At Involution Studios we design digital healthcare experiences for clients like Johnson and Johnson, 3M, and Walgreens for projects spanning health IT, mobile, wearables, and other emerging technologies.

A big part of our initial product design workshops involve facilitating conversations between client stakeholders from a variety of departments and divisions — engineering, product, ux, management, sales — and getting them on the same page. Working in this way is so vital to our collective creativity – and to our business – that we’ve invested in outfitting our entire office with Idea Paint, making every wall a writable surface so our teams can collaborate and work through ideas whenever and wherever they arise.

In addition to ubiquitous writing surfaces, graphic facilitation is a terrific way for us to enable these initial conversations about new products. For this reason, we were excited to host the Collective Next team, in partnership with Idea Paint, for a Graphic Facilitation Boot Camp for our designers — spending a full day exploring graphic facilitation concepts and techniques. The Boot Camp had a tangible impact for the designers who participated in the session. Graphic facilitation helps us capture ideas by organizing and clarifying thoughts and making it easier to convey the concepts to others later.

Involution Studios Idea Paint Collective Next Scribing Training Graphic Facilitation Boot Camp Bootcamp Designer UX

“A major takeaway from the session for me personally, was that graphic facilitation is an incredible skill and art. It requires careful listening, processing and organizing of ideas, and a certain finesse with the whiteboard marker,” said Sharon Lee, a UX designer at Involution. “Tricia, who led us through the session is a clear pro, and it was a joy to learn about her methods and practice them as well through a few exercises. The focus on listening and organizing as well as the methods that she taught us have stuck with me and have definitely helped me to take more effective notes and even use graphic facilitation in meetings here at Invo.”

Involution Studios Idea Paint Collective Next Scribing Training Graphic Facilitation Boot Camp Bootcamp Designer UX

“It gave me another tool to organize and understand content,” said Edwin Choi, an Involution designer. “I realized that when you’re transcribing half an hour or more of content onto a surface in real time, you want to focus on main points, big questions, and connections between the topics. It’s a good exercise in parsing down information into the essentials, which could be useful when I am taking that information and building it into marketing material, a website, a short article, something that’s meant to educate an audience.”

Involution Studios Idea Paint Collective Next Scribing Training Graphic Facilitation Boot Camp Bootcamp Designer UX

Scribing is a terrific addition to our design toolkit, and we’re looking forward to incorporating it into workshops and other design sessions for our clients.

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Editor’s note: Many thanks Jonathan Follett and the team at Involution Studios for sharing your experiences from our Graphic Facilitation Boot Camp. Thanks, also, to our partners at IdeaPaint! Visit IdeaPaint.com to learn more about how their products help organizations nurture a culture of collaboration.

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