Refreshments and sandwiches from 18:00.

BCS SPA SG AGM from 18:15 to 18:30

• Welcome and Introductions
• Apologies for absence
• Minutes of the previous AGM
• Matters arising from the minutes
• Chairman's report
• Treasurer's report
• Election of committee
• AOB 
  
  PLEASE NOTE - Mike Hill has announced that he is standing down as Treasurer, but all positions on the committee are open for election. If you wish to stand, please announce your intention to the Secretary (Mohinder Khosla - see http://bcs-spa.org/ for contact details) before the meeting. 
  

Sketching as a Tool for Visual Thinking and Notetaking

Synopsis

We live in a visual age where it's crucial to develop the capacity to think visually - whether making a presentation, developing a business idea or even doing something as simple as laying out a report. Visual-Thinking guru Dan Roam argues in his book The Back of the Napkin that sketches are more effective in summarising information than graphs and bullet points. The notion "But I can't draw", which puts people off drawing, is a myth. We all are born with great visual intelligence and most of us enjoyed drawing, painting or modelling in our pre-school years.

Sketching may not come as naturally to some as it does to others, but nonetheless it is another way of visualising your creative thinking. These are highly sought after skills in the current labour market. Although analytical skills are absolutely essential, they are no longer sufficient. Developing our visual thinking improves our communication and collaborative capacity that may land a job or boost career prospects.

Sketching is considered to be one of the best ways to give life to our ideas, aid visualisation and help to develop and validate new concepts. Drawing a picture is one of the collaborative techniques taught by some agile coaches to bring fun into retrospectives in teams where communication is a problem.

The workshop aims to cover exercises on sketching that emphasise the importance of the cognitive shift to R-mode, emotions and visual images for visual thinking. The three basic steps of visual sketch notetaking will be explained. The building blocks of visual drawing will be introduced and practised in teh workshop. For visual note taking, text and images will be used to aid learning. Hints and tips will be given for future practice.

Presenter

For the past 28 years, Mohinder Khosla has been an international speaker, software developer, DBA, freelance software tester and application support engineer in telecommunications. Experienced in the development of asset, product, personal, organisational and financial systems from inception to delivery, using a wide variety of operating systems, technical stacks, programming languages, test tools and test automation frameworks, following both waterfall and agile lifecycles.