Doodle Your Work

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, companies are now encouraging their employees to doodle their way through their work day in order to spark their creativity.

Where nonsensical doodling was once considered a sign that you didn’t have enough work to do, companies are now holding training sessions to teach their employees how to draw. Others are hiring cartoonists as “Visual Note Takers” to sketch out the ideas being thrown around during meetings and brainstorming sessions.

While I applaud this new found acceptance to bring graphics and art into what was once a very linguistic based working world, I have to wonder why it now seems like such a new and brilliant idea? Anyone with any semblance of creativity has defaulted to design, sketches and doodles since they first picked up a crayon. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that the stuffy corporate world has finally seen the value in putting ideas into images.

But don’t let them fool you with their fancy titles and colourful pictures.

Visual thinking isn’t new.

It’s just new to them.

SOPA & PIPA – The Explanation

This explanation of SOPA and PIPA by Clay Shirky at TED is one of the best descriptions of the proposals and why they need to be crushed.

Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)