Drawing Connections – An Exploration of Graphic and Visual Facilitation in Organisational and Higher Educational Contexts

Graphic and visual facilitation is often used to describe what professionals do when visually representing group processes. The method was initially inspired by the ways in which designers and architects utilize visualizations and sketching with clients. Globally, graphic and visual facilitation is a growing practice with many practitioner guides and hands-on books, but there is a lack of empirical research in the field. With a point of departure in a Design Based Research approach, the research project commence by investigating the organisational context of graphic facilitation and the manifold understanding of the practice. Furthermore, the research project develops design experiments applied and redesigned in higher educational contexts. From an organisational perspective, the research project identifies the graphic and visual facilitation practice in relation to the material and visual turn in society and discusses the relation to the current meeting culture in organisations. From a higher educational perspective, connections to Problem based learning activities are drawn and discussed in relation to current tendencies of organising teaching that foster creativity, critical inquiry and spaces of resonance.

As the research object is visual, the study also explores different visual approaches to ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and development of educational designs. The research project aims at drawing connections between the pragmatic design field and Humanities by exploring the use of drawings as an academic dialogue tool when students develop learning -, game - and communication designs.