Matter Look
Modeling, visualization and graphic facilitation.
We help teams and large work groups address shared challenges by helping them visualize the variables and issues they are addressing. We combine consultants who are trained to ask the non-obvious questions with world-class graphic artists to build powerful visual tools – either real-time to document group discussions, or off-line to help shape future discussions.
Services
Scribing
Our graphic facilitators listen to large group discussions and illustrate them – live. While the finished product represents a remarkable living record of an important conversation, it is the scribing itself – the act of listening, interpreting, and visually documenting a discussion that makes the discussion itself more insightful.(link to examples)
Modeling
Through interviews and brief iterative design sessions, we create visual models that document a strategy, an operating concept, an organization, a process flow, or any other concept that can be too easily trivialized if forced into words alone. Usually, these models create subsequent conversations, provoking challenges and encouraging clarity and precision on the part of heterogeneous teams who might otherwise have difficulty communicating or aligning their visions.
Clients & Case Studies
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Oxfam →
Our Role
As part of a project to design an 11-year water rights program in Ethiopia, this NGO assembled a group of partner NGOs, donors, government officials at all levels, technical experts, and effected populations, including village ...
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Oxfam
Our Role
As part of a project to design an 11-year water rights program in Ethiopia, this NGO assembled a group of partner NGOs, donors, government officials at all levels, technical experts, and effected populations, including village leaders and farmers. As part of our preparation for a 3-day DesignShop, we worked with the NGO to develop a visual strategic model of the potential impact of the 11-year program.
The model was at the same time complex – representing flows of value and a variety of stakeholders – and simple – subsuming important detail into simple drawings and headlines.
The model itself became the focus of an entire day’s work as it helped provoke discussion on weaknesses in the strategy, on under-represented stakeholders, and on unarticulated assumptions. It was discussed by the group as a whole and then dissected into small parts to be challenged and improved. While the visual model was indeed revised as a consequence of this intense work, its principal benefit was the structured discussion that it helped shape.
Visualisation
