Jack’s Whiteboard

musings of a visual thinker and unremitting creative

My Viddy Journaling Experiment

I AM A COUPLE OF MONTHS INTO AN EXPERIMENT.  I’m using Viddy in an attempt to better journal my life.

It’s nearly impossible lately for me to find time to write in a journal. Even quick blog posts have been few and far between. So, here’s what I am trying to do...

Every day or two I just pull my phone out of my pocket and capture a 15-second Viddy. My self-imposed rules? No retakes. No editing. No fretting about quality or art direction. In fact, Viddy knocks down the resolution for quick upload and storage. With one touch on my phone I can upload the 15-second video to YouTube for archiving.

These videos have one objective—to trigger a memory of something significant that happened that day. They aren’t meant to be pretty. They’re meant to be functional.

Every month or so I’m planning to drag the next batch of 15-second clips into iMovie and export them as one video. The total amounts to about seven minutes a month. That means over one year I will have created about 1.5 hours of video (in 15-second snippets) that visually captures my year. At that point (or someday in the future), I may add an audio track to the video to narrate and add detail.

Here’s the first one. I’m about ready to do the second one. Good idea? Techy goofy? Both?

Content Meets Context

The Internet brought content—lots of it. Today’s web, coupled with practical integration using sleek, remarkable tools is beginning to bring context to the content. Most importantly, it’s beginning to bring content’s relevant application to our businesses and our lives.

Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice—IDEO’s vision of tomorrow’s book.

 

Visual Reconstruction of Flight 1549 Into The Hudson

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Wow. I admire companies that can recreate this kind of stuff. What an art.

Based on recently released information by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Cactus Flight 1549 Accident Reconstruction (exosphere3d.com) contains a very detailed technical description accompanied with various visualization animations of US Airways Flight 1549, or better, how it ditched in the Hudson River earlier this year.

The Power of Visual Problem Solving

A FEW MONTHS AGO I attended VizThink ’09 in San Jose, California, where I learned tons from the best visual thinkers in the world. One of the workshops I enjoyed most was with Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin—recently named one of the best business books of 2008. Dan is a fascinating guy and his book is simply brilliant.
Dan spoke a lot about his next book, and I’m anxious to summarize my notes from that lecture and will post them here. In the meantime, if you believe in the power of visual thinking to solve business challenges, pick up his book. It isn’t an easy read, but if you’re fascinated (like I am) with organizing complex information, and then distilling it in ways that help people communicate, you will enjoy the book.
By the way, this comic doesn’t have anything to do with Dan Roam or the VizThink conference, but I couldn’t resist its application to visual problem solving!
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