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Censemaking No. 40

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. After a late summer break - Censemaking is back and ready to share some of the best tools, strategies and ideas on the art and science of innovation. So put the pot on and let’s start our coffee break together.

Season of Change

It’s the autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and that means cooler temperatures, shorter days, and a burst of colour as trees start to lose their leaves and nature gets ready to hibernate.

As the Censemaking Newsletter returns from its end-of-summer break we devote this issue to setting us up for the season ahead with a look at some tools for making change when change seems to be everywhere.

Through better visualization, creation and sharing you can bring more people along to your way of thinking, make change happen, and get your ideas out there.

Thanks for reading. Keep safe, well, and creative,

Cameron

Tools & Techniques for Visualizing

Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From explores the fundamental concepts behind innovation and the ideas that spark them. One of the biggest takeaways from his book is that when we provide opportunities for people to expose themselves to new ideas, new ways of seeing things, and most likely, new people and settings, we innovate.

This means we need to keep engaging people deeply even if that means doing much more of it online. Whether it’s for personal protection, budget, convenience or environmental considerations, working remotely is becoming a bigger part of our lives and we now have the means to do it well.

Working at a distance is no longer considered a second-rate option but a first-rate choice for many activities. I’ve seen firsthand and led workshops online that felt as good or better than had they been in-person. There’s no doubt that certain benefits of gathering are lost online, but there are also many things that are gained. This issue — we look at the means to gain and gather together, better.

Beyond Whiteboards: Miro & Mural

Two tools that work very well are Miro and Mural for using what you might normally use a whiteboard for. Both of them offer the ability to place sticky notes, draw simple shapes or collaborate. These tools can also be used to help facilitate meetings, organize events, and capture novel ideas in real time or asynchronously in ways that very few others can.

For a comparison of the two, this useful blog post outlines the features of both very well.

Getting to know these tools — or others (see below) — allows you see possibilities for doing things that make online gathering and productivity top notch rather than second rate.

Three additional considerations are LucidSpark, Jamboard or FigJam

Vision Boards Plus: Milanote

Visual thinking is a hallmark feature of good organizing for innovation. Usually we have so much research, data, and ideas that it is hard to keep straight and the best option is to lay it out on some kind of board.

This is where Milanote comes in. It is a simple drag-and-drop system that allows for organizing and connecting text, documents, and visuals simply. It’s a tool that does what many others do, but in ways they don’t and all together. It’s one of the reasons this is a big part of my innovation toolkit. The ready export feature within Google Chrome allows you to capture and annotate things directly from the web, too.

It’s also a great tool for doing storyboards and organizing visual data from design research projects. Alternatives are the re-vamped Evernote, which has improved its functionality and ability to work with different media. (I use both of these tools in my practice).

Visual Communication

We take in an enormous amount of information with our eyes. Ensuring you have the best visuals — whether in your social media, reporting, and presentations — is one way to make up some of the distance created working remotely.

Canva is a web-based platform that allows everyone to do simple graphic design of the basic documents that we use everyday. It’s easy to use and has an entire community of users that provide suggestions and examples to support its use. It can even help you to create simple logos.

Lucid is another web-based tool for creating and formatting documents that allows for quick and simple visual communication for a variety of purposes.

Looking to use icons or small, simple images? Tools like Noun Project and IconFinder offer a great selection of free, Creative Commons enabled, or paid versions of tens of thousands of quality icons that you can embed in your documents, webpages, and media.

Lastly, photography — your own or stock photos — makes a big difference. I use my own photos for most of what is on this newsletter, but rely on Unsplash and sometimes Pexels for the Censemaking blog . Both offer a great selection of royalty-free and paid options to allow you to share the generous work of others and make your content pop along with it.

Keep in mind that all of these graphic design tools are useful for simple tasks — the kind of jobs we do everyday — but I still rely on professional graphic designers when I need the expertise of (graphic) design thinking to guide and often create work that is above the everyday.

Making Your Voice Heard: Podcasting and More

Podcasting is far more than putting on a radio it’s a way to make your content more accessible to a wider audience. Podcasts aren’t for everyone (but then, neither are newsletters, blogs, videos, reports….) but for those who are busy, like to listen while they do other things, or just enjoy taking in material via their ears, audio communication is a valuable tool.

Platforms like Soundcloud are great for uploading content. As part of my effort to make material accessible to more people — especially those who are visually impaired or limited by their physical ability to use computers — I’ve started recording ‘podcast’ -like episodes from posts from the Censemaking site and posting them on Soundcloud.

Last month I also launched the Censemaking Innovation Podcast, a specific 10-minute regular podcast that profiles ideas in change, innovation, and transformation. These are not just passion projects, they are part of an effort to make material accessible.

Courses like Wordpress’ terrific Podcasting for Beginners are ways that you can learn how to do something that is relatively straightforward, yet does require a little support to do well.

And on that note, if you are a Wordpress user, that platform has enabled a blog-to-podcast option that will transcribe your words and post an AI-driven podcast episode to Anchor. All for free.

Using tools like Descript it’s possible to do the opposite, too — recording a podcast episode and have your voice transcribed into text. This means transforming podcasts into blog posts and blogs to podcasts to increase your options to reach your audience and communicate your message.

The options are many and these are just a few. Change-making only works when we engage ourselves and others and these tools hopefully will provide you with some new ways to think, create, and share your ideas for better engagement with your community, audiences and even yourself.

Until our next coffee break….Cameron

Use the links below to connect that person to ideas that might make a difference to them.

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