How can we share our thoughts and feelings? How can we use words to describe what we’re truly passionate about? How can we express the fleeting impressions, the transient feelings that nourish our imagination and that we would like to translate into our professional ventures?
Creativity may be fickle and volatile, refusing to be pinned down by words and speech. We must therefore find other ways of communicating, test new languages. We may, for example, use our writing skills for a brainwriting or get on with a more practical approach to prototype solutions. There is, however, a tool which stands at the core of our imagination and thought processes, a tool that may turn out to be our most trusted ally in our search for optimal creativity: images!
Think about this old childhood picture that brings back to mind so many memories; or about the company logo that conveys everything you need to know about them. How about this painting whose plastic beauty leaves us speechless? Images can have artistic purposes, they can help us remember past events or serve the purpose of asserting one’s identity. Regardless of its specific role, images represent who we are and strengthen our creative abilities. It is also an incredible way to communicate, as they can instantly express what a thousand words could never aspire to fully describe.
Illustrating your Stormz workshops
There are three main ways to use images during a Stormz workshop:
- To complement your instructions and invitations
- To represent your clusters and canvas
- To illustrate your thoughts in your cards
In this article, we will mainly talk about the third one since you can now export, copy-paste and share your workshops with the cards’ attached files! We will show you how to use visual cues to enrich your collaborative workshops, should it simply be to live a shared experience, to reflect on your core values or to find inspiration.
Four workshops to share a common vision!
These four workshops will no doubt inspire your participants and unlock new creative possibilities for your team!
Visual brainstorming – Find inspiration by analogy
One of the main rules of brainstorming is to create an environment where the participants’ contributions echo one another, mutually reinforcing each other and bringing ideas to fruition up until your teams come up with the golden egg. In that perspective, rather than starting on a blank sheet of paper, it may be useful to summon images to provoke the unlikely encounter between seemingly unrelated elements and build innovative solutions from there.
In this workshop, the participants should implement practical solutions with a creative constraint of two inspiring images. Try out this workshop on Stormz!
MoodBoard – Visually illustrate the overall "feel" of an idea!
The MoodBoard is popular in creative circles and remains associated with designers, constantly surrounded as they are by images, substances and patterns of all sorts. Discovering someone else’s MoodBoard is like peeking into someone’s mind, its mood and intentions. This technique doesn’t only apply to creatives; it can bring huge benefits to whole teams, either to express some feelings or to build a common vision.
The MoodBoard will allow you to exchange all sorts of images and documents and to think, in a collaborative way, about those you feel closest to. Try out this workshop on Stormz!
Value Board – Define your values!
In this workshop, you will have to position yourself in regards to images already present in the workshop rather than having to find them in your environment (as required in workshops like the MoodBoard). Every image will question your perceptions and relationship to your surroundings, giving you the opportunity to reflect on your true motives.
This workshop will also make you work on your shared values and inspiration models in order to increase your every-day commitment to virtuous practices. Try out this workshop on Stormz!
Photostorming – Send a postcard to your team!
Postcards have the ability to gracefully conclude an awesome experience and allow us to share it with people we care for who couldn’t be there. Photostorming is an interactive, short and most engaging workshop where your participants will have to write a postcard of the event for colleagues who were not able to make it.
They will have to take a picture – or a selfie! – and write a few words explaining what they learnt from this experience and what they enjoyed the most about it. Try out this workshop on Stormz!
Images, pictures and all kinds of visual elements will turn your workshop into a truly creative and inspired experience and increase its spontaneity. If you would like to use canvases, whether they are specifically adapted to your own methodologies or standard ones, we kindly invite you to read this article!