NOW IT’S YOUR TURN

We’ll start by diagramming something you’ve done recently. It could be breakfast, or a conversation you had with a loved one. Below, you’ll find a simple graph to copy onto your own piece of paper. Time runs from left to right. What will the Y-axis represent? If it’s breakfast you’re diagramming, why not choose wakefulness/grogginess? Next, choose a shape that can stack nicely from left to right. We like boxes, but you could use a line or a wave of varying thickness. Each instance of that shape will represent a moment in the event –  say: coffee, then eggs, then coffee, then toast. Then layer one more parameter onto the shape. If it’s breakfast, how about sugar content? or maybe it’s something more abstract, like tastiness?

We will start with a simple graph. Print these worksheets, or, on a piece of paper, or on an online whiteboard, such as www.miro.com, draw the following:

Excellent! Now let’s try something a little more freeform…

We’re going to make two symbols and then have them interact with one another. First, we start with a symbol. Circles and squares are great to begin with, but if you’re feeling inspired, head for something a little more unusual. What are you representing? It might be a person’s experience using something you have designed. It might be an idea, such as freedom, which varies depending on what constricts that freedom. It might be a person’s body, which is in a changing condition over the course of exercise or stimulus. Whatever the symbol is, draw it first in its “neutral” state.

Then, before we do anything, let’s take a look at what parameters you want to work with. If we can use the Subway Rider Diagram on the previous page for inspiration, we see several parameters. These are size, color, texture, number of concentric circles. Certainly, other parameters could have been chosen (like, say, if the circle were more or less oval or if it were sometimes half, or sometimes a quarter cirelce) but these were all that were needed to represent what the diagram needed. Size, shape, and color are pretty typical parameters (think of the dots that represent cities on a map).

Then we’ll choose a second symbol. This one will interact with the first, just as the line on the Subway Rider Diagram interacted with the circle. There the line was an event and the circle was a person. Perhaps your first symbol is a person and the second symbol is some food. Or perhaps the first symbol is a chess club and the second symbol is a new set of rules. Or the first symbol is a wedding and the second symbol is the weather. Together, the two symbols make a little machine, interacting with and changing one another.

On your paper, make a grid of six squares and start drawing inside them. Use pens, markers, colored pencils; whatever you like to work with. It doesn’t need to look beautiful; it just needs to represent something. Not all squares need to be filled in. The grid should appear as follows:

Now use a new piece of paper (or online whiteboard) and arrange the symbols to diagram an experience. They may be representing events over time, over space, over both time and space, or neither. Be adventurous! Have fun with it!