Sketching Potential: The Hope Booth

“Drawing the issue and placing myself into it allowed me to see where my attention was – and more importantly, where it wasn’t.”

In this moment against an increasingly turbulent set of contexts, what if there was a way to generate possibility, navigate uncertainty and complexity, while doing something simple like putting pen to paper? This presentation will describe how a speculative space can be created to think through a question, using sketching and diagramming as tools to decipher, explore, and engage with the idea of emergence. Following a pilot year facilitating 'Sketching Potential: the hope booth' at University of the Arts London, I will share case studies and themes including hope as action (Solnit, 2004, Gwinn & Hellman, 2018), drawing to see (Causey 2016), notatio as a refuge (Barthes, 1979), but also affect theory and the bloom-space (Seigworth and Gregg, 2011), which serves to describe what happens in these mini-workshops.

A few years ago, I anticipated the emerging potential, the bloom-space of affect theory: “in drawing, you are not only visualising what’s inside your head, your ideas, but you are developing ideas, you are coming up with ideas, through the process of putting things down on paper.” My journey began with over a decade facilitating idea generation workshops, recently crossing over to care and processing grief, but also including complex problem solving, anxiety management and seeing multiple possibilities or points of view.

• Organisation