See you at the Show Don’t Tell!

By Juan Velasco.

It’s a long-held tradition that I associate with the coming of the spring. Every March, as I have done for the last 11 years, I’ll drop whatever I’m doing in Washington, where I live, and head to Pamplona to join my old friend John Grimwade and teach the Show Don’t Tell workshop. “Teach” doesn’t really explain it since we learn as much as anyone else and get to spend time with some terrific graphics professionals from all over the world. The workshop is, of course, part of the Malofiej conference. At the same time, our friends Alberto Cairo and Geoff McGhee teach the web/tablet side of the workshop.

The attendees are as diverse as their international origin would have you guess. We have our veterans and regulars (our loyal Malofriends from Sweden, Norway, Germany…), who by now are as familiar with our hand sketching exercises as they are with the staff at the Jumping Jester, the unofficial bar and headquarters of the infographics world (and so are we!) Over the years, professionals from all over the world have joined us: Argentina, Germany, Costa Rica, Brazil, India, England, Portugal, Oman, Spain, the UAE, the Netherlands… Let’s say it’s a mini World Cup of infographics where we get to play with an enthusiastic group of graphics friends for three days.

For every Show Don’t Tell and Interact Don’t Show, we plan exercises that allow us to go out and enjoy some amazing places around Pamplona, always with the excuse of making a graphic about it. We have visited the stunning Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the route of the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the wineries and beautiful castles around the region. We crawled under the ground to look at how the infrastructure below the city is organized; we even watched a live surgery operation at the local hospital! In every case, our Malofriends act as reporters, gathering information, asking questions, taking notes and making quick sketches. Then, back at the Journalism School, we all come up with ways to explain what we learned with infographics. The brainstorming is always fun and often we surprise each other when we explain how we work differently in different countries or organizations. Never mind that everyone may speak a different language in each exercise group, the visual thinking always shines!

Our breaking news exercise, when we do it, is as fun as it is feared, because of the frantic pace and the less than helpful teachers (us). We deliberately cause some confusion with different versions of an event, and abuse some volunteer students in the process by sending them out in the cold (or the heat; in Pamplona you’ll never know) so that they can act as “witnesses” to be found and interviewed by the workshop participants.

After three days, when the majority of participants at the Malofiej arrive in Pamplona for the conference, we are already good friends and speak the same language (with no little help of a few pints or gin-tonics at the Jumping Jester). It’s a unique experience; the anecdotes and stories are countless, but I hope I’ll see you there to tell you in person!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2011 at 12:46 pm. It is filed under blog, slide and tagged with Don´t Tell!, Show. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.