Hello! I'd like to tell you about the IFVP Institute in this blog and invite you to consider how you might participate in our work!
Our current board is composed of four IFVP members.
Phil Bakelaar (Dr B) serves as the current and founding president.
Renatta Algalarrondo serves as the current and founding treasurer.
Susan Kelly has joined as a board member and has been providing excellent material for our website.
David Sibbet has joined as a board member and has been instrumental in linking us to projects through his GLEN Global Learning and Exchange Network.
We meet monthly to discuss our goals, vision and plan for ongoing development.
There are three key projects underway at the moment.
- A competencies project has been in process for some time that will provide developmental, mentoring, informational and certification guidance for those seeking to enter and grow in visual practice.
- An academic bibliography continues to grow which gathers scientific and other published literature relevant to our practice.
- An initial involvement with a project on developing visual materials to support wildfire resilience in underway.
More history:
During a strategic planning meeting some years ago, the IFVP decided it would be useful to have another chartered organization devoted to a more general purpose of promotion of visual practice rather than diluting the business promotion function of the IFVP. While this is somewhat confusing, the IFVP was originally chartered as a business promotion organization under US law, which limits our ability to seek grants and offer any tax deductions to donors. The IFVP Institute was chartered in 2019 to address this.
The IFVP Institute is formed for charitable and educational purposes. More specifically, the IFVP Institute is organized and operated to promote the development and application of visual thinking and practices, such as graphic recording and graphic facilitation, through sponsored research, public education programs, and related activities.
Visual practice is a rapidly growing field with applications in business, government, nonprofit, and educational sectors. The origins of this field date back to the beginnings of human civilization when cave paintings and hieroglyphics served as the early means for humans to express and spread ideas and to communicate. In modern times, as organizations grew in their size and complexity, there has been a resurgence of interest in the visual practice field, as companies struggled to apply whole system approaches to increasingly complex problems.
The broad appeal of the visual practice medium rests in its characteristic combination of visual and verbal elements, which work to support a shared understanding and collaboration.
The IFVP Institute will conduct these activities both domestically inthe United States and internationally, particularly in countries in which IFVP has an established presence. The IFVP Institute will bring together students, teachers, and practitioners in the visual practice community.
In 2008 David Sibbet published a peer reviewed article in the journal Theory and Practice entitled "Visual Intelligence: Using the Deep Patterns of Visual Language to Build Cognitive Skills."
In that article, he discusses a major shift in his thinking about how visual language works. This insight led him to focus on the process of using visual language, and not just the artifact. He writes
"The shift to looking at graphics as a process was profound for me. I realized that both the input process of perceiving visual information and the output process of creating visual displays fell into universal patterns, and that by looking at graphic displays as artifacts of a process, and holding the process as more fundamental than the form, I could begin to make sense of the hundreds of resulting formats and designs that I had been collecting."
IFVP Institute has collected references to over 100 journal articles, periodical articles and books that provide a research basis for visual practice. Take time to look over our research bibliography, and like our page here to be notified when we post more quick quotes from this material.
- Philip Bakelaar's blog
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