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Episode #92: Catherine Madden
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Hi everyone, welcome back to the show! This will be the last episode for the summer. I’m going to take a break from podcasting for the next two months, do some writing, relaxing, and traveling, and gear up for a...
The post Episode #92: Catherine Madden appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Season Finale Announcement
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. The final episode of, well, let's call it this school year. I'm gonna take a break after this week's episode. So for my last guest of this semester, it's called semester, I'm very happy to have Catherine Madden in person with me here in DC. Catherine, welcome to the show. Hello. How are you? I'm good, how are you? Fantastic.
Summer Break Plans
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm about to take a two month break from podcasting.
00:00:40
Speaker
What are you going to do with your time? Right. I want to stop talking to people and just be quiet. You can't do that. I want to just hang around and, you know, do, you know, other work stuff. Maybe some fun side projects. Maybe some, maybe some travel, maybe some sleep. So yeah. So July and August, I'll be taking off and I'll be back in September with new guests.
Meeting Catherine Madden
00:01:04
Speaker
But before we get there, we have lots to talk about. Yeah.
00:01:07
Speaker
Um, so, um, we met at tapestry. Well, no, we met in person in tapestry, but I've been following you on Twitter for awhile. Like this is really cool, what she does. And then I finally got to meet you and you were doing the, um, the drawings of the, of the talks at tapestry.
00:01:26
Speaker
Yes. So some people call them sketch notes, but basically I doodle what people say in a presentation setting to help me remember. But as it turns out, other people like to look at them as
Sketchnoting Journey and Impact
00:01:39
Speaker
well. Yeah. Then after the conference, you put all the different talks together, like one tapestry, super clever. And people got super excited about it. And I remember seeing people after like, how do I get this printed out? Yay. Yeah. Um, which I have been meaning to do. Do you think people would still.
00:01:55
Speaker
want a poster. I think people, coming from personal experience of making a poster, I think people like the idea of posters more than actually having them. I feel the same way. Yeah. But you know, you can always just give them the opportunity. Maybe a digital download. A digital download. There you go. Yeah. They could print out the five by seven version of it. Yeah. For their desk. How did you get into the sketchnoting?
00:02:23
Speaker
Uh, okay. So I went to a conference about five years ago, Tableau in Seattle. I don't remember how long ago that was, but I worked at Deloitte at the time and was super lucky to be able to go as one of like, you know, 20 team members that got selected. And so the way that you communicate at any big company these days is through PowerPoint. And I knew that I was going to have to present some of the things I heard.
00:02:53
Speaker
at the conference and I knew that I did not want to use PowerPoint. And I knew that I had this cool new iPad and this app that I had downloaded called Paper. And I thought it would be fun to just like challenge myself to pick up a new tool and learn how to use the iPad drawing app, not for any business reason, just for fun and artsy stuff, but to try a sketch journey. Cause I'd like seen people do it before and thought it could be interesting. And then my idea was just compile all those into
00:03:23
Speaker
like a sweet doodle presentation that I get to my team. And I had so much fun with it. It was, you know, it happened very spontaneously, but sort of the only way that I know personally to learn a new skill is to really like eliminate all other options and then just really dedicate and seem like the perfect time to do it is just like,
00:03:43
Speaker
four days only working on the iPad, you have to... You have to learn this tool right now. Yeah, you have to suck at it for a while and just deal with it because there's so many easier ways to do things these days. But what I learned doing the sketch notes is that there's a ton of cognitive benefits. You actually listen in a different way when people are talking because you have to synthesize and really understand what they're saying as opposed to compared to writing on your keyboard or typing, I guess.
00:04:12
Speaker
Um, you're not actually listening when you're typing when people talk because you're just basically, your mind is basically transcribing. You're just trying to transcribe. Exactly. So you have to switch into a much more active listening mode and way more like, I guess.
00:04:28
Speaker
of attentive processing to be able to synthesize information in real time and then organize it on a page in a way that makes sense. So that other people when they see it the next day. Yeah, they can follow along and you know, like know where to start and where to go along and see and then you know, you add
From Sketchnoting to Graphic Facilitation
00:04:46
Speaker
pretty pictures. Right, right. And then you make it look good. Yeah. So when you came back from that Tableau conference, how did your team respond to the doodles? They thought it was pretty cool, but I think I got a better response on Twitter.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, from the people at the conference and they were like, you know, because I just started tweeting them out. That was also new to me. I've never used Twitter before and
00:05:07
Speaker
just found a lot of friends online as we do in the database community. And began connecting with people through that. And because I think either you heard the content or you wish you were there, that was a much better place to share these. And there's also just this whole tangential field to consulting called graphic facilitation. Have you heard of it? Not really, no. So it's like these people, including myself,
00:05:35
Speaker
will show up in a meeting and put big swaths of paper on the wall and they draw the conversation as they hear it happening. So there's some people that do it more actively like they lead the conversation and they write and there's other people that just are sort of off to the side and they're more passively recording. So this is sort of a form of that is sketchnoting and it's a much different medium. So it's better for large conferences where people are
00:06:00
Speaker
you know, giving presentations, but not necessarily interacting with the audience and you want to sort of reach a broader group outside of who's there in
Professional Sketchnoting Insights
00:06:07
Speaker
the room. But then if you use like graphic facilitation, that's super helpful to do it actually in an analog format on the wall when you're trying to like make big decisions as a group or like accomplish something together. So when you're at a conference and you draw the talk out, do you also try to incorporate questions that people are asking questions?
00:06:28
Speaker
That depends on how much space I have. So tapestry, my goal is to like basically pump out every visual by the end of the question. So when the talk is over, I basically stop listening to the questions and I'm just trying to like polish it up and get on Twitter and post out the image. So you're basically trying to get this done in real time.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so for tapestry, that's like, that's a game I like to play because no one's paying me to do it. And so I just want to like, because there's so much social media chatter during tapestry, I try to be like right on time with things. Um, but if I get paid something, like miraculously now, sometimes people pay me to show up and draw. Um, I'll spend more time with it. And.
00:07:13
Speaker
upload everything at the end of the day or make sure it all looks good. Like the tapestry thing, you were uploading basically in real time, but then the full tapestry of all the talks, that was like a week later. Yeah. As soon as I got around to it. Right. Now you also spend time teaching people how to draw data vis and other mind mapping and all those sorts of things. You have a slide
00:07:37
Speaker
Skillshare. You have a Skillshare course. So can you talk a little bit about the challenges of getting people to be comfortable drawing and showing their drawings to others? Yes. So I have a advantage for a couple reasons. First of all, I studied art in school. So drawing was my favorite subject and I like to draw and I always create a notebook. And I started as a designer.
00:08:06
Speaker
as like, you know, the beginning of my career and I sort of woven around in terms of like consulting and doing more like user experience or project management. But everything I do is just anchored in like, here's how I'm thinking about it and using a drawing.
Drawing and Prototyping Concepts
00:08:24
Speaker
So at first I just thought, why can't anyone else do this like me? And as I became more sort of like senior in different organizations and I had teams under me,
00:08:35
Speaker
I noticed a lot of hesitation and a lot of, um, it's fear. Like people just don't want to look stupid in front of people as essentially the biggest thing. And when you're telling someone, if you show your idea to your boss and you've drawn it as opposed to putting together a very professional looking slide, they're going to resist that. Um, but there are no, there's two different ways that you can prove this to people. One is by making them do it and just showing them as if by example, that,
00:09:05
Speaker
You know, it's not actually that scary. People respond really well. But there is a author who's like a neuroscientist at Stanford. His name is Baba Sheev. And he has this theory of like the rough pitch. And he says, if you show someone a polished prototype or a polished product, they're going to quickly just look at it and only point out the flaws. And you've probably seen this before or down with that, where you're like, Hey, I just want to get your feedback on this concept overall.
00:09:34
Speaker
but don't worry about that we're missing data for seven years. They're like, I don't like this color. Why did you put that in bold? What about the idea? Yes. In my last role at Deloitte, I was the lead UX designer and I would review everyone's dashboards and all of their work and progress. It was so hard for me even to not focus on the fact that
00:10:02
Speaker
they chose a terrible font or whatever. Um, so I have this problem now in presentations because it's like, I see these terrible slides and I'm like, no, stop. And I end up not focusing on the content, which is, and I can't read an ugly slide. I just won't know. It's just terrible. She's painful. And yet the idea is maybe really good, which, which speaks to a couple of different things that we don't need to cover, but yeah, the workaround is to make it look like
00:10:28
Speaker
Can I say the S word? You can, you can. Make it look like shit on purpose. And then people will be like, okay, this is still a work in progress and people are naturally inclined to then help build on the idea with
Digital Drawing Techniques
00:10:41
Speaker
you. Right. It's so much more effective. And okay, so there's the, okay, from the, from the receiver's point of view, right? There's like, okay, this thing looks terrible, but it's about, so now I'm concentrating on the ideas. Yes.
00:10:55
Speaker
from the creator's position. Is there also this element of, I'm not worried about how precise this is gonna look? Like I know this line graph, for example, I know this trend is gonna go down. So I'm just gonna sort of draw a squiggly line that's going down.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yes. And does that in some ways carry over to when you have the way you do your drawings carry over to the final product or it's like I'm drawing this graph from this talk or even data but maybe the data is not that precise. Like does the drawing help you pull away from like worrying about over precision? Yeah, I mean I experienced this a lot of Deloitte when people would ask like
00:11:37
Speaker
right away, where'd you get that data? And you're like, okay. Again, can we separate from, you know, the tactical and logistical things and focus on the idea? And that's sort of after doing sketchnoting, another tangential benefit I noticed of drawing data more specifically. So then, you know, when I got bored of sketchnoting or, you know, when I just like want to try something different,
00:12:05
Speaker
I sort of experimented with more like data doodling and using observations and my surroundings and like marking down, like I see 15 people walk by, you know, whatever it is. And it's not precise data, like observationally you miss things, but it's just fun to play around with less precise sort of information, whatever your perception of it is. But if you do need to be precise,
00:12:33
Speaker
you could still make it look hand-drawn just to get the right feedback. Or even like we were talking about before painting the cord is like, it also just looks different. And it's kind of refreshing. No, it's certainly a different feel. Yeah. Absolutely. I had Mona Cholovy on the show a few weeks ago. Yeah, it was awesome. I mean, she's making very similar arguments. Do you, and I'm going to guess you do agree with this idea that if I draw a bar chart that the reader of that
00:13:03
Speaker
also feels like well is not is not saying oh well this number is super precise because it has that hand-drawn look or feel to it. Yeah I mean I guess to me that's just like less interesting
00:13:14
Speaker
I think, yes, psychologically you will know this was created by a human being. And if there's like chart lines behind it, like they did their best approximation, but like, you know, I don't have to take this for, hopefully if you're doing that, you're not making like a life or death decision. What's more interesting to me about the drawing of charts, particularly, for example, if you're an analyst or a data scientist, you know, your data pretty well.
00:13:44
Speaker
And you know, you can bring it into Tableau and you can create a bunch of visuals. But you are constrained to like the number of visuals that are in that tray and then however many hacks you know to create like another hack. And if you sort of illuminate that
00:14:03
Speaker
Constraint of all those different possibilities and only think about like what's in your mind Yeah, you're gonna have more ideas and different ideas that perhaps then you can figure out how to bring back into double and make later I can't tell you how many times I would like sketch something out of the whiteboard at Deloitte and the developer who I was sitting with it just like like No, no, don't tell me to make this now
00:14:28
Speaker
But there's a way. And if you start on paper, you just you what you end up with doesn't look like every other dashboard you've ever seen. Yeah, because you're thinking creatively without the confines of the tool. Exactly. Right. The same thing with PowerPoint. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned the paper app.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yes. Which is one of the many tools I think that you use. When you're working on the paper app, do you think of that as analog or do you think of that as digital or is it analog digital? Do you have a new word for it? We need to come up with a new word for it. Yes. So the one that I think best works is manual, but I don't know what the opposition word is, right? Because digital means, in my mind, a computer is thinking of what to create. Right.
00:15:11
Speaker
And analog would be, I'm thinking of what to create, but also physically physical paper, not paper, paper app. Right. Yeah. So perhaps manual works, but I think there is like a gap between, I'm creating something with my hand, but on a digital screen. Yeah.
00:15:29
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of people that just make it or prefer, you know, to draw on like a standard moleskin notebook. And I used to be that way. I have like thousands of sketchbooks, but it's so darn convenient to have everything in one thing on a little device. Do you want to talk about some of the things you really like about it? It doesn't have to be about paper, but I know because I know you use a bunch of different tools. You want to talk about some of the things that you really like about those tools? Yeah. And this is something I mean, maybe we can link to it with the show.
00:15:59
Speaker
I gave a talk at Tapestry two years ago where I demonstrated some of these things in paper. So first and foremost, you're just going to be more creative than you are using Tableau or Tableau to start. But then second, you get more creative because you can sort of play around with things and manipulate them and try different colors and just like make it
00:16:25
Speaker
look different or throw it all out because it's just a drawing and then start over. And so much about creativity is just producing more than you think. But then the last thing is the speed because this takes a little bit of muscle memory and it does take a little while to build up this skill. But for example, in paper, you can draw one person. Let's say a person is representing like
00:16:49
Speaker
And then you can duplicate that shape and, you know, kind of just using a touch gesture, create 10 of those and then circle that and duplicate that. So you have a hundred and you drew a hundred people in two seconds. And then you can just use like huge fills.
00:17:10
Speaker
create a background of color behind something, or what's really cool about paper is they have this diagramming technique which basically autocorrects your drawing and makes it look like snaps to an actual shape. So that's why I'm drawing to paper. It's a simple app. It's got a lot of power once you've gotten used to it. And most of the other drawing apps, I've had it for artists who want to make
00:17:35
Speaker
you know, beautiful replicas of a portrait. And you're using the Apple pen, Apple pencil. So before I move on to, I want to ask about some of these, you tell people who are not comfortable drawing, but before I do that, one more thing about tools. So can you talk a little bit about moving the drawings from the iPad or to a desktop where you may want to be, you know, putting into something else and to illustrator in design or you're doing the final touches. Like how, what does that process like?
00:18:04
Speaker
So for the most part, all of the drawing apps that are available export in a number of formats. So when working in paper, the preferable thing for me is to just do all of the editing manipulation right in the app. And then you can either export it to individual images, a PDF, or actually exports to PowerPoint slides. So each slide is the dimensions of the iPad screen with a PNG image on top.
00:18:31
Speaker
Which then you can like nicely add like annotations if say you created like a wireframe and you're not comfortable with your handwriting. You could draw the wireframe. And then one thing I was showing you earlier that is fun and everyone should know about if you use Adobe Illustrator at all is an app called Adobe Draw which takes what you
Encouraging Drawing Skills
00:18:54
Speaker
create on the screen with Apple Pencil and then exports it to Illustrator and everything is vector in a vector format. So there's tons and tons of anchor points on the screen, but it can then resize it. Yeah, it's pretty powerful. That's nice. Just so people have some other ideas or alternatives, what are some of the other apps that you like or use?
00:19:19
Speaker
One that's pretty cool in terms of marking up documents, like say you get a mock-up for a PowerPoint slide or something, I like to use Notability. It's good at reading different file formats like PowerPoint or Word.
00:19:36
Speaker
And you can just basically draw on top of things. And that's pretty nice. I mean, you can do that with most drawing apps, but Notability also has like the document organization. So that's better for like if you're more of an Evernote type of user. I think there is an Evernotes-ish app that I've ever used it. And then for the non iPad users, I've heard that Leonardo is a really good
00:19:59
Speaker
drawing out for the surface. I haven't tried it yet. Well, those are some good ones that people can check out. The last thing I wanted to ask you about is when you are teaching people to draw or encouraging them to draw and they push back because they say, well, I'm not a very good artist. I don't know how to draw. Like how do you get people over that barrier, over that hump of anyone can draw or you don't need to be embarrassed that you didn't go to art school?
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, so I emphasize first and foremost, it's important to think about drawing the verb and not drawing the noun.
00:20:36
Speaker
Rather than focus on the outcome, which could be a beautiful drawing of a lily that you did in kindergarten, you put on the fridge, think about the process and the benefits that you will gain from that. And we've talked a lot about all of those different benefits, but you're just going to have a better outcome, like at the end, whether it's a drawing or
00:20:57
Speaker
Tableau dashboard or whatever you create And then the second thing is it doesn't actually have to look realistic. So it just has to represent cognitively a basic concept that people will understand and there is an author that people either may know or might want to check out his name is Dan Rome and
00:21:20
Speaker
And he and a bunch of other people in the visual thinking space use this concept of a visual alphabet. So basically if you start drawing with only a circle, a square, a triangle, a line, and a dot, and maybe like a couple other simple shapes, you can draw anything. You can draw like, I mean, obviously you could draw a bar chart or a line chart, but you would also draw a horse and people will get it. They don't need to see every detail of like,
00:21:48
Speaker
the figure of a certain... The shape is enough. Yes. The basic shape. The combination, yeah. And so, I mean, that's something that...
00:21:58
Speaker
is an easy place to start for most people. And just like anything else, drawing is not a talent. It's not a gift. It is a skill. Just like learning how to swing a golf club, the more times you do it, the better you get. So when I mentioned like the only way I could actually teach myself how to use paper, I had to force myself
00:22:19
Speaker
Only use paper and I think that's where you run into problems if you've got like a deadline and you're like, I think I want to try out this new thing I want to try drawing that's this enough time. Yeah But setting aside maybe a side project or thinking about something that's like less pressure as a place to start
00:22:38
Speaker
And just actually committing to it would be what I would suggest. And, you know, like just whiteboarding with colleagues.
Role Blending in Multidisciplinary Teams
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, so what I hear a lot is a designer goes to talk to a researcher about the visuals in a paper and the, and the graphic designer will say, well, can you draw it for me? I don't quite understand. And the researcher will say, well, I'm not a, I'm not a designer. I'm not an illustrator. I really don't know how to do that. Like those are the sorts of tensions that I hear about all the time. Yeah.
00:23:04
Speaker
where this message of, it doesn't need to be polished, you need to just draw for me so I can get the message and get the understanding. Yeah. People resist that. And I think like when you have the title designer, everyone expects you to just like, whip out these amazing ideas out of nowhere. And you're like, okay, I'm not an expert in like insurance markets. Okay, like you have to take the time to explain that to me. And
00:23:30
Speaker
share with me how people in the insurance field typically like to communicate or understand information and tell me how you think your information should look. And then I have a great starting point and I can make it either better or different, but like fundamentally you have to make the effort. And what I'm like sort of recently fascinated by is I feel like this like whole role-based teamwork
00:23:55
Speaker
what I hope is happening now, but I've been freelancing for two years, so I don't really know. Is that there's like, the rules are blending because everyone is everything and some designers would be really resistant to this statement, but everyone is a designer and they have to be. Likewise, I bet some people would bristle if I said everyone's a data analyst, but like whether you want to be or not, you're doing data analysis.
00:24:22
Speaker
I don't know if everyone is sort of everything because I think, I think in some ways that's what we want things to be. And I think even people in organizations want that to be. But then at the end of the day, it's like, I have to go do this thing now, right? Yeah. And who's going to do what? Right. And who's going to do what? Because not everybody can be everything every day because stuff has to get done. And you know, the designer is going to be 10 times as fast as doing that thing in Illustrator because she's been doing it forever, right? She or he.
00:24:57
Speaker
But I think in general, at least the idea of people understanding and respecting what these other skill sets are, is really important. Like to be able to say,
00:25:08
Speaker
to a web developer, for example, can you create this website for me? And not to say to that person, can you create this website for me by the end of the day? Oh, it shouldn't take you very long. Right. It shouldn't take you very long. Oh, it's just easy. It's just a dashboard where like, Oh, did you do all of the, did you write the 30 page paper in an hour? No. So I think, I think I've seen more of that coming together a little bit more of the mutual understanding. Yeah. I think that's like what.
00:25:35
Speaker
And maybe that's the first step. I think it takes a lot of time to get the trust and the comfort and the rhythm working with a team of people to figure out when to come together and get everyone comfortable dipping their toes into the different ones. But yeah, you're totally right.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, not everybody can be the head of design and not everybody can be the head data analyst or head data scientist. Yeah. But, but everybody can at least appreciate the skills and the, and the demands involved in these different things.
00:26:08
Speaker
What other people do, but you also have to relinquish some of the control you feel like you hold. Yeah. And I think designers, especially, uh, I was gonna say researchers, especially. Well, this is my 30 page paper and I wrote it and this is my graph and just.
00:26:25
Speaker
put the right color on it, right? And it's like, just make it pretty. Just make it pretty. And so, yeah, so it goes both ways.
Podcast Conclusion and Future Plans
00:26:32
Speaker
Yeah. Great. Well, thanks for coming on the show. Always fun to see you. I know. And if you're on the West Coast, Katherine's moving to San Francisco this summer. So you should drop her line and have her come to your conference or
00:26:52
Speaker
I also still speak to people on the East Coast. She'll still speak to us on the East Coast. There's just a time delay. Yeah. So West Coast peeps, you're going to have a new fun date of his sketching graphic designer all around. There's no one. I do everything. You do everything. There's no one term that describes you. Well, thanks for coming on the show. This is great. Thanks for having me.
00:27:14
Speaker
And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. So this will be the last episode for the summer. I'll be back in September with a whole new slate of guests. So I hope you have a great summer and thanks for tuning in. If you have comments on the show, please do get in touch on the website or on Twitter. If you have thoughts on other apps that you like to draw or other processes or workflows that you have, please do let me let Catherine know.
00:27:41
Speaker
So, again, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks a lot for listening.