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The
History and Evolution of the
Graphic Facilitation / Recording Field
by
Christina Merkley
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The
Embryonic Environment: San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960 and 70s
The
modern use of a visual approach to assist learning and group interactions
heated up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the mid 1960s and
70s. This area was a rich, intellectual environment
where people from many different fields were breaking through
to different levels of thought and understanding: architecture,
film, social change theorists, the beginnings of computing and
artificial intelligence – all sorts of people in this area were
working on ways to help human beings learn and interact together
more effectively.
In
the late 1970s facilitation itself began to emerge as a field
out of the arbitration, mediation and negotiation arenas as the
need for impartial leaders of group process (facilitators) became
more and more apparent.
Michael
Doyle and Peter Strauss, former architects, launched their Interaction
Associates (IA) consultancy
and wrote the seminal ‘yellow bible’ for the budding facilitation
field, called How
To Make Meetings Work. Their
work was stimulated by research being funded in the education
and social change realms, particularly a project called Tools
for Change sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and creativity
work conducted by Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
At
the heart of Doyle & Strauss’ work, they advocated the creation
of ‘facilitator’ and ‘recorder’ teams to manage the personal dynamics
and thinking of groups. Believing
that people learned best when facilitated to focus on one thing
at a time and working on it in a logical sequence, they pushed
for the creation of extensive visual documentation, which they
called ‘group memory’:
| “The
human brain is essentially a massive parallel processor. But for a group to work together, the group
brain needs to be a serial processor.
The group memory is the consciousness thread that is
used to keep the group focused on working on one thing, and
working on it in a logical sequence. Group memory is the stuff you post on the walls
or otherwise collect where everyone can see it. It is where you keep all comments, ideas, discussion,
agreements, thoughts, votes and decisions, so each person
can see what we’re talking about now.” |
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Group Memory:
How to Make Meetings Work, Doyle& Strauss
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At
the time that Doyle & Strauss had set up shop in San Francisco, several other early pioneers
were experimenting with the merits of visual approaches. Geoff Ball and Doug Englebart of SRI
had been years into a project examining ‘explicit group memory’. Another former architect, Joe Brunon, created
an approach called ‘Generative Graphics’ and an art and philosophy
student from Stanford, Fred Lakin,
began creating tools to assist the new visual experimentations
(peg boards, magic marker holders, and a wall scroll that supported
up to 16 feet of large butcher block paper … Lakin eventually
moves into telephone and web facilitation technologies later in
his career).
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