Café Carto 2.0

As most of the readers of this blog, you are already familiar with MindMapping (”carte heuristique”). In anticipation to the meetup of the French visual thinking community (Cafe Carto 2.0, last Dec. 17th in La Cantine, Paris) where all participants were asked to present themeselves via a map, I wanted to look at different “mapping” techniques. The MindMapping meme / school being quite strong in that community (and to some respects in France : see Petillant), I have been revisiting other visual mind games and found quite a few.

• The first one is the calligram (already covered by Claude Aschenbrenner of SerialMapper, Peter Gabor of Design et Typo, or this very nice blog dedicated to it : Calligram Designers). Popularized by Dada artists in the beginning of the XXth century, it is an example of an old usage that has been developped thanks to new technologies (here photo-composition for printing). See more on this page from the University of Chicago Library. The most famous examples are from French surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

• The second one is the graphical version of “exquisite corpse” (”cadavre exquis”), another usage popularized by Surrealist artists like Andre Breton and Jacques Prevert. See as an example this drawing from the current virtual exposition on Prevert:

• Another popular visual mind game is the doodle (”griffonnage” or “crayonnage” in French), that designer Dennis Hwang made a key part of the Google brand. During the last seminar I attended there were a good 5 doodlers in the room (at least that left their doodles behind them …). Not to be mixed up with the very useful meeting sscheduling tool, it is a key part of school age : who hasn’t doodled on his books or notebooks ? Many still do as an adult, during conferences, phone calls, etc… Some psychologists and cogniticians have dwelved on why we doodle, and what it tells about someone’s profile or state of mind (the “alphabet” of doodles.

• Maybe the last game I found is rebus, a visual word puzzle. Like most games, often played in childhood, it enabled me to work with pictures, so that’s the technique I used for my map (see below). I later discovered that rebus generator http://www.rebus-o-matic.com/, but because mine is a mix of French and English … and I had specific images in my mind, I wouldn’t have used it anyway.