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The
History and Evolution of the
Graphic Facilitation / Recording Field
by
Christina Merkley
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Group
Graphics® Is Born
In
the midst of this creative vortex, a young new face arrived on
the scene to become the training director of a public affairs
leadership program called CORO just down the hall
from IA’s San Francisco
office. David Sibbet, a journalist
grad with an artistic flair, was taken with IA’s methods
and was inspired one afternoon to borrow Fred Larkin’s wall
scroll to map out a city-wide picture of the internship experiences
his students were having throughout San
Francisco. Instead of sticking to IA’s smaller, 2-foot
wide strips of paper, Sibbet went for the larger panorama, and
in the process, inadvertently spawned a new way of working!
From
that first exciting afternoon, Sibbet caught the ‘Group Graphics’
bug (in fact “Group Graphics” is a registered trademark
of Sibbet’s, although there is some debate as to who first
coined the term). He continued
to learn from the researchers around him and to explore with his
students, eventually in 1980 holding his first public workshop
(co-lead with Sandra
Florstedt and Geoff Ball).
(See Sibbet's Retrospective
Article for more detailed information about his take on the
field and on the early influences).
| “Sibbet
recognized that the power of group memory could be increased
substantially by adding a specialized set of icons or graphic
images to the structure sketch.
Sibbet, who had both strong artistic and conceptual
abilities, developed a series of templates that could be used
to structure ideas”. |
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Geoff Ball, former SRI Explicit Group
Memory Researcher
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Another
visual innovator, who was steadily active during this period,
although across the ocean in England, was Tony Buzan, the creator of Mind-mapping.
Buzan’s method combats the linear; left-brain education
system that has taught to start in the upper left-hand corner
of a page … his method begins in the center instead, and
works the human brain’s natural tendency to organize things
in branching patterns.
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