this software over the next few weeks and will keep you posted.
3. I can create quick 'Today/Tomorrow' diagrams - In a lightning fast 20-min session led by Elizabeth Pastor of Humantific, we created 'Today/Tomorrow' diagrams that were very successful at communicating. Nicely done, Elizabeth!
4. I got a nice 3x3 storytelling grid from the folks at Proctor Gamble - I'm always looking to add storytelling tools to my kit. The method that these folks use to tell authentic user experience stories is simple, but effective. A very experiential session gave us confidence we can use it.
5. Oh, that's what SQVID does! - I'm a huge fan of Dan Roam's "Back of the Napkin", but I have to admit that SQVID didn't quite connect with me. Well, lights went on when I say Dan present the material. He's a great speaker. I'm looking forward to playing with the SQVID model at work now.

As I mentioned, I'll be putting up photos and comments from the sessions I attended, so stay tuned!