Behind the Scenes - Visual facilitation for the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People
Visual facilitation - co-creating a shared vision
As a graphic recorder I interpret others’ thoughts and words into imagery on their behalf. When I step into a more interactive role, I can use live visualisation as a facilitation tool, engaging directly with participants in all types of settings to help them surface their own visual interpretations. I can support groups, teams and individuals into their own co-creative visual thinking, to lend their ideas more clarity and communicability.
To understand what this looks like, in this article I take you behind the scenes of a visual facilitation project with one of my clients, the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People. We’ll walk through the stages and outcomes of our work together, as well as the thinking that went into them.
Scoping the Project
Early March 2025 I was contacted by NICCY, the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People. NICCY safeguards and promotes the best interests of children in Northern Ireland, and advocates for their voices to be heard and their rights to be upheld. For this project, they were interested in ways of visually capturing the experiences of a forthcoming all-day event on children’s rights and the environment. They had spent the better part of a year organising this event in consortium with several organisations, led by a panel of young people. It was to take place at the end of the month. Specifically, they were looking for a way of visualising the learning experiences from the day in the form of a resource that could be used after the event.
Normally, the standard offer would be to provide graphic recording at an all-day event like this. The resulting visual summary could be shared as the post-event resource capturing the impressions from the day. However, an initial scoping call with the client revealed that the event would largely take the form of decentralised, parallel workshops and very little plenary contact, apart from the opening speeches and one plenary presentation. That meant that I on my own couldn’t cover the real substance they wanted visualised, as I couldn’t be in all the workshops at once.
They had a healthy budget at their disposal, so we had the opportunity to brainstorm some alternative approaches. We agreed that it would be great opportunity to involve some young people in the creation of visual summaries at the different workshops. This would require training them up in the basics of visual notetaking, which I offered to do. That way we could ‘divide and conquer’ on the day, while also equipping the young people with a cool new skillset that might serve them well in their own schoolwork or studies.
Then we turned our attention to the post-event resource they were looking for. We determined in our scoping call that it would ideally be some sort of platform that children and young people, feeling overwhelmed and unsure of how to help with the climate crisis on a local level, could come to for signposting to different ways to get involved in Northern Ireland. This ‘landscape’ of opportunities would be where the organisations and initiatives who had hosted workshops during the event could showcase their work, and could be contacted for follow-up involvement.
Over the course of this call, we’d gone from a simple run-of-the-mill graphic recording, to a visual thinking crash course, coordinating a team of visual notetakers on the day, preparing an interactive illustrated ‘landscape’ of the environmental initiatives involved in the event, and integrating the work of the freshly fledged visual notetakers into this interactive landscape. Supporting others to visualise their own ideas and together co-create a shared vision, or in other words, visual facilitation!
Graphic Recording - visually summarising on everyone’s behalf
Visual Facilitation - co-creatively visualising ideas
Preparing for the event
In the weeks leading up to the event I prepared the illustration of the interactive landscape that we would populate with content from the event. In co-creative conversation with the client we had chosen to go with a bird’s eye view landscape of Lough Neagh. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in Ireland and the British Isles and the centrepiece of Northern Ireland, has been plagued in recent years by suffocating blue algae blooms that threaten the biodiversity of an ecosystem which has endured since the last Ice Age. It has supported an age-old fishing and glass eel industry, and is the setting of local folklore such as the myth of Lí Bann the mermaid. Lough Neagh was to be the symbolic focus of the event as a local ecosystem under severe pressure from climate change, human pollution and mismanagement – a climate justice issue anyone at the conference would know about and could get involved with.
Two days before the event I came to the NICCY office to train up some of the NICCY staff in visual notetaking in a 3-hour workshop. I’ve run this workshop many times before in different formats, including as a two-day in-house training in Scotland, as a specialised two-day online workshop for Ocean scientists, as a module in my Visual Practice Apprenticeship programme, and as a 1-hour crash course as part of a ‘Knowledge Expedition’ during an Art of Hosting training. All these workshops contain a number of core elements:
Addressing the ‘creative trauma’ ingrained in a majority of people and getting past the ‘blank page syndrome’ with some accessible visual icebreaking exercises
A quick crash course in drawing using the principles of ‘Constructive Drawing’, an easy method for drawing any object or abstract concept by using only three basic shapes: circle triangle and square. It’s a great way to level the playing field, whether people consider themselves as visual thinkers (most people) or think they are terrible at drawing (also most people).
Developing an ‘image library’ relevant to our work or subject matter, as a ‘mental rolodex’ of visualisation ideas to access quickly whilst keeping up live with spoken content. In this case, we collectively came up with some simple icons representing concepts we were likely to encounter during the workshops at the event.
Then I throw in some basic layout tips, in this case for sketch notes (mini, notepad-sized versions of graphic recordings) as well as mind maps as an alternative method for structuring information in a visual way.
Finally depending, on the audience, I can add in some theory, for example on the types of listening involved as well as the different types of visual thinking I work with.
The image library, sketch note lay out and mind map principles we covered during the workshop
Visual facilitation at the event
On the morning of the event itself, hosted at the Greenmount campus of the College of Agriculture and Horticulture, we were forced to improvise as the young people originally assigned as notetakers didn’t turn up. The NICCY staff rounded up some unsuspecting substitutes, mainly NICCY colleagues and members of the youth panel. With no notice, a 25 minute crash course from me (consolidating the 3 hour workshop from two days before on the spot), and no prior experience, this ad hoc team of very brave first time sketch noters rose to the challenge.
“I’m warning you, I really can’t draw,” piped one at the start. “That is the first thing we’ll be working on, that attitude!” An energetic 25 minutes followed in which I was able to win them all over to both the value of visual thinking, and the tentative belief that they were capable of at least giving it a go. I was thrilled and so impressed when the sketch notes starting pouring in after the first round of workshops. By the end of the day, we had a stunning gallery of colourful visual summaries thanks to their heroic efforts. This was an exciting example of when visual facilitation works: to empower people to tap into their own creativity and visual thinking skills.
I also contributed two sketch notes made during the two walking tours of the Greenmount campus that was hosting the event, taking one for the team as it was raining outside. My main job on the day however was to coordinate the impromptu sketch noter team, look after the morale and ensure a steady supply of markers and paper, and to curate a gallery at our ‘Visualisation Station’.
Post-production
In the days following the event, I digitised all the sketch notes and other content from the day to integrate them into the visual landscape I had prepared, watching it come alive with colour and inspiration and input from the event.
I have made interactive embeddable visuals like this before, for Diabetes UK in the spring of 2020 and for Shared Assets UK for their Land for Who project in the summer of 2021. Ever since I have been harping on about the potential of this to some of my (returning) clients, and I was excited that NICCY was willing to take the leap and try this as an alternative format. The end result paid off! Here is the co-created, visually facilitated interactive landscape of NICCY’s climate justice event in its full multimedia glory!
The people at NICCY were delighted, as was I. The proof is in the pudding, and with some wonderful feedback::
“The only feedback is that everyone loves it! Our chief executive reminded me that I was banging on for a few years about how there must be a better way to visually represent reports and events. I’m happy you have finally made this come to life! We’re really delighted with everything you did. The youth panel (and staff) are keen to keep practicing during regular meetings. You’ve started us on a path of a new way of working.”
A selection of other visual facilitation jobs
