[Sigia-l] We could just use whiteboards instead.

[Marc Rettig]

I'm a big fan of analog media when it comes to collaboration. I take
Ziya's point about the advantages of digital, but in practice I find
myself in line with the sort of things Chad Jennings describes. I'm sold
on the way Big  Stuff On TheWalls changes the conversation among the
team, the way it leads to new conversations, the way it helps immerse
the team in all the ideas.

As an illustrated, informal and semi-sappy point comment on this, those
of you who are enough interested in this to put up with a 1.9M download
might look at an old "show-and-tell" I did for one of the Advance for
Design summits:
http://www.marcrettig.com/writings/rettig.walls.72dpi.pdf

Somewhere around here I have a little movie of a Vice President of a
financial services firm getting so involved in what was happening on the
wall that he grabbed the marker from one of the team and started drawing
his vision of the connections between user activity and information.
This was a *good*  thing,
because it was a moment in which our stakeholder had become a passionate
stakeholder. I give large credit for this to the fact that the wall
integrated large and fine-grained info, strategic and tactical views,
data
fragments and narrative synthesis. That richness gave us and him a sense
of immersion we couldn't have achieved with say, spreadsheets and
diagrams.

Er, I hope you'll permit me one more link. This is a case study in which
analogness on the wall figured prominently in the success of the design:

http://www.marcrettig.com/writings/DUX_Herzfeldt_Rettig.pdf (713k)

Grins,
Marc Rettig