papershine

Recording the employment policy discussion noted below.

Thanks be to Trish for the photo.

…with the crazy guys in movies who inveitably demonstrate their mental imbalances by trying to unravel dense, dizzying codes or elegant mathematical proofs using yarn, tape and pictures from magazines pinned to all the visible wall space in their house, garage or bunker.

Truth of it is, there’s no better way to see information, particularly when you’re looking for the way it flows and fits together. The crazy code above is the early layouts of a course book for Positive & Productive Meetings. That’s approximately 48 pages of information and illustration represented on my living room wall.

One trick I’ve discovered for sharing raw form layouts like this digitally is to use Word or PowerPoint and to type the general outline in some huge, huge typeface, one topic per page or slide. When people view it on their screen at 5 or 10% they will see the overall structure, but no detail. At long last, I’ve found a use for PowerPoint. And in PP, you can move things around a bit more easily.

It can easily go overboard. This was a twenty page layout of a ISP guide book for OTAC tucked in a corner of the dining room. Sometimes papers fall and drift gently to the floor, like leaves in autumn.

Last week I recorded a day long round table discussion on enhancing competitive employment opportunities for people with developmental disabilities. Thirty-five local leaders in the field from Oregon and Washington met and discussed the challenges that people face in finding meaningful work they enjoy that pays. It was an extremely professional discourse, moderated by C.J. Webb from OTAC, focusing on policy inititiaves and the issues of putting effective policy into widespread practice.

I tried to keep my recording balanced between image and word. Policy discussion doesn’t always suggest vibrant imagery, but the conversations about work and people lent themselves to pictures. My favorite image was one of a person being given a job, that turned out to be a bottomless pit, a reminder that too many people with disabilities are placed in jobs and left there, without thought of growth and development or a career path. By many’s people’s reckoning, getting any job is supposed to be good enough.
At the end of the session, the group did a ’round’ with everyone suggesting policies, practices or strategies that would help Oregon change its policy around employment. This was rapid fire and I stuck to just writing the words, as fast as I could.

I used a nice Sakura marker for black outlines and soft pastels for the highlights. Lovely to look at, but not the best arrangement for retouching in PhotoShop. The colors in these digital images are at once faded and harsher than the paper.

Paper is shine.

Image links to larger, legible versions of some of the day’s conversation.