Sketchnoting Manifesto
Highlights from a design conference held by Designers + Geeks
Held at the beautiful Autodesk Gallery overlooking San Francisco’s Ferry Building and Bay Bridge, Manifesto was an exciting Thursday afternoon for 250 product thinkers, designers, and makers in design and technology to come together to share, learn, and collaborate. With 4 keynotes and 3 panels on a spread of topics including product design, behavior design, customer retention, and disruption, the conference was the perfect opportunity for me and others from Salesforce UX to meet some inspiring folks in our field.
Between all the talks and mingling, it can sometimes be tricky to capture the content of these cool live events. Photographs don’t really say much, and videos can be too long to watch. Meanwhile, hand-scrawled notes scribbled on a page are often too cryptic or personal, and forgotten about after the fact. In light of this, I’ve actually always thought of visual note-taking as a fantastic medium for capturing live events. It’s essentially cartoon journalism: easily consumed, easily shared.
To test out my hunch, I decided to take my visual note-taking skills out for a spin during Manifesto last week. Here are my sketchnotes from some of the keynote presentations.
Chris Anderson: Product Design
Author of “The Long Tail”, Former editor-in-chief of WIRED, Founder of Geekdad, Co-founder of 3DRobotics
Chris shared with us the story of how he started his company 3DRobotics 6–8 years ago, and how different getting to V1 is today. A natural storyteller, Chris emphasized “peace dividends of the smartphone wars” and how much of where we are now harkens back to 2007 with the rise of hardware.
Brian Mathews: Product Design
VP/Group CTO, Information Modeling and Platform Group at Autodesk
Brian highlighted 5 key tech trends in design that he’s seeing come to life through his work at Autodesk and beyond. I was particularly blown away by some of the things people are applying technology to — things like self-assembled DNA, 3D printed stem cells, and the photogrammetric reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Nir Eyal: Behavior Design
Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, nirandfar.com
Nir distilled years of his research, consulting, and practical experience into a passionate half-hour explanation of the hook, a model to help unpack how habits are formed and sustained, which can be used as a framework to create habit-forming products. It was awesome to learn about the hook model straight from the source!
Thanks to Manifesto’s keynotes and panels, my mind is now bubbling around with all these juicy concepts and ideas. I’m definitely keeping my eyes peeled for the next round of the conference. In the mean time though, armed with tips on getting to V1 and designing the latest disruptive/habit-forming/awesome technologies — I’m inspired to go forth and make!
Curious about sketchnoting? Check out the Sketchnote Army and become a Whiteboard Warrior!
Thoughts on visual note-taking? Want to chat more about design, illustration, and/or grab some tea? I’d love to hear from you☺Tweet me @cindyjchang
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