In Newark: Communicating Clean Energy With Facilitated Art
NEWARK, New Jersey — Newark’s Green Future Summit opened yesterday with Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, and other speakers making the case for installing clean energy principles to generate jobs in this upward-looking city. The issues discussed here are complex and often emotionally charged. The flow of information about jobs, building practices, labor, wages, zoning, resource recovery, clean energy and the rest requires careful attention. This is the nit and grit of urban economic development, but with a new foundation laid on environmental economics. 
One of the techniques used here to help attendees establish a conference narrative is a communications platform called graphic facilitation. A young Chicago-based artist, 34-year-old Brandy Agerbeck, (see pix above) has spent nearly every hour of the conference standing on her feet, colored felt marker in hand, drawing and writing on a landscape-size stretch of white paper.
Brandy, whose work is timed to start and finish with each panel discussion, begins with a blank paper canvas. When she finishes, 60 minutes later, the canvas is a colorful display of pictures and language, arrows and boxes and circles, color-coded. One idea links to the next, and priorities are conveyed by graphic attention and dimension. It’s a tremendously adept way to communicate big ideas that aren’t easy.
I had a chance to sit down with Brandy at the end of the day and learned more about her and graphic facilitation. Brandy told me she was raised in a Minneapolis suburb, educated at Grinnell College in Iowa where she studied art and printmaking. Graphic facilitation was founded on the West Coast 30 years ago, Brandy said, and gained credibility largely because of the work The Grove, a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in “visual planning and organization change.” Most American graphic facilitators still practice their craft on the West Coast, where they helped form a trade group, the International Forum of Visual Practitioners.
Brandy is one of nine graphic facilitators in the Midwest, she says, and has been in practice for 12 years. Three years ago she developed a curriculum and also began teaching the craft.
“Our world is more complex,” she said. “We can’t keep all the information in our head. I help people get out of their own heads. I’m there listening as an outsider and drawing what the group is saying so they can see it. We don’t live in a list world. That’s too linear. Being visual is more transparent.”
“I’m a synthesizer,” she said. “I listen for ideas that need to be bigger and bolder, and the small ideas that support those themes. I use color to organize. A lot of what is happening here is just being a sythntheis thinker.”
“There’s been a lot of story telling at this summit,” she said. “I take the lessons for Newark out of the stories. Each of the finished panels is a distillation. This work literally gets everybody on the same page.”
– Keith Schneider
Tags: Brandy Agerbeck, clean energy, graphic facilitation, Newark's Green Future Summit