A New Way To Communicate (Truly)

You’ve probably seen those artists at conferences, who work at the back of the room and put together a fascinating set of sketches of what was being discussed during the conference. After the session is over, you go over and have a look at it and you can see the threads of the conversation often amusingly depicted on a large board. But there’s a lack of connection between the experience of listening to the talk and then later viewing the drawing. Well, what if the artist was at the front of the room? And what if the sketches were being done in real time, perfectly in sync with what the speaker was saying? You would have a new way to communicate.

That’s what the Royal Society of Arts in London has done with a series of talks. What’s interesting is that they have taken a fairly slow moving fifty minute talk, and turned it into a fast-paced mesmerizing ten minute barn-burner. Astonishing!

Watch the slow-moving 51 minute version of Jeremy Rifkin talking about the empathic civilization here.

Watch the riveting 10 minute version here.

A colleague wrote to me about this and commented: “Nothing new here—been doing it for years.” Now, I've seen people illustrating meetings live, many times. But I haven't seen it done in a video where it is so tightly linked to exactly what is being said. This is obviously only possible to achieve by doing the drawings separately and then integrating them into a single tightly edited video. The tight editing is another key part of it, reducing a wandering 50 minute talk into 10 minutes of tight argument. What is new to me is putting all these elements together. If there are any earlier examples of this on the web, I would be interested in seeing them.

Comments

[Nicolas Marescaux]

The sketches presentation is amazing. The Empathic Civilization is even more interesting
Food for thoughts !

[Health News]

I can't believe how much of this I just wasn't aware of. Thank you for bringing more information to this topic for me. I'm truly grateful and really impressed.