I almost called this “Beyond Tufte” since everyone just loves Tufte, but I didn’t. Here’s the thing: In a past life, I spent a lot of time facilitating workshops on technology. How to understand the technology that flummoxes you, ways you could be using technology better in your organizing work. And one thing I often butted up against was that I was supposed to be doing technology workshops, and sometimes I’d get a room full of people who really needed help with story telling.
I came up with a few good activist story telling workshops, but I’ve mostly stopped doing trainings since I started working full time with Gotham Gazette. If I were still doing workshops I would be even more excited about Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design.
Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases.
“Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design” is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. This project aims to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design – a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organization and education.
It is really well done. You should check it out and pass it on.
it is very good. Are your storytelling materials available anywhere?
I have never actually read it but I have heard only good things about a book called “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward Tufte. It is supposed to be very accessible and a good read. I’ve considered buying it since I have heard so much about it and every time I look it up on the SF public library’s on-line catalog all the copies are checked out.
Arif, I didn’t ever write up the activist story telling workshop, though I’ve pulled it off ad-hoc a few times. Andrew Boyd does a great activism workshop where he gets the room to pick a campaign out of the air and then break into groups and develop a quick theatrical intervention to perform for the group.
I think that was probably in the back of my mind when I was ironing out the storytelling workshop. The idea was to work in groups of 3 or 4, spend five minutes explaining your work to one another and then pick on and focus on distilling it to its essence.
Oliver, I have the Tufte book, you can read it if you visit.
thanks. I’d like to talk with you more about it, but what you’ve written here is plenty to give my mind stuff to work on on the plane ride to Seattle on Monday (and I’d be doing something like the storytelling thing on. . . Tuesday. Or Wednesday).