Visual harvesting for more conference engagement

ThinkYoung in a Brussels-based think tank focused on researching the issues that are most important to young people today. Last week, they organised the first ever EU Tomorrow Summit with a focus on vaccination. It was a wonderful experience to create visual harvesting for them in the beautiful setting of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels.

Large-scale visual harvesting

It was important to ThinkYoung that the audience could follow the progress of the conference drawings, so we decided to use pinboards for the support (thanks to Visuality), instead of going digital. During the plenary sessions, I was drawing live in the auditorium, illustrating the key concepts and it was interesting to learn about how attitudes towards vaccination are changing in society.

Managing the breakout sessions

For the breakout sessions (three were happening at once), we decided that I would be popping in and out of each room for a while to get a feeling of the discussion, and then when they were over, the organisers would collect post-its from the audience that formed the basis of the boards. This is a great solution for breakout sessions and it was a great way to include the audience and add an interactive element to the visual summaries.

Feedback from the audience

To be honest, it was a long time since I had done visual harvesting on big paper, recently, most of my jobs have been done digitally. The thing about digital is that the visual harvester can sort of “hide behind their iPad”, there is less of a performance element to it. That’s why this event has been such a great experience, because I could see the actual benefit of people experiencing visual harvesting on a large scale, happening in front of their eyes.

During the closing, we arranged all of the boards together and people could see the visual summary of the whole day together. They really appreciated it, took photos and studied the boards in detail. It was nice to hear the great feedback and it reinforced how much people are in need of visuals and creativity in their work environment.

If you are organising an event in Brussels and would like to include visual harvesting, feel free to get in touch!