This picture was used to illustrate a supposedly erudite blog about how wiki conversations might be visualised. and I am at a loss how to make sense out of it. It may make sense in the moment for those attending, although I would doubt it.
Ahhhhh!!!! The moment of madmapping as opposed to mind mapping is upon us as more and more visualisers and marker pen holders gain work by drawing “bad visualisations” on costly whiteboards, only to be removed immediately after the event whilst being photographed, digitised and copied into the vast bin of data pollution.
The first source of comprehension in a chalk and talk approach, facilitated or not, is via listening. It’s aural. Visuals can add through their preciseness or create a sense of chaos and madness depending on the perceiver of the visual. The more I look at how visualisers work, in meetings, I see kindergarten naivety and childlike madness. Instead of creating meaning for me they seem ugly messes without context or meaning!! At least with something like Pecha Kucha or Ignite Sydney made up of 20 PowerPoint slides in 5 minutes, the visuals add to the meaning and the presenter has a proper palette on which to make meaning..not so with our madmappers!!
The world of an artist is a solipsistic one. They create work for themselves through a highly developed sense of personal creativity and practice and in the process offer us new visions of their observations of reality. And it is how we engage and perceive their pictures that can change the way we see – not hear by the way!!!
In the mad mapping world of whiteboards and marker pens, all the illustrators seem to be doing is contributing to pollution, both environmentally and visually.
I would certainly be delighted to see the works of some great madmapping illustrators. I would even be happy to feature them for one month as an exhibition on the Creative Leadership Forum Art Gallery (which by the way this month features the work of Ed Burtynsky, the famous Canadian environmental photography who makes meaning out of man’s environmental madness) to see what response we might get to the work of the madmappers.