Upcoming workshop: P.U.R.E. 29-30 June, Cardiff

On Friday 29th and Saturday 30th June, Noreen Blanluet of Be Amazing Today and Shiva Nata Wales and I are running a workshop entitled P.U.R.E. Transformation Through Sideways Engagement and Deliberate Play. We’re holding at Noreen’s home Cardiff (otherwise known as BeAmazingTowers).

P.U.R.E. stands for play – unblock – reveal – engage. The two-day workshop is a space to explore, play, and transform your life, your work, and your projects. It’s a practice in deepening self-awareness and light-hearted, joyful change. Noreen and I will be facilitating the process with a mix of tools and techniques including movement, artful visualisation, word exploration and guided meditation.

We are only opening up 6 places on the workshop, and the cost is £150 for the two days. All details are here.

If it’s something that resonates and you are drawn to it, get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to forward this email to someone you think will enjoy exploring creative possibilities in a held space.

Recent Projects: A Vision for Altrincham

Recently I have collaborated with the Glass-House for the first time. The Glass-House is a national charity that gives both communities and regeneration professionals the skills and confidence to lead and contribute to design and neighbourhood planning that involves and benefits local people. In late 2011 Mindful Maps became part of the charity’s Enabler bank. Glass-House Enablers are a dynamic and diverse group of creative professionals brought together through a shared commitment to supporting the development of delightful and sustainable places shaped by local people.

On the 19th March, Hannah Gibbs from the Glass-House and I headed up to a day of workshops with Altrincham and Bowdon Civic Society about the role of Altrincham’s Markets in shaping the town’s future. My role in the workshops was to document the day and use Graphic Harvesting to ideas for the vision down on paper.

The ideas included increasing the flexibility of market buildings and streets, creating pedestrian dominated main streets free of bollards and clutter and improving accessibility to specific areas and under-used spaces.

Much of the vision created at the workshops will be fed into forthcoming plans for the market house, covered market, the old Altrincham General Hospital site and all the surrounding streets, which in part could become a new market square. The visual created has since been used in further events and was referred to in this local press article as a regeneration blueprint. It will also be used as the basis for a vision and strategy document.

Introducing Ubele to the Art of Graphic Harvesting

In mid-April Mindful Maps spent a day with friends of The Ubele Initiative introducing them to the art of Graphic Harvesting as a creative process for capturing dialogue, experience and conversation.

We ran this small workshop at the wonderful Spring Project in Vauxhall. The Ubele Initiative is a new project working inter-generationally to secure the future of the African and Caribbean community, primarily in the UK.

The focus was not on becoming a professional visual facilitator, but on how anyone can use graphic harvesting to support their practice and thinking. One participant said she would use the techniques to facilitate workshops (especially with intellectually disabled individuals) and when note taking during research field work. Another person said he would use Graphic Harvesting to document the ideas shared in his various projects, to develop skills and a style. As well as learning practical skills, we did some creative exercises relating to observation, being present and mindfulness (indoors and out in the real world). As one of the participants said:

Visually Noted: WOW Festival

Visually Noted is back! Here are some maps I made on the Sunday of last month’s Women of the World Festival at the Southbank Centre. To start the day, I went to the WOW bites session featuring the Object campaign, anti-FGM project Daughters of Eve and Afri-Love‘s fabulous Lulu Kitololo, who talked about women using digital platforms for storytelling.

Next up, I caught a panel discussion called Tea with the Lady hosted by Bidisha and former editor of the Lady magazine Rachel Johnson, plus other special guests. The panel discussed the notion of being a ‘Lady’ in today’s society.

Finally I went to a panel about fashion and decoration hosted by Maggie Semple, Polly Vernon and Oonagh O’Hagan.

As you may have gathered, Mindful Maps is very pro-female voice. I hope to bring you many more visualisations about Women and Feminism in the near future

Case Study: CAFOD’s Voice & Accountability Tool

Mindful Maps is currently helping CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) to develop their Voice and Accountability monitoring tool.

CAFOD is a development agency with sustained economic justice work in countries around the world. CAFOD builds long-term partnerships, funding partner organisations to promote social change, for example partners monitoring government implementation of infrastructure budgets in East Timor. In the UK aid scepticism is on the rise; one of the greatest challenges facing organisations like CAFOD in the coming years is demonstrating impact in order to gain funding to support partners in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Therefore CAFOD is developing a new kind of monitoring tool. This will be used to report on its use of funds but is also a tool for partners abroad and others looking at this type of work. Our aim is to create an adaptable tool that can be used in a variety of contexts to facilitate reflection about the wider context of advocacy work as well as the achievements. CAFOD also hopes this tool can become part of planning and strategic development of advocacy programming.

Through conversation, co-design and collaboration between the policy and design department, the V&A tool has evolved from an excel spreadsheet to a visually accessible tool and will continue to evolve into increasingly appropriate design solutions.

In phase 2 of the project, Mindful Maps co-designed a workshop involving visual facilitation to help participants interact with the data, illustrate what they were talking about and identify emergent patterns.

Mindful Maps has been involved in illustration, co-design, workshops and visual facilitation in the ongoing journey of this project. You can download one of the project outputs (Voice and Accountability case studies) here.