Visualizing the Future: CEOs for Cities in Chicago

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.