A few months ago I was contacted by AdLounge, an organization in Toronto, about an event they are hosting on June 16th called "Art from the Unexpected." The idea is to have 20 leaders, not formally known as artists, create pieces to be auctioned for charity. In this case, the charity is SKETCH, an organization that works with homeless and street-involved youth to engage in the arts.

The idea sounded fun and I was happy that I could contribute to a charity event. So, I began work on my "Unexpected Art" piece - something that came to be known as "the art project" here at Common Craft HQ. I had been thinking about a way to take the style of our videos and apply it to something static and came up with a way to use foam board to create depth and texture.

Here's my contribution to the event.

Toronto in Paper

It comes framed in a deep, 3 inch frame and is made from paper and layered foamboard.

I'm so excited to see how the piece does in the auction. If you live in Toronto, or plan to be there on June 16th, I hope that you'll attend the event and take something unexpected home with you.

After having been out of town for four Seattle MindCamps prior to this one, I'm excited to finally get to attend.  MindCamp, as it's described on the home page, is: 

I wouldn't call it disappointment, but rather a dose of reality.  I spent the last week in Las Vegas at the Community 2.0 conference and with my family thereafter.  Coming back, I must say that the trip gave me some much-needed perspective. Let me explain.

We work from home.  We make videos, we put them on the Web, people watch them.  We track our views, our Technorati links, our mentions in Twitter, our blog comments. A good percentage of people we see in social situations in Seattle are aware of our work.  Most of the email we receive is about the videos and of course, it dominates our discussions at home.  This is all misleading and a bit unhealthy.

It's too easy to start making assumptions - assumptions about general awareness, about the number of people who really know what's happening in "our" online world.  Viewed from the comfort of our living room, bookmarked pages and social circles, the Web looks pretty small and awareness looks pretty big.  It's too easy to assume that people have heard about the tools and sites we use everyday.

But they haven't. In real terms, no one has. I look at Las Vegas as a cross section of the US.  At any moment there are people from every state and many countries.  They are the General Public in a lot of ways.  I sat back and asked myself - forgetting Common Craft - do these people know about Twitter?  Has Flickr become part of their world?  What about wikis, do they care?  Are they using RSS readers?  My completely anecdotal evidence says the answer is no.  In our own little online world, it's too easy to assume they do.

I'm writing this because I've caught myself assuming too much lately and I'm hoping for new perspectives.  While we spend so much time debating the merits of Twitter (for example), there is literally a world of people who are still perplexed by the basics of computers and the Web.

In terms of Common Craft, there is still so much work to be done and now the challenge seems even greater.  We can't assume that we've reached any sort of milestone.  The race is long and we've only taken the first few steps. 

Our challenge, you included, is to remember that our web-based world can become a deceptive echo chamber.  We may think we're creating awareness and change, but until our work, our ideas can get outside the chamber and impact people walking around Las Vegas, I fear that we're just talking to ourselves.

Text and bullet points - they are dead, or at least used inappropriately.  That was one of the overwhelming messages from VizThink, a two day conference on Visual Thinking.  We agree.

This was the first (of hopefully many) conferences on visual thinking put on by VizThink, the brainchild of Dave Gray of Xplane.  It brought together people from around the world who focus in communicating with pictures. More info on the wiki.

For example, on the first morning we sat down with three pediatric ER doctors from Loma Linda University. They often talk to parents in the ER about pediatric medical problems and a brochure doesn't work.  They see visual thinking as a way to communicate complex problems in the emergency room situation.  Indeed, there are near-infinite applications for visual thinking.

I wish I could mention everyone we met, but here are a few.

We had dinner with Ole Qvist- Sorensen of Bigger Picture who was there from Copenhagen, Denmark - I have a feeling we'll be hanging out with Ole before long - a great guy with lots of ideas.

Ryan Coleman of Clay Tablet Technologies turned out to be a friend of our good friend Will Pate. Ryan has started local Visual Thinking BarCamps around Toronto.

Cliff Atkinson of BBP (Beyond Bullet Points) came to our session and stuck around afterward for a chat.  We really connected with Cliff - he loves being small and independent and we share a lot of the same ideas.

Speaking of our session, we had a great time and I hope the attendees did too.  It was called "Solving Explanation Problems with Simple Online Videos"  The session was mostly group activity where we asked teams to produce storyboards.

It warmed our hearts to hear the whole group yelling "yaay!" and
"boooo!" (appropriately) when the teams presented their storyboards. As Sachi said - it was like they were singing a song we wrote. :)

One thing I found interesting was that we didn't meet anyone else doing video. It was like the visual thinking world and the video world had not previously intersected.  I hope that we inspired some of the attendees to take another look at video.

We owe a big thanks to Tom, Chris, Denise and the VizThink folks for inviting us to participate and pulling off a great conference. We'll be back!