Category: #thinkery

London Underground

The London Underground map is a design marvel. It makes your paths straight. Just looking at it lightens your load. On seeing it for the first time (as a fresh-faced 20 year-old), I thought someone had intentionally worked a bottle shape into its design (essentially the outline of the Circle line.) After attending an excellent after-hours…
Pink…

The first time I went to see Mount Kilimanjaro, it wasn’t there. Get up first thing tomorrow morning, just as dawn breaks. So I did. And there it was, that awesome monster of a mountain. And it was pink. I grew up in a colour-coded world. In Belfast, even the kerbstones are painted. I’ve realised…
To create is to notice

Let there be light! And there was light, and it created a really interesting shadow… The skill of noticing detail’s. Like any embedded skill, it takes a lot of practise. It’s like a teacher and a badly placed apostrophe (hee hee!) – it jumps out of the text and hits you on the head –…
This is my own hand

Listen… aha! There’s one! But what does it look like? Why are they saying that? Just start drawing – let’s see what shapes my pen creates, and go with it… Some of my earliest visual thoughts come from keynotes at education-related conferences. I would try to zone in and capture just one thought the speaker…
Those cubes

So I stare at a blank page and draw a brightly coloured cube. BUILD SOMETHING WITH ME it says, sitting there in it’s bold primary colours. TESSELLATE ME. I wonder about the light, and were the shadows might be. If the shadows were irregular, how would that feel? It feels to me like pixels on…
Hairy and smooth…

George Orwell was a smooth man like myself, so this is obviously what he was getting at when he uttered this utterance. Personally, I have nothing against beards, apart from not being able to grow one. So it’s a bit off when they are stylish all of a sudden in Hipster-ville. When will extra-tall be…
The Binary Decision

I’m now in the habit of carrying around a sketchbook and scribbling down a thought as it jumps around in my brain. I’ve recently noticed that being creative requires a lot of noticing (notice what i did there?…) In this instance I was noticing how decisions are rarely binary, even thought its in our nature to…
Dyslexia…

I really enjoyed making this visual thought, commissioned by MindshiftKQED to go with “Dyslexia and the Wider World of Creativity and Talent” by Holly Korbey. However, the bit that really buttered my parsnips (a Christmas metaphor, if you will…) was creating the Picasso image. I found that by trying to imitate his style I started to see a bit…
Hey! How’d you do that?

I’ve been asked many times about how I go about creating visual thinkery – so here’s a first stab at illustrating the tools I use. Even though drawing with a stylus on my iPad was my path into drawing, I prefer to use pen and paper as the fastest way to capture and develop an idea.
Maths & English

This thought came out of the table discussion amongst Primary and Secondary teachers. Other subjects deemed less important than Maths & English are being squeezed (and in some cases squeezed out) of the learning landscape.
Feedback…

This thought was mentioned a couple of times. The context of course, was how teachers could provide quick and positive feedback on students work. A subtext to this thought was also provided by a student at the Maker’s Academy – where they review the curriculum every month, depending on both student and employer feedback –…
Education is what builds community

This was a thought from James Townsend, who works for the Church of England, about just how important education is to the whole community.