The 21 st Annual
October 8, 2015 Ottawa Conference & Event Centre
600 ATTENDEES | 55 SPEAKERS | 12 SESSIONS Register Today $410 + HST For full conference details and to register visit www.realestateforums.com/ottawaref
Thought bubbles abound in many of Kara Stonehouse’s drawings. COURTESY KARA STONEHOUSE
“Sometimes a certain image will just sort of pop into my head about, ‘Oh, that would really explain that really well,’ so then I’ll put that beside it. But you want to use the words and images together to make strong linkages.” – GRAPHIC RECORDER KARA STONEHOUSE
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Centrepointe Childcare Services, is a believer. He hired Ms. Stonehouse for a retreat of the centre’s board of directors and says her drawings not only helped create a spirit of collaboration, they also served as a vivid reminder of the concepts that were discussed for months afterward. “It was really to bring strategic planning to life,” he says. “It becomes a different way of communicating and making people see things.” Ms. Stonehouse, whose other job is as organizational director of Rockland’s Tucker House, has hired a couple of parttime assistants and hopes to find two more at an upcoming graphic recording workshop in October. She plans to branch out and attract more high-tech clients in the near future, adding she expects demand for her services to keep rising. “It’s definitely growing,” she says. Ms. Shepherd, who sometimes works together with Ms. Stonehouse, agrees the field of graphic recording is gaining more and more respect. “When people first see this work, sometimes they see it as an opportunity to entertain or they see it as a novel way to engage participants in their session,” she says. “I think there’s been a shifting from that novelty to looking at how it can more deeply serve a business’s strategic objective.”
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
the message behind it remains as clear in her mind as ever. “I can remember, years later, what the name of the keynote speaker was, what the topic was that they were exploring and what was really meaningful, just by recalling the image in my own mind of what this other graphic recorder had captured,” she says. “You have an opportunity to see the ideas reflected back to you and you’re using more of your senses.” And a growing number of companies aren’t just leaving the drawing to the professionals. A 2009 study in the Applied Cognitive Psychology journal found that people who doodled during meetings actually remembered more of the information that was presented than those who didn’t, which some experts attribute partly to the fact that drawing seems to use just enough of the brain to keep participants from daydreaming. To that end, Ms. Shepherd says she’ll often hand markers to the audience to let them try it for themselves, regardless of whether they have any artistic talent. “Whenever we’re trying to understand something more deeply, it helps to get ideas out of our heads in a way that we can see them,” she says. “Somewhere along in their lives, they’ve denied themselves that capacity. If you can write the alphabet, you can draw.” Robert Chan, a board member at