‘Tis the season to be gaming. And many great games were played during a recent 2-day Gamestorming session with Turner Broadcasting Co. in Atlanta, GA. We were thrilled to be invited by the Strategy Development AYAKM group to host their offsite this year. The offsite was designed to support a work-flow transformation for a small but super-dynamo internal consulting team. (Repeat after me: Cartoon Network and Adult Swim rock.) This was arguably one of our most challenging gamestorms for a group because the burden of the thinking wasn’t carried by the games. (Although, technically, it rarely is.) But this team was asked to put on some serious deep-thinking caps so they could articulate not only a new vision for their high-performance team, but also a new method of orchestrating highly complex and multi-stakeholder projects. Thankfully, quick thinking and VISUAL thinking seemed second nature, so we moved through a ton of games in a short period of time and ultimately met the goal of the offsite. And now, after all that, I’m gonna go watch me some Robot Chicken.

You can view all the images on Flickr.

It doesn’t seem right to have Jared Spool, Matt Jones, Mike Moran AND Stephen Anderson all under one roof. I think we’re supposed to spread the Smart around. But they and I were all invited to Webdagene 2011, Norway’s best user experience conference. Each of these guys are “kahunas” in their field (pardon me, I just came back from Hawai’i) and the amount of content they dispensed was dizzying. (Thankfully, Spool’s talk was also coupled with bouts of hilarity.) My contribution was to visualize their content for the audience so they’ll remember and come back to it. Favorite takeaways? Chicken sexing, failure rewards, beer-o-meters and humane gamification. Trust me. It all made sense that day. Take a look.

From TED.com: Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension — and our creative thinking. So why do we still feel embarrassed when we’re caught doodling in a meeting? Sunni Brown says: Doodlers, unite! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen.

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.

From .net magazine, my article “Why the Doodle Matters.”

You can read it on the .net website or download a PDF version of the article.

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.

Click a thumbnail for a larger view. Click here to view them on Flickr.

Being part of any TED event, whether as a speaker, facilitator or visualizer, has been like joining a family. A big, raucous, good-samaritan, wildly creative family. I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of being involved in various TED events, my first via an invitation from Duarte Design (another big, raucous, good-samaritan, wildly creative family) to curate a team of graphic facilitators in partnership with Steelcase and GE. One of our BrightSpot team members was at the Palm Spring simulcast, where people seem to run around in their bathing suits. This year, I sent another BrightSpot team member to the TEDActive event (more bathing suits) while I was participating as a speaker at TED Long Beach – a terrifying and exhilarating experience. And recently, TED invited me to participate at TEDGlobal in Scotland, where the whiskey runneth over and the people feel like friendly, neighborly Texans. This post showcases a few photographs of the murals created during the event, as well as the set-up. If you want to see a picture of Jetman, go to the Flickr set.

The purpose of this particular event at TEDGlobal was to showcase the remarkable work of three young, entrepreneurial Indian women. One filmmaker, one a fashionista and the third, a strange hybrid of incredible talent, whimsy and genius. The large mural that says The Stuff of Life (TEDGlobal’s theme) is hers. It’s beautiful work and indicative of the fact that she is a real artist, unlike myself. Remember folks: visual thinking doesn’t have to be art. It’s about clear communication and those don’t always overlap.

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click the picture for a larger view.

View the images by clicking on the thumbnails below, or click here to view them on Flickr. And see more about Robert McKee on Facebook.