Simon Kneebone – cartoonist and illustrator

Conference poster

The Local Government Managers Australia (SA Division) 2014 conference Active Citizenship – The Future of local Government had a facilitated ‘World Cafe’ as its final session. There were two tables for each of five key questions and participants ‘speed dated’ their way around the tables; the responses to the questions reported back to the conference at the end of the hour session. It is an intense brainstorming process and an effective way of collecting the feelings of the group, at the end of a conference, on the main issues.

Although I do cartoon/illustrate as a form of recording at conferences I don’t specialise in graphic recording – recording people’s responses on the spot, in real time, in a coherent graphic. There are a number of very skilled graphic recorders around. So for me, I needed to do some preparation for recording the responses at the end of the Active Citizenship ‘World Cafe’.

Knowing the five questions beforehand, I was able to get a graphic in mind for each. The facilitator suggested basing them on conference’s ‘people tree’ poster image – a great suggestion as it was a good image to borrow and play with. Once the session started I moved around, listening in on each table, to get a feel for what was being said. From this I saw that three of my graphic ideas seemed to fit, but I had to rethink the other two. In the times when participants were changing tables I drew up my images on butcher’s paper – leaving room to add in the actual responses. This paid off. Although it was a rush as the reporters read out their lists, I was able to get down most of the responses to each question, incorporating them into each graphic.Here are three of them…