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Bringing Ideas to Life • The Online Home of the The International Forum of Visual Practitioners

What is a Visual Practitioner?
by Christina Merkley

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WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY 'DO'?

Ahhhh, perhaps you are scratching your head a bit over that general explanation. Maybe a bit perplexed and wondering "geez, what do these practitioners actually do?" Well, the answer is, we DO a lot of different things, but there is always some sort of common denominator in terms of using a visual approach.

In our ranks we have facilitators, trainers, scribes, consultants of many types, community leaders, artists, designers and different kinds of performers. Generally we work with groups or in some setting where groups of people are coming together to do talk, think and collaborate. We assist people in thinking, or as one of the early pioneers in our field likes to say, we "help people SEE what they mean".

As Visual Practitioners we weave a graphic component into our work. We literally draw information out of people, functioning as facilitators and scribes to get the wisdom of groups into a tangible form. Some of us use visual presentations to "PUSH" information to people. Other use a "PULL" approach, gathering the information that is pulled out of people, into graphic displays or renderings. Whatever approach is used, the artifacts that are created have a very graphic or visual nature.

Some of these materials are very large (such as when graphic recorders or graphic facilitators use large wall size sheets of poster paper to capture the thinking of groups). Other materials are smaller in scope (such as the poster board displays that the information architects and designers in our midst use).

Many of these materials are later formatted into handy digital versions (the arrival of digital cameras has made the reproduction end of our work easier, faster and more cost effective than methods of even a few years ago).

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