Brief
To facilitate a visual round table conversation amongst Westminster Adult Education Service (WAES) student representatives about climate change. Specifically, what do we think, feel and do about the term, ‘climate emergency’?
Workshop Design
This is a workshop, titled 'Symbol Safari' that I designed to conduct across the WAES service in different teaching and learning departments, from accounting to childcare for example, with people with zero drawing abilities.
Process
It’s such a BIG overwhelming topic! Where do we even begin? With ourselves? Organisations & businesses? Communities? WHO has the power!?
To do this, I demonstrated and explained the process of generating litreal words and phrases and then translating them into something visual.
First, we looked at what symbols are and how they are used to communicate in order to explore and break down the words ‘climate’ and ‘emergency’ into a variety of symbols. We then combined these symbols in lots of different ways to form pictograms, to be able to communicate and express more layered meaning.
Conclusion
The best part is that people wanted to carry on and said how much they enjoyed themselves, drawing gives people power! As does the process of visual facilitation which gives people the power to frame the conversation using tools and techniques help to break down social barriers in order to enable difficult conversations in a fun, energised inclusive space. Everything is visualised in order to document and externalise complex ideas and concepts that spark ongoing debate and dialogue and serve as a fantastic memory capture.
