Philip Bakelaar's blog

On Wednesday morning about 40 visual practitioners gathered to discuss the development of AI and what it means for us. Panelists discussed various dimensions including using text AI for business development, visual AI for ideation and tile generation, and explored what is going on in these large language models. There was good discussion about copyright and use issues. The recording is available under the "members" tab to both basic and premium members. More to come!

Members, have you filled out your online profile? And if you have, we've added a simple way for you to format testimonials you might want to include.

When you are signed in and go to your profile, you will see the "About" section, and in the formatting options you will see what look like quotation marks. This will automatically apply formatting that makes your testimonial stand out.

This is what it looks like publicly in the image below.

I was preparing for a meeting with student interns where I was going to introduce visual methods for their summer program. I asked GPT-4 (artificial intelligence) a simple question and got an interesting answer. Phil Guo, Roy Blumenthal and I are doing a zoom call on May 31 to talk about our experiences with AI. Here's the answer I got...

Why is visual practice useful?

Visual practice, or visual thinking, is useful for a variety of reasons in different contexts, whether it be in education, business, or personal growth. Here are some reasons why it is beneficial:

ARE YOU WONDERING HOW AI IS AFFECTING OUR FIELD?

We are working on a special IFVP panel event to discuss how text and visual AI can and is being used by our community. Roy Blumenthal, Phil Guo and Dr B met this morning to begin planning.

So recently some of the IFVP board have begun to do an audit of our video resources. We're working to make them more accessible to our members, and to encourage others to join to have access to them. We started with our Online Learning Series, and thanks to the diligent work of Alexandria Oporto d'Ugard we've tagged 40 videos that we've developed over the years and created an initial draft of a sortable database.

WE'RE LOOKING FOR INITIAL PROPOSALS FOR THE 2024 GLOBAL SUMMIT! People are already asking where we will gather, which is great! The IFVP board has appointed a team of four members as the proposal review committee. We are hoping to decide at the June 2023 board meeting on a recommendation from the review committee. Our deadline for proposals is May 29. You don't need to have all of the extensive details for this initial proposal. The review committee may contact you for further information.

The board of directors met on Saturday, April 22. We are excited that there are many renewals of membership, often at the two year premium level, and often by long time highly experienced practitioners. This helps us to see that we are coming back from covid and have a strong role to play in the global field.

The IFVP Institute board met today to review progress on the Certification project. We continue to work with INIFAC on partnering for them to provide the formal certification based on our Visual Practitioner Competency Model.

Time zones are challenging! We are grateful that our board members from Asia are willing to stay up late, and not only be present but be fully engaged in our work together. Jihyunn Lee created the image above, and Phil Guo shared this image of his workspace during our meeting. What a gift to work with this committed group!

At the March board of directors meeting we set up a four person Global Summit Proposal Review Team. The four members represent Germany, Peru, Canada and Brazil. We are looking for proposals and will send potential host sites materials on request. Hosting a global summit involves a great deal of planning and preparation and we would look for locations that have members available to be the local planning team.