By Sombra González
Everyone has a story to tell.
Everybody can draw.
Under these assumptions we shaped our last community event in Bern. Located at the inspiring office of Nothing Interactive we enjoyed an inspiring evening full with stories, drawing and portraits.
Our starting point for these Rebel Stories has been the highly recommended book “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls”, a compilation of hundred bedtime stories about the life of extraordinary women from the past and the present. Since we do believe there is a rebel inside everyone, we encourage the attendees to draw their own portraits as superheroes to show their superpowers, strengths and weaknesses.
Lara Portmann shared with us her own story about gender diversity at Nothing Interactive. Five years ago Lara was the only woman on board, nowadays women are almost forty percent of the employees. But how did they manage to improve their women quota? As Lara explained to us, everything started just talking about the issue and given the problem some visibility within the company.
As we said, everyone can draw but not all of us know how.
Visualization techniques are powerful tools to make information understandable. Monica Ray Scott introduced us how we can effectively communicate through visualizing and why we should take advantage of it during meetings and project’s development. She was supported by Andrea Berset who did the live graphic recording from her tips and suggestions.
Following Andrea made us a quick introduction about drawing from characters and how to use basic forms into our portraits. As she said – “Visualizing can be learned”. And so we did. Learning by doing.
Time for drawing: we all tried our best to set down our capabilities, superpowers and challenges on paper. With the resulting portraits we built a stunning wall gallery packed with brave and rebel stories.
And after a short plenum where some of the portraits were presented by their authors was time for our networking Apéro. This time we could enjoy the vegan treats from co-kitchen, simply delicious!!
Thank you all for the inspiring evening and especially to those who helped us during the event and to our sponsor Nothing Interactive. We hope to see you soon in some of our future events. Stay tuned joining our newsletter or following us in Facebook and Twitter. And most importantly: keep on being a rebel.
You can check all photos from this event in our gallery.
