CEOs for Cities is a rock-and-roll nonprofit that has consistently proven it’s on the cutting edge of conversations around designing and innovating cities of the future. This relatively small but dynamite organization connects urban leaders to front-line research, human-centered and tech-oriented projects, and perhaps most importantly, to each other. They have a membership business model and their members include an impressive roster of CEOs, Mayors, City Planners, Journalists, Governors, and so forth. Rahm Emanual, the current Mayor of Chicago and Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, opened the event and freaking BRUCE MAU – recently crowned one of Wired Magazine’s Top 50 Designers in the World – closed it, He delivered an epic keynote in which everything he said was powerful and memorable, which made it challenging to graphically record due to my frequent urges to hug him. If you don’t know Bruce’s work, find it. Everything he creates, from books to buildings, is beyond noteworthy.

My partner on this project was the undeniably talented graphic recorder Mariah Howard, who brings an irreverent sense of humor to match my own. For this event, we worked in tandem – two graphic recorders per mural – so we wouldn’t experience any deterioration in performance due to the back-to-back panels and the full days. CEOs for Cities supplied 200 copies of Gamestorming  to the guests (thanks to the generosity of my publisher, O’Reilly and a good time was had by all.

**Tangential note to all city officials: Join CEOs for Cities. Because the possibility of having a talented, innovative, diverse and connected city is a terrible thing to waste.

Editor’s note: Editor’s note: Sunni Brown owns an information design firm and is a speaker and co-author of “GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers.” She was recently named on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business List and on the 10 Most Creative People on Twitter list. She spoke at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, California.

(CNN) – Humans have been doodling in snow, in sand and on cave walls for more than 30,000 years.

George Washington, Thomas Edison, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Vladimir Nabokov were doodlers. Bill Gates and Frank Gehry are among today’s active doodlers.

Yet most of us haven’t reflected on why we feel compelled to draw.

In fact, many parts of our society — including businesses, schools and colleges — frown on doodling and consider it a waste of time. While we can’t overcome cultural biases overnight, we can certainly ask a relevant question: Why is doodling so universal? What is doodling doing for us?

Virginia Scofield, an immunologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, knows from personal and professional experience what doodling does. After struggling with organic chemistry in college, she decided to try doodling the complexities of the subject rather than memorizing them from the textbook. Scofield happened upon what native doodlers have known for a long time: Doodling can improve cognitive performance. Because of her success in transforming her own learning process, Scofield incorporated doodling and visual note-taking into her university classroom for more than two decades, and she told me it notably improved the success rate of her students.

Scofield is not the only one who’s learned to be impressed by the Doodle. Jackie Andrade, a professor at the University of Plymouth,published a study finding a 29 percent increase in information retention gained by doodlers. She noted that, contrary to popular belief, doodling seems to prevent people from losing focus on boring or complex subject matter. It gives learners who may otherwise mentally check out an opportunity to check back in.

Other researchers exploring the impact of doodling and drawing have come to equally significant conclusions about this deceptively simple act. A recent article in Science argued that drawing in science education caters to individual learning preferences and motivates students to engage and explore content in a more meaningful way. And classroom research shows that not only do learners better understand concepts through simple drawing, but it sets the stage for innovative and divergent ways of thinking. For a nation with an ego wounded by our decreased scores on the Torrance Creativity Test, this unfettered access to creative thinking shouldn’t be underestimated.

Just ask Google, the only company on record with an official Chief Doodler on the payroll. Google’s culture is well known for its 80/20 “innovation time off” rule. And for many employees, that time is spent using simple visual language to doodle, sketch and prototype new business opportunities. Indeed, many companies seeking an edge are looking to applications of hand-drawn visual language as a prospective lifeboat. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, thinkers need all the mojo they can muster.

To the throngs of doodlers around the world, this evidence is likely just the beginning of our gentle “I told you so” moments. Learning that accommodates more than text-based or verbal information amplifies the effects of cognition and creativity. And when the Science article suggested that drawing should be recognized along with reading, writing and speaking as a key element in education, it was a hallelujah moment for doodlers around the world.

I’m one of them. I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me.

See some examples of how doodles are used

So how do you get better at doodling? It’s a delightfully easy task. Learners can start with the Visual Alphabet, a series of six flows—the point, line, arc, angle, spiral and loop, and the six forms—the oval, eye, triangle, rectangle, house and cloud. With these 12 “letters,” prospective doodlers can articulate any visual representation of any concept they can imagine. All it takes is a commitment to learning this language, native to our brain’s visual cortex, and applying it to challenges either at work or at school. Rather than talking in circles about a complex subject, try doodling it using words and pictures. Show your teachers and colleagues another way to see information. The insights and aha moments will arrive naturally in the process.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sunni Brown.

My experience as the Resident Doodle Expert at Sharpie, and the subsequent media tour it required, eventually led Margaret Webb-Pressler of the Washington Post to my telephone. She wanted to do a feature on doodling in the Kids Post and thought (probably because I myself am quite a child) that my work would be a great match for the story. The interview lasted about 30 minutes – resulting in, I don’t know, 17 whole words from me – and turned out to be the beautiful splash page you see above, with presidential doodles and all. We agreed there should be a Call for Kids’ Doodle Submissions for the holiday season and I’m really looking forward to seeing what gets published. It’s a two-part feature story, so perhaps in the next article I’ll squeeze in the line I’m now famous for in my family: “To doodle is to light up your mind!” Long live the Revolution, and thank you, Washington Post, for the coverage.

I like to make the most of my work trips around the country, and evidently my editor at O’Reilly, Colleen Wheeler, likes me to do that as well. So while I was returning from a presentation on The Doodle Revolution, she asked me to interview on Martini Hour with she and her co-host, Deke McClelland, the author of, oh I don’t know, 99 books on the Adobe Creative Suite. Because the show was called “Martini Hour,” it was not in my vocabulary to say no. So we all took our shoes off and proceeded to have a lively conversation about visual thinking, the importance of the doodle, innovation in the workplace using design thinking, and how much I thought the two of them should be in love because they got along so well. Oh, and of course, we also discussed our forthcoming book, GameStorming, which is a playbook for explaining why and how you can get your hands dirty at work using visual thinking to solve business problems. To hear the audio, click: MartiniHour-075-128Kbps. But first, pour yourself a dirty martini.

I was planning to write up a description of Foo Camp 2010 myself, but I decided to be more time-savvy and just use the content from Wikipedia, below. Suffice it to say that it was an honor to be invited and a pleasure to present The Doodle Revolution to such a stellar audience. Some highlights from my experience include (as I mentioned), presenting on the topic above, bonding with author Scott Berkun who, seemingly impossibly, is even more likable in person, meeting June Cohen, Executive Producer of the TED Conference and finally, drinking bourbon with my editor, Colleen Wheeler who – poor thing – was probably relying on bourbon to get her through the last edits of Gamestorming, which comes out in July. Colleen, you are amazing. I will send a non-alcoholic present your way very soon.

FYI, reader, Foo Camp is an annual hacker unconference hosted by publisher O’Reilly Media. O’Reilly describes it as “the wiki of conferences”, where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule. The goal of the event is to reach out to new people who will increase the company’s intelligence about new technologies, and to create opportunities for cross-fertilization between people and technologies that are on the O’Reilly radar. Some have described it as a meta-birds-of-a-feather session, that gets smart people together to discuss technology issues. [Added by Sunni:] During the event, people camp out in actual tents – not something I expected to do in the desert heat of Sebastopol, CA. But for this crowd, it ended up being worth it. Thank you, O’Reilly, for being a publisher that defies tradition and instead focuses on innovation. Nice work.

I was absolutely impressed with the Zappos Insights Bootcamp. It’s a 2-day workshop designed to expose people to their famous culture – the values that drive it and the people and policies that keep it growing. I was so impressed, in fact, that I’ll write another blog post soon showing the video with interviews from some participants. The images above were the four 32-square-foot murals I created for the group while they were in the workshop. Tony Hsieh, the CEO, and Alfred Lin, the CFO, made presentations during the session and I think people were a little bit starstruck. The Zappos guys have officially reached celebrity status, but they remain humble. One principle I took away from the session (among many) was that hubris gets you nowhere, quickly. More to come.

One page of my visual notes from Dan Roam’s excellent workshop in SF – the pilot for The Back of the Napkin. I appreciate that Dan’s putting visual thinking front and center in the business world. It helps me keep MY day job, too. See the rest of the visual notes here.

Producing TEDx Austin felt like birthing some kind of gigantic baby. I think I can speak for the entire team – Nancy Giordano, Jen Spencer, Kelley Burrus, Shannon Mehner, Chris Justice, Mary Baird-Wilcox and Stacy Weitzner – when I say that it would be impossible to capture the experience in one word. There were triumphs, frustrations, elation, teamwork, tough decisions, and absolute overjoy at what we were putting together. And through it all was the undeniable knowledge that Austin, TX needed and deserved a killer TEDx. That our little town is growing up, transforming into a big city with a big heart, a big brain and ideas that are big beyond belief. I have to give thanks to my graphics team, composed of Honoria Starbuck and Austin Kleon, but if I started thanking all of the other heads and hands that were involved, you would probably stop reading this blog post. (We all know that in this day and age, people want pictures.)

Some personal highlights for me:

• Seeing the program designed by the Butler Brothers and the video that showed its creation. One of those ‘wow’ moments.
• Establishing a relationship with Shiny Object – a film production company whose work I admire and enjoy.
• Connecting with Philip Berber and his wife Donna of the Glimmer of Hope Foundation.
• Hanging out with a freaky astronaut and a sexy firefighter.
• The fact that we had 10,000+ individuals who watched the livestream (29% of which were in New Zealand!)
• Working with a team of women who were indomitable.
• NOT working during the event itself. I so often graphically record or contribute to the group process in some live, visual way that I just wanted to be present and enjoy the birth of our big ole idea baby. (The graphic architectures above were created by me beforehand and the audience populated them with content over the course of the day.)
• Being thanked on stage for our efforts and feeling how much the crowd really did appreciate it.
• Going to the TEDx Rejects party at Conjunctured afterward. Word up, rejects.
• Slowly absorbing long after the event was over how truly incredible it was. Is it too dramatic to thank God for the TED people? I mean, it’s not just an event they’ve created. It’s a humanitarian movement. And I think that’s worth saying thank you for.

Onward to TEDx Austin 2011.

On Feb. 3rd, I held another VizThink Austin community meeting for our ever-growing group of visual thinkers and visual learners. The rare and brilliant bird Austin Kleon hosted, taking the group on a comedic and informative journey about visual thinking for writers. A powerful topic considering that few people are aware of the symbiotic relationship between words and pictures. (Don’t let the blinking cursor get you!) Austin has attended virtually every VizThink session since the beginning, so it was high time he hosted one himself. He’s a natural visual communicator as well as a writer and you’ll see how he combines the two in his forthcoming book with Harper Collins, Newspaper Blackout Poems. And, since I know people love free content, you can also see video modules from the session itself. Attendance was impressive considering the dangerous….um…drizzle (Austinites panic when driving in the rain) and it was another excellent evening with our impressive community of minds. So if you’re reading this post and you want to join the VizThink entourage, contact me. I am always open to another inquiring mind.

Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree of The Popular Podcast – among other exploits – make it a point to interview panelists and performers coming through Austin for SXSW. Since Dave Gray (Founder and Chairman of XPlane) and I were on a panel together, they invited us to join them for a brief and…um..deliberately informal interview. Dave, being the good sport that he is, and I, wanting to see my new hairdo on camera, agreed. This interview doesn’t do what my normal interviews would do: it doesn’t describe visual thinking; it doesn’t talk much about my background; it doesn’t discuss learning or group process. In fact, I’m not sure if it hurts or enhances my reputation. But no matter – it’s a fun one. And I look forward to the next Popular Podcast at SXSW 2010. Minus the references to poo.