On the 22nd of November i had the chance of attending a Visual Sense Making workshop by Elizabeth Pastor of Humantific (I’m the pseudo-hipster with a beanie in the video, I pop up every now and then).
During the workshop I thought it was all nicely planned and laid out, Elizabeth was engaging and entertaining. It was fine, but I wasn’t quite blown away. It seemed basic. Somehow, it made loads of sense, at least to me, given my design background. And I judged that to be a negative feeling rather than a positive one. But the more I think about it, the more it dawns on me what an amazing business model the team at Humantific have. To take something that we designers use daily (visual thinking), giving it a new name to represent a new focus (helping other make sense of their needs, aims and assets through it) and making it work. Yet again, I had been fooled by the apparent simplicity of an innovation.
In contemporary Art a common comment is “but I could do that” and it drives us MAD (I say “us” becaus at the end of the day, I am a postgraduate in contemporary Art History and Visual Culture). The answer to that comment is “yes, but you didn’t”. What counts is not so much the end result, but the process, the ignition, the idea and the very, very hard part of carrying it out. So I failed myself by applying that same basic thinking to the workshop. Yes, I could do that. Good for me. But I didn’t do that, did I?
I still find myself thinking about Humantific. It’s genius. And useful. So very well done, chapeau. It’s been really inspiring to see them at work. And, you know what? I do find myself using some of their symbols here and there.
