Artrain’s challenge

As part of the VizThink 08 conference, philanthropic partners were selected to take part. One of those selected was Artrain USA. For thirty seven years Artrain has brought artwork to rural communities around the country in an antique train.

“Artrain USA is America’s Hometown Art Museum. A nonprofit organization, its mission is to enrich lives and build communities through the arts. As an art museum housed in vintage rail cars and traveling via the nation’s railways, Artrain USA brings world class art exhibitions and art education programs to communities and their residents. Artrain USA delivers exceptional opportunities for learning, growth and art appreciation while encouraging the development of local cultural programs and organizations.”

Artrain visited the town I live in. I was very impressed with the quality of art, the way they had installed it in the train, and how the staff engaged us when we were visiting. So I was particularly thrilled when I discovered Artrain was the organization I would be working with for the VizThink Challenge.

A Changing Environment for the Train

With changes in the rail system, Artrain will no longer be able to be pulled around to the various places in the country. Big changes are in store as the organization shifts to delivering services on a set of high tech truck trailers.

Tom Crawford the CEO of VizThink introduced the Artrain team. Debra Polish, the executive director prepared a compelling presentation about the work of Artrain. She was joined by Annie Castellano from Switch, which is the company designing the new trucks. One of the board members, Brian Tolle also joined her to help us better understand the opportunities and challenges Artrain faces in this transition. The challenge they put forth:

• How do we visualize the power of the Artrain experience to engage individual and corporate sponsorship?

There is a 20 minute video of the presentation on the Artrain challenge on the VizThink wiki. They also have an information page where there are more specific details about the transition.

VizThink Challenge

Where do we come in? Tom Crawford challenged three of the VizThink facilitators to participate in a live session.

Session Description: Often, it’s not about the tools we use, but the process we go through to come up with visual thinking solutions. This segment is designed to show just that, and we’ve got three great people to help us with that including Jamie Nast, Christine Martell, and David Sibbet. We’re going to put these three leaders on the spot by bringing them up on stage and presenting them with a real world communications problem. They’ll have never seen it before and have no time to prepare. Their job, with your help, will be to come up with a visual thinking solution, and we’ll look at how they approach it and what they come up with. However, they won’t be in it alone. Each of the tables in the audience will work on the problem too. This segment promises to be a fascinating look into the similarities and differences between visual thinking approaches.

Jamie Nast took six people, and with her breakout session co-facilitator Susie Watson, worked on creating a mind map with Mindjet software. David Sibbet took 12 people, and worked with his facilitation team to come up with a series of graphic murals. You can see a video of the overview of our results on the wiki.

VisualsSpeak’s part

There were almost 400 people at the conference. The other sessions took around 24 people. We had the rest. There were 42 table groups in the room. We gave each group a VisualsSpeak ImageSet containing the same 200 images. They had 30 minutes to select images individually, tell each other the story of the images they selected, then come up with an image together. All in response to the question, how do we visualize the power of the Artrain experience to engage individual and corporate sponsorship?

The VisualsSpeak Data

Each group had a sheet of paper to write a summary of what their table discovered. We numbered the tables, and took photographs of each group image. Two of the tables quickly described their images in the short reporting time each group had in the big session. While the individual stories can be interesting, the real value in the data is in the collective. The patterns across the entire data set is where the deep wisdom lies.

The Data Analysis

What are we looking at? There is information in several places:

• the written reports individually
• the themes across the written reports
• the patterns of how the images are constructed
• the patterns of which images were used

We are pouring through the raw data, and there is some fascinating and insightful things we are seeing already. The next challenge will be how to translate what we are seeing into reports that will be useful to the Artrain team as they move forward. Stay tuned, more to come as the process continues.