workshops work Podcast
This is a podcast about facilitation: the practice of creating conditions for people to think better together.
Whether you’re leading strategy, navigating change or developing leaders, the quality of your conversations shapes the quality of your decisions.
Hosted by Dr Myriam Hadnes, behavioural economist, facilitator and founder of workshops.work, each episode explores the human dynamics of working together: how psychological safety is built, why some conversations lead to action while others stall, how leaders foster genuine participation, and what behavioural science can teach us about collaboration. Alongside these conversations, Dr Hadnes shares reflections from her own client work, offering practical insights from the realities of designing and facilitating workshops in organisations.
Recognised as the facilitation community’s most-recommended podcast in SessionLab’s State of Facilitation reports from 2024 to 2026, the show has grown into an archive of more than 350 conversations spanning the craft, the inner work, and the unexpected edges of facilitation. Whether you’re a facilitator, leader, consultant or L&D professional, you'll come away with sharper questions and a few ideas worth borrowing.
workshops work Podcast
069 - Unflattening: An Attitude that will Expand Our Thinking with Nick Sousanis
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workshops work is a podcast for facilitators, by a facilitator, about facilitation… so why have I invited Assistant Professor of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University and comic book artist Nick Sousanis to join me in this episode?
I read Nick’s remarkable work ‘Unflattening’ recently and immediately knew that the world of facilitation needed to know about it. I was delighted when he accepted my invitation!
What followed was a beautiful exchange of ideas and reflections from two distant fields, worlds that do not normally collide but have more in common than you might first think.
This is a very special episode of workshops work – and one that I think could change our practice in a deep and powerful way.
Listen to find out:
- Why trying to think outside of the boxes we are in isn’t necessarily a good idea
- The most important question Nick believes we need to answer in this moment in time
- Why unflattening is a journey, not a destination
- Why images aren’t simply aesthetic, but communicative in novel and detailed ways
- How creative constraints and limits help us learn, grow, and unflatten
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A huge thank you must go to SessionLab, the sponsor of Workshops Work. Claim your free two months of SessionLab Pro now – this deal is exclusive to Workshops Work listeners!
Questions and Answers
[01:44] Is it correct that Unflattening was your dissertation?
[02:33] What prompted you to draw your dissertation?
[05:25] Where was the idea of Unflattening born?
[08:58] How does Unflattening relate to ‘thinking outside the box’?
[12:47] Did you create Unflattening to intentionally remove as many of these ‘boxes’ as possible?
[17:47] What is the magic ingredient for hearing each other’s arguments?
[22:27] Is Unflattening a journey, a philosophy, a destination?
[27:51] How can we practice Unflattening when it comes to emotive topics?
[31:50] What can pictures teach us that words cannot?
[36:21] How do you encourage people to follow the path of your writing without being too explicitly directional?
[45:05] – What makes a workshop – or a class – fail?
[01:02:13] – What is the one thing you would like listeners to take away from this episode?
Links
Connect to Nick
Any thoughts? Share them with us!
👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/ 👈
What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that takes and leads to results? My name is Meram Hapnot, and with the Workshops Work Podcast, I'm on the quest to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show, Nickel Sanders. And we have a slightly different conversation since he is not a workshop facilitator but an academic and a comic book writer or thinker. And we're talking about his uh piece of art which is called underflattening. So stay tuned to join the exploration of underflattening. And by the way, if you don't have pen and paper at hand to take your own notes, why don't you visit workshops.org and download my free one page of somehow enjoy the show. Hello Nick.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I'm pretty excited to explore the world of unflattening. A book that I recently came across and when I read it, I just thought that the world of facilitation needs to know about it. So I'm glad that you're joining this uh exploration experiment about the world of facilitation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm grateful to be here and to learn more about that whole world as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And maybe just to start with a little bit of introduction or background. So you wrote the book Unflattening. And if I'm not mistaken, it was your dissertation.
SPEAKER_02That's correct. So this is it's hard to say about its firstness or not, but um, but this is uh this is my dissertation at Teachers College at Columbia University, and that is entirely written and drawn in comic book form. And and the version that was published by Harvard University Press is more or less the same as as what I submitted for my dissertation. The cover is new. There's a few some of the the chapter title pages were not drawn for the dissertation. And there was some copy editing and a few things that I sort of that I just had a little bit more time to go back and redraw. But but other than that, that's what I submitted. It's essentially the same.
SPEAKER_01And I wonder what prompted you to draw your dissertation, or is it something that is quite normal? And what let you maybe I let you answer this one first?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's definitely not quite normal as I learned. I mean, I think uh I partly did it out of ignorance or naiveness. I was a comics person, you know, I was a comics reader and maker as a kid. I made my own comic through high school. And um, and then I have this sort of lull in my in my comics making through undergraduate times where I studied other things, and we could talk about that another point. But as I sort of returned to them and I saw what I could do with them, like the kind of ideas, educational ideas I could get across without dumbing it down, I saw this way to bring together all the things that were important to me and then do it as my work. Um, you know, I'd been, I I have an undergraduate in mathematics, and then I have a gap in time, and then I come back and I did a I did a mixed master's in art and mathematics and a master's in fine arts, and then I have another gap, and then I come back and do the doctorate. And I really liked being part of academia, but I I think I was always a little uncomfortable that things there tended to stay there. Um, they didn't tend to go out. And and then I think in sort of in my own, you know, I made these comics, but I think my own view of comics was that they were entertainment, they were, you know, they were I didn't see them as what I see them now. So I think when I sort of came to that realization, I said, oh, well, I can bring together this thing I love to do, this way I love to work, and make work that is complex, sophisticated, but also accessible at the same time. And so when I applied the doctoral program, I I said, this is the kind of work I want to do. And because of things like uh Art Spiegelman's Maus and Persepolis, Marjain Sitrapi Persepolis, and Scott McLeod's understanding comics, all those things were out there at that point that I just assumed this argument was long over. Like, like, of course, you can do it in comics. It didn't seem like that big a deal, but um but it was a bigger deal than I realized, which was to my benefit because there was a lot more interest in it than I ever expected there to be. Um because it just isn't something that happened in academia at all. So yeah, I think that's how I came to do it. I just sort of stumbled into it because it's what I like to do.
SPEAKER_01I wouldn't have called myself a comic person. And what uh I find fascinating is that through your book you can really dive into and explore, and there are so many facets. And you called it unflattening. And for me, this is really what happened to me, that it opened new perspectives on things that seemed so normal that I wouldn't have expected otherwise. So, what prompted you to come up with the concept of unflattening? In which situation or from which instance was the idea born?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean it's it's sort of a roundabout way. I I think in the so my first semester at Columbia, I I made comics for some of my classes, and in my research class, I sort of studied comics makers as if they were researchers for my work. So I started, I'm pretty sure that the that word comes up right away in that semester that I uh was thinking about how much information you could put on a comics page, and even though it's a flat piece of paper and it's static, that with the sort of layering of multiple images, you know, how they're divided up into panels, how words layer over them and interact with them, that all of a sudden you could put more information than seemed possible in this single sheet of paper. And I described it then as you know, as this sort of unflattening to make it more dimensional. So it came, I mean, it's not apparent from that, from the book, but it came very much out of thinking about how comics could do this thing. And then my own background, as I mentioned before, you know, I have this uh math and art background, and I also was a very bottom level pro tennis player for a few years, and then I made my living all the way through doctoral school as a tennis pro. So I taught, I taught most of my teaching was involved in that. So I mean, I saw these, you know, coming from these different perspectives, and uh, you know, I'm teaching tennis and I'm thinking about how you might use an analogy of like making a brush stroke to think about how you put topspin on a ball or talking about the physics of why spin works, to talk about why topspin works, to talk about why you want to swing a certain way. So I mean, I I really saw that this idea of interdisciplinarity, you know, coming from multiple perspectives was also another kind of unflattening, I mean, quite literal. And working in image and text, you know, so that was another, so it was not just different different disciplines, but also different modes of working. There's probably a few more ways I mean it. I mean, that you know, as you started to think about it, all these other things start to like come into the picture. And I know often people say, because I use the example of Flatland, Edwin Abbott's uh 1880s novella, Flatland, in there. But that that was more of an afterthought. I mean, I knew the book, and because I had all these sort of examples of things being flat and then less flat, that you know, it it ended up, it was at the end of the book I was gonna mention it, and then that that's one of the few things that sort of changed from my my massive sketched-out outline, and it moved near the front, and um really helped me explain what it is I meant by it, or or at least give people a sense of it, because I don't think I ever explain what I mean by unflattening.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you leave it to the exploration and the imagination of the reader as it's yeah.
SPEAKER_02I mean, there's this simple example of Eratosthenes, I don't know, simple, but um figuring out the circumference of the earth from two different points on the earth and the shadows cast then um at the same time from two thousand years ago. And in that that sort of drawing of it, you know, sort of to help me think about what I meant by this term, how we come from different points.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And it's interesting because from what I hear is that it started in a quite literal sense. So that you have a flat piece of paper and by drawing on it and adding words, you uh add more dimensions. So it's unflattening. But then unflattening becomes like a view of the world almost. And I wonder to what extent does it relate to thinking out of the box.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, and I certainly in that first chapter deal with boxes a lot, you know, and I think about boxes. Uh, you know, I mean, I think about my own sort of schooling or or uh, you know, as somebody that is in, you know, if you're in the math box, you're not supposed to be in the art box, right? And if you're in a sports box, you're definitely like you're not supposed to. And I I think that those are boxes we made up, right? Like we made up these boxes and said, you know, and and when we call them real when when really it the boxes are artificial. So that's that's one, and that's not answering your question yet, but I but that's one thing I was definitely very concerned with. And I think schooling becomes a series of boxes, you know, where it's like you have a box of subject, you have a box of time, and you and you have the literal box of space. Like this is where your learning has to happen and what it looks like. And I I wanted to sort of push back against those kind of boxes. The the out-of-the-box thing, I I have to say I'm a little mixed on the expression in general. Like I get it, and I appreciate being lumped in with that, but I also think you never get out of boxes, right? You're you're and I made a piece before this about that, um, and it's it's in here a little bit, but like like my whole book is about not and like how I made the book, is I make specific rules for myself. So I I you know it's a book to me that's very much about education, but the word education, the word schools, the word teachers, none of those words ever appear. It's rooted in lots of disciplines, none of those ever appear. So there's there's a very conscious like stripping out of language. There's no story, there's no sort of narrative in or characters in any real way. So those are removed, and then each page tends to have its own series of like how I want you to read it or how the structure is. So I'm always building this series of boxes around myself to say, you know, here's a bunch of constraints. Now, how do I find my way, not out of them, but how do I like create from them? So uh, you know, and it and as much as you, I mean, I think that's some of the points of the later chapters, as much as we want to like sort of free ourselves from the sort of boxes or strings, as I called it in the later chapters, you still have them. You still came from a particular place, you still your parents are who they are, you're you still have these things, you still got gravity. Like it's hard to cut all of those things away. The laws of physics are still gonna apply. So I think it's really important to see the boxes we're in. It's really important to see the sort of things that make us who I are, make our systems the way they are, and then see how we can sort of play within those boundaries and push on them. But the sort of leaping out of it, I that that one feels a little less. I'm not sure I'm articulating it very well, but I think it's more about how we sort of use those boxes to to free ourselves rather than getting rid of them.
SPEAKER_01So is it a matter of growing the box in which we're sitting or decorating the box?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean it can be I think it can be all of those things. You know, I think it can be all of those things. But I don't, you know, man, I there's still there's still boundaries that are part of our lives, and I I I think the awareness of the boundaries is as important as saying I'm totally out of it, because I'm not. There's there's still boxes that I'm I'm in, um, or boxes that I've created for myself, or if that makes sense. And you can challenge it too.
SPEAKER_01I'm just um there's so much to unpack there. Starting from how you and it sounds as if you consciously decided to leave out everything that could label a box. So you leave out the character, the narrative, the reference to education, the reference to any scientific fields. Was this a consciousness?
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, very much so. So my my sort of return to comics making as an adult happened around the 2004 US presidential election. I was invited to be in uh in art show in Detroit where I ran an arts magazine, and um I only had a couple days to do it, so I was like, well, I'll make a comic. And I I made this first comic book before the election, and then there was a second show after, and I made a second one, and it's the second one, it's on my website, um, that really really shaped my way of working. I mean, at that point, it that one's the first one's a little bit more me, like I'm there and I'm sort of narrating and and pointing out things. The the second one is all it's about voting or you know, a show of hands. So it's all every image is something to do with a hand. And my goal with the work was thinking about how like I think it's very easy to make a political cartoon that says the other side sucks, right? Or rah-rah for m for us. I think that's an easy thing to do. And and I appreciate some of them, and they're you know very clever and and skilled, and and I but for me, I I was like, well, how do I get somebody who doesn't already agree with me to at least stay in the conversation? You know, uh that doesn't mean they're gonna it uh you know, winning people over or whatever, that's more complicated. But but how do I make something that says you can stay with this conversation and you can take something from it, as opposed to being turned off with the first word that's in there. And I think about you know, I've made subsequent ones around that, and and and and then that came into my academic work too. It's like how do I you may not be versed in you know certain kinds of educational theories or whatever that that I've now read, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a way into the conversation for you. And it's a tricky thing. I mean, I'm sure you know there's ways that my work is going to be interpreted that I didn't mean, but I also most of those are rewarding. I mean, here I am talking about in a very different area than I anticipated, because it's you know, I think in that opening, people can find their way in. And that's I I think one of the most interesting conversations I that's too big a word, um, interesting snippets of the conversation I or responses to the work. We lived on uh the Spanish Harlem in New York City, the upper upper east side, and there's these guys that that uh lived somewhere in the neighborhood, but they hung out on our stoop all the time. And I I at some point I gave him some of the comics I made, and and I saw the guy the the other day, I mean a couple days later, and he said, uh, you know, I said, What do you think? He said, Yeah, man, it's all about perception, it's all about how we see things. And I was like, Yeah, and I mean, and this is a guy who I'm I'm pretty sure, you know, didn't finish high school, is making money on, you know, doing something that that you know we might not classify as as proper or something, and definitely hasn't, you know, gone to higher education or anything like that. But but he really got it. He really got it, and I I felt like that meant a lot to me. Like I I think you know, people are very capable, competent creatures if you give them a chance to be. And I think a lot of language, you know, specific language can be a barrier to communication. And I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that what I'm doing can can bring everybody into it, but that's how I'm approaching it.
SPEAKER_01So basically by removing all these labels, you you open it up for everyone to join and to find their own understanding in it. Because if you remove the label education, then people can explore what they see in the picture without being primed on, oh, okay, this is about education. So I have to put on this lens in order to see it that way.
SPEAKER_02I mean, again, that's my hope. Uh, you know, obviously it can backfire, but I uh to me that's valuable, and it's one of the most interesting things. I mean, I know you know college classes that teach it. I I remember one professor who did telling me like he always starts with the question, like, what is it about? And here I kind of picture that students would see it as education, but that's you know, teachers do. Teachers very much see it that way. But students who are you know headed to random degrees, they don't it's pretty rare that they see it that way. And and that's great for me. You know, I I think it's I I learned so much from seeing how people read it.
SPEAKER_01And I would like to come back to what you said about this um presidential campaign.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So and this is something to open a conversation, to create space where difficult conversations can happen. This is pretty much at the core of a facilitator. So how can we get the boxes to communicate with each other, basically?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And to open to hear each other's arguments. So, how did you do it? So, what is what is your skill on the magic ingredient that you I don't know.
SPEAKER_02And it's interesting. I I I titled uh a class, my first class when I came to SF State, the only sort of writing class I taught, The Having of Difficult Conversations. And this was in 2016, the fall of 2016. But and thinking about that concept, like how does interdisciplinarity uh help that? How does uh words and pictures help that? I mean, I can only tell you how I do it. Uh you know, I mean I but I can I can't even tell you that really. I don't even think I can tell you that. But um I think you know it's I mean, maybe it's an assumption that at some point we all kind of we're all not that different. And I think the things that connect us are are certainly stronger than the things that keep us apart, but I do think there are particular ways of seeing the world that keep us apart. And if you can if you can create things that that help people stick around longer, that maybe they get past it. If you can you can prevent ways that people start to work to I mean, I don't I don't do that kind of facilitation so much, so that's harder for me to answer. But uh at least how I see it, how can I make this thing that you'll read and you'll read it and it works for you and it hasn't kept you out? I mean, I guess I already said that, but I but I think that's the to me that's the that's the thing. And and you maybe that's a naive point of view, you know. Maybe there are some people. I I made a piece recently around that for the current situation. And you know, I I mean, are there some people you're just not ever gonna like bring into the conversation?
SPEAKER_01Maybe, maybe not.
SPEAKER_02I just was referring to everything in the last three and a half years in my country. I actually made it a couple weeks, I made it before all of this too. So, but you know, are there some people that just aren't coming back to be in the conversation? And I I I maybe I I don't know. I'd like to think you can still try. I I I do believe if people can see how the things connect them, that maybe they can get past their own limited sight. And I and I say that to myself too. It's not like I'm claiming any kind of genius site or anything. Um, I think how do we how do we find ways to get to to see from different perspectives? And I think that that's obviously the hardest question. And it's certainly the hardest question maybe of our point in time right now.
SPEAKER_01And I somehow thought wh while I heard you speaking, I thought about a piece of art that you you look at a piece of art and then it kind of triggers a conversation but it's rather neutral. When I think of a political campaign, it's not neutral. And still so I have the impression that it's a fine line between uh being sufficiently provocative so that communication will emerge and both sides want to stick around long enough and not too provocative for them to get enraged and then to pass over this.
SPEAKER_02Right. Yeah. I mean I think you said it well. I think that's a tricky, I mean that's a tricky dance, right? Like um, like I said, I I I'm not interested in making the piece that says, rah-rah, this is what you should think. But it's not like I don't have a point of view. And it's not like I don't have a very strong point of view. And it's also uh, you know, I mean, I think there's a there's definitely a risk with with the word unflattening and some of the approaches that that it can devolve into a kind of relativism, you know, like we should hear all, you know, all sides are equal. And I don't think, you know, I mean, I think climate change is such a great example of that, you know, yes, there are climate change deniers, but if they're coming from a perspective that's not based on any sort of honesty, that's not, you know, I mean, that's like having you know, using two eyes, but one of your eye is like giving you false information all the time. You're gonna have to learn to ignore that eye, right? Like otherwise you're gonna run into stuff. So I I understand how how mine might be construed as that kind of relativism, and I I'm quite leery of it. But I do think, you know, having all the stakeholders, having all the different takes uh in a conversation really matters. Anyway. I don't know. I'm getting a little probably beyond what I understand, but it doesn't take much.
SPEAKER_01I wouldn't say that. Would you consider unflattening then as a mindset or as a journey or as a philosophy? Or as a state of being? Or destiny?
SPEAKER_02Destiny. Did you say destiny or destination? I didn't hear the last one.
SPEAKER_01Um destiny, but maybe destination is better.
SPEAKER_02I would say no to the last one. And I would say I think yes to all the the others. I mean, I think, and I I think it says it somewhere in there, and I, you know, I'm not, I don't have the book in front of me. I mean, I think it's an attitude, but I wanted to think about as an attitude or an orientation. Like, how do we sort of approach things so that we can understand more? And you know, I I think that's and it it's maybe this is getting ahead of the the questions here, but um I mean I think it's one reason uh as I've mentioned that you there's a lot of ways people do typos to unflattening. I get unflattering a lot, and and that's you know, annoying, but whatever that happens. But the one I really don't like is is when people call it unflattened, you know, with the E D ending. And I I think the the problem with that is it implies something that's finished, implies that there's like a state of unflattenedness or something that you can reach. And I was super resistant to that. Like it, it's it's very intentionally an ing there, so that you understand it's something you're always striving for. It's again coming back, it's an attitude for how do we how do we grow rather than a place to reach. And I think the danger, the danger for all of us is is becoming stagnant. The danger is saying, you know, we're gonna reach some some place, and then we know all the answers, and then we can stop. And I think that can happen with the most enlightened point of view, and it can happen with the worst kind of views. Either of those can lead to this really stagnant and unhealthy place. But if you keep accepting that you don't know everything, and there is so much more to understand, you know. I mean, I think that at least keeps you moving and keeps you alive in your thinking.
SPEAKER_01And I wonder, is there a technique that you can practice this unflattening attitude that you would look at the same plant every day and try to find new ways of looking at it or drawing it? Or I like that.
SPEAKER_02That's a nice idea. It's interesting. I was just out with my my daughter six, and my boy was a year and a half, but mostly it was with my daughter, and we were looking at a first we were looking at a bee on like a one foot square of stuff, and then um and then we started noticing other insects crawling up there, and we spent a long time, and I mean, I think the idea that you can look at a one-foot square of space and say, what's going on in here? And you, you know, your first look at it is uh, well, there's some flowers there, done. But as you look longer, you start to, you know, you've reeled this whole life. So I think your your perspective is really good there. Let me let me try to tie this back to the previous answer. Uh I was a student of Maxine Green, uh philosopher of aesthetic education at Columbia from I don't know, she was there for like 60 years or something. She was 90 when I had my first class with her in her living room, and 96 when I had my defense with her in my her living room about uh a few weeks before she died. She's really a phenomenal philosopher. And and her big work, and I think this connects to your previous conversation, that uh is that art has this transformational, transformative potential. I mean, the class I had with her was you know, we was very much how looking at a piece of work and certain pieces of work could could make you more empathic. And I say this, I uh after her passing, she myself and uh another student of hers, we made a comic about the view out her window. And you would go visit her. She lived uh right near the Guggenheim over Central Park, so she was looking into the park, and there was a tree outside her window, and because she wasn't very mobile, so she always sat in the same place, and you would come visit her and have lunch, maybe, and you would sit there. And so we, for the first time, sat where she sat and we looked at this tree that she looked at. And I I really I could send you the comic, but um uh the comic is about looking at this tree. I think that each day, each time she looked out, she was seeing something new in the tree outside her window. Um, whether, you know, obviously there's seasonal change, but there's daylight change, there's there's storm change, there's what's in the tree, there's the bus that goes under the tree with the tourists on it every 15 minutes or something. But you know, this the tree became this way, I think, of sort of practicing her philosophy of seeing other, you know, she's very much about seeing otherwise, trying to see things in ways that they weren't already defined as. And I think that's an absolute thing you can practice. You start looking at the tree. Are you paying attention to its bark? Are you paying attention to its root system, how its roots have pushed up the concrete down below the tree, and how the passerby sort of has to adjust their walking to it? So I think when you I mean, I think you said it much more efficiently than I did. But I think that is the kind of mindset we're talking about. How do we come at something from all these different ways of looking and uh and keep remembering to do that?
SPEAKER_01How can we remember to do that when it comes to something that is not as neutral as a tree? So for instance, climate change. Is it does it require empathy or just curiosity or the scientific mindset?
SPEAKER_02Yes. Yes, it requires all it requires all of those, right? I mean, not everybody's gonna be a scientist, so there's that. But I don't know. I mean, I think I mean again, I I said before, I think thinking about how people, how we're connected. You know, we're connected through what we breathe, we're connected by water. As we're seeing right now, we are connected by viral organisms. You know, we're these things are these things are connecting us, and we can try to pretend we're not, but that's really foolish. And, you know, I think you can connect it to the current situation, the you know, the very immediate situation in our my country, you know, if people are being oppressed, that you can say, well, that's other people, but that's all part of you, and it has an effect on you whether you want to pretend it doesn't or not. So I I think helping people I mean, I'll let me back up one more time on this. So my dad's a physics teacher, and my mom is an environmental studies educator for little kids. And I I think the the environmental studies perspective, uh, I mean, the main thing I would take from it is seeing connections, seeing how an ecosystem works. And I think understanding that, yeah, I don't think you can look at anything without having that perspective. And there's a page in Unflattening, which in the this is a change from the dissertation view. My mom is cited in it, she's not cited in the book. We cut that out. But it's the page about uh it's got the citation from James Joyce. It says, Did it flow? and it's about the water flowing, and the page sort of flows across the page. And I I had read that, I read Ulysses in high school, and I'm not I can't say that I made heads or tails of the book, but that that particular passage has always like sort of been a transformative moment for me, in that it's you know, it's a simple act of turning on a faucet, right? Like we do it all the time, you do it without thinking. But the passage then goes into who dug the well and the amount of water pressure, and you know, it has all these things, and and it probably has actually less than I imagine it has. And I tried to show that in the image. If you start thinking about how this very smallest actions that we do every day, you know, what happens when you turn on a water faucet? Who forged it? Where do those pipes you live in a city, in a city that's a hundred years old or something like or more? Where are those pipes? Who made those pipes? Who even knows where those pipes are anymore? Like there's all these connections that you start to see, and I think that is the kind of attitude or or orientation that if you have it, it's hard to, you know, it might be hard to shut that off because you probably need to once in a while. But I think if you have it, it it forces you to start looking at things in a different sort of way. So I I think your exercise that you suggested at the start of before I went and rambled on all of this, I think is a really that makes a lot of sense as a way to train people to think about that or to push that train. I don't think you can, I don't think training in that, but to sort of open that kind of eyesight.
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SPEAKER_01What is it that pictures can teach us or tell us that words cannot?
SPEAKER_02That's a really good question. You'd think I'd have been asked that in all these years of talking about this. Um I'm not sure I have. That's a great question. I mean, what can they teach us? I mean, uh there's the maybe the more obvious things, like the sort of emotional capacity for an image. And, you know, so there's that. But I also think there's there's, you know, in talking about connectedness here, there's that aspect of it. And it's something I think about a lot in comics and even more than than I did in the book as I as I go forward. But but it's like how do you draw connections across. I mean, the simplest example I'll give from my book is is the the symbol that I sort of came up for with for unflattening. And it comes out of that Eratosthenes drawing, and then it shows up like six times in the book or something. And people have different ideas on what it is, and and that maybe got out of my control a little bit. But the point is it's never said, right? There's no there's nothing that says, here is a symbol and it means a certain thing. It's just there. So then when you see it a second, a third, a fifth time, you can't help but start to draw these connections. And they're connections that are totally not in the verbal realm. And I think, you know, that's an example, you know, sort of obvious example in the book. But I think those kinds of things, I mean, I think that's one of the strengths of comics, is you can link these different ideas or different instances in time through images that we recall, you know, our visual recall is very strong, and start to sort of thread a narrative through it that's different than the narrative in the words. And different even in the narrative than the story, you know. I mean, it which isn't quite the same thing as the words, like it's it's something else that's sort of going on in there. I mean, that's that's there's only one aspect of how pictures help us, but but I think that's an important one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think the pictures are also free of right or wrong or any judgment. So whatever you see in a picture is just right for you. But then, and maybe it neutralizes then the conversation around it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, uh, it's always a tricky one. I mean, I I made a piece that that some elements of it ended up in the book before, where, you know, I mean, I think one can say, well, words are specific and pictures are ambiguous, but I think you can also say the complete opposite thing. You know, you can write poetic words and you can write technical pictures. I think I I'm not disagreeing even with what you said. It's just I think it's it's complicated and they strike us in very different ways. And they're certainly more on some hand, more readable, like you know, a one-year-old or less can see two dots in a in a curve and see a face. Like we can't help but do that. So there's ways in, but I it's tricky. I mean, I just think it's a very different kind of thinking, and I think some of the reasons it's hard to talk about is because it's it's hard to talk about. Like we don't have the language to talk about it. And that's a re I think one of the reasons we tend to dismiss what pictures can do. We tend to see them as you know, aesthetics, things that go on our wall, things that are pretty or entertaining. But we tend to dismiss their potential for for thought because they're hard to put into words and what they're doing. And I, you know, I mean they can do so much more. Uh uh, I mean, you know, a body slumped over in a drawing, like those figures that are marching that are sort of slumped, I I could describe that sort of field of things, but I think the sort of impact of an infinite plane of figures marching feels something. Yeah, I don't know. That's a really great question. I I I feel I need to spend a few days trying to answer.
SPEAKER_01And I'm um I'm happy with your answer. And also to challenge this, yeah, that words can be very implicit and drawings can be very explicit. What I find fascinating about your book on uh uh maybe so more sophisticated comic books in general is that when you uh zoom out, it looks like uh almost chaotic and you don't know where to start. And still if you start in one corner, you get you guide the reader through the story. Although it might not seem obvious at first. So how do you how do you create that that you make it so easy to follow the path without being too directional, too explicit?
SPEAKER_02That's great observation. And I'm glad to hear you say that it's still easy to read, because I know that that is the risk one runs in making the kind of layouts that I tend to make. So I mean I think, you know, I mean there's there's one school of thought about comics is this sequential art. So it's just you know, there's a sequence of things and you read it in sequence. But I think the big crux of my talking about comics in the book is is the simultaneity of a page, or or even larger than that, but at least of the page, in that you see the whole at once like you view a piece of art, and you can't help but start to make connections in multiple directions. So I think the, and I think this comes back to your last last question. I think the the power of comics is not simply in sort of putting images in sequence, but it's in putting images in sequence and this sort of to making nonlinear connections at the same time. So you get the whole and the you know uh one at a time, all at the same time. And I I I try to relate that to how uh things work in our heads. Like, yes, we have this sort of linear perspective of time. I go from this, you know, I'm talking to you now, I'm gonna do something after, I'm gonna do something after that. But my thoughts, my thoughts are not nearly so sequential. Something you've suggested has made me think about something there, I'm anticipating something later. My thoughts are all across. And so I think one of the strengths of comics, at least how I see them, is their ability to do both this sort of linear sequential thing and their all at once, you know, and see this different kind of connections, the way, the way things are in our heads. You know, I have this chapter called The Shape of Our Thoughts, and that's the chapter about comics. And I I do a project with my visual communication course that's called The Shape of Our Thoughts, and they make something that they try to like think about. What does our thoughts look like? Which is a question we never ask, probably, right? Like we don't like what does our thinking look like? And who knows what it looks like. But um, but when you start to ask that question, people come up with really fascinating answers. You know, I had a student make uh a bowl of jello and suspend some things in her bowl of jello, some words and pictures. And then she talked about, and this was my favorite part, how the jello is kind of still, but it's always a little bit moving, and how that was kind of like her thinking. So, anyway, it's a bit of an aside, but but I think it's important. So, so how do I? I mean, I think the comic is comics are sort of balancing this way we read with the way we look. And so for me, you know, I make very, very detailed, dense drawings, and I I try to not always do that, but it's hard for me to let go of that. But what actually takes me a longer amount of time is figuring out how the page is gonna move and how all the elements on the page are gonna work together. And so there's there's the part where there's no narrate, there's no visible narrator, there's no story, there's no character. So each page is like trying to come up with what's the kind of metaphor to, you know, like I have a kernel of an idea I want to talk about, but then I gotta find the right sort of metaphor for it. And then I gotta I I I want to think about how I want the reader to move through the page. How does that idea feel? And I know this happened in fairly early on in the work. My my wife would walk by where I was working and she said, I haven't seen a page like that before. And then she'd walk by again and say, I didn't see a page like and at some point I realized I'm not gonna make any page that repeats a composition. Like there is none that uh that has the same structure of reading. And you know, so that's a challenge for my you know, that's another, even though it might seem out of the box, it's another set of boxes, right? So the work comes out of like you know, making a lot of iteration after iteration of the sketches and and starting to see how these pieces start to fit together and how they suggest new pieces, and that's often the case. You know, it's it's it's very rare that if if never, that I say, this is what the page looks like, and I put it down. It's here's some things, and here's some things, and then I try stuff, and then I draw it badly, and when I draw it badly, I start to see it in a different way, and then I draw it badly again, and then I say, Oh, well, that's really interesting. There's some connections, and and I keep doing it, and I keep doing it, and eventually things start to, I start to understand what it is I'm talking about. And then and then it gets tighter because I'm thinking about you know very specific design choices. Like an example I give if we were doing this with pictures, I think it's like 67 or something like that. Uh, the page on multimodality. There's a head and a typewriter, and typewriter keys, there's hands typing on it. Um and there's a very specific choice where there's a cloud at the upper left that acts as a thought balloon, but also as a cloud. And then the cloud drops down into a the head of a thermometer. I think this is right. I gotta think of all these all these pieces fit together. I don't have it in front of me, sorry. And it it does all these very specific things, even though the page is sort of all over, but it does these very specific things to keep you on the left side of the page where I where I want you to read. It's it's like 67 or um 65.
SPEAKER_01This is 67.
SPEAKER_02Uh it's 65. 65. It's one, it's one before that. Yeah, yeah. So look, can you just open it just a teeny bit more? Oh yeah, I see it. I see enough. But but okay, so you can look at it yourself. Um but you can see there that the there's the clouds there are uh keeping you in that upper, you know, there's words there, and then they drop into that that round, you know, the thermometer thing, which then takes you into the you know, there's all these things to keep you on the left side. And then this I I I've talked about this at length before, but the challenge here is how do I get you to move back up?
SPEAKER_03Right?
SPEAKER_02Like I want you to move back up, and that's a real hard thing to do in comics. Like you you want to read like your read, even though you see them all over, you still want to sort of go left to right and top to bottom. So, how do I get you to go back up? And the trick there, and you can see it was it was having the hand was a late addition, the hand sort of as an arrow, and the way that box down at the bottom curves into the hand rather than having a so then it becomes this design challenge, like how so it's all these is all these boxes that you're like trying to navigate. And and I often feel like if you sort of trust, if you put up enough rules around you and then trust that eventually you'll see your way through them, you get to a place you don't expect. Which is really always it's exhausting, maybe, but it's always rewarding too, because you're like, wow, how did I think of that? And and the truth is I didn't really think of that. I drew a bunch of stuff with a bunch of rules, and eventually looking at it enough times, uh it taught me where it should go.
SPEAKER_01Which nicely fits back into your concept of the boxes, that basically you do need all these rules, you do need the boxes in order to explore what's in them. Because without the restrictions, without the rules, you wouldn't get there or wouldn't uh get this clarity.
SPEAKER_02Exactly.
SPEAKER_01And I I really hope that the uh fellow facilitators who listen to that have um the same clarity or the analogy in mind that I have because when I heard you explaining this, I really had the the design of a workshop in mind where you need to get all these ideas, you need to explore, you don't know what the solution is. And still you have to uh bring back the group to the next level. So let them explore and then tie it to the next level without making them feel pushed or pulled, but that it becomes kind of a natural process.
SPEAKER_02Right. Right. I mean I think that's the challenge. The challenge, I mean, I think of you know either workshops or my classes like it's how do you give enough structure so that you're not lost, but enough freedom within it to go in your own direction. And I I, you know, I think that's that's always the challenge. But it's the exciting one. I mean that's where the exciting things happen.
SPEAKER_01And since you're mentioning the class, um I in a sneaky way now I bring in my um one of my general questions that I didn't know how to place. But what would make a class fail? I would usually ask the question for a workshop.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But for a class you just mentioned that you design it in a similar way that you want the students to explore and then to come up maybe with their own reality solution understanding. What makes for you a bad class?
SPEAKER_02Huh I I don't know if I can answer what makes I mean I can that's a really I what makes a bad class. I hope I don't give a lot of bad classes. I I that's a harder question. I mean I when when does a class fail? I I don't know I mean I can certainly picture times where I'm less satisfied than other times of the class if that's what you mean. But I I don't know. I don't know if I have an answer. I mean I can think of ways that make these things succeed and I can give examples of that but I I it's harder to say so what what makes it succeed then? Let me try that and then maybe I can get to the failing part on the other direction. I mean I let me let me let me offer some examples and then you tell me if it's useful and if it's not I'll I'll change directions because here I am failing at this. So so constraints to me I it's like that's how I'm running run my classes a lot I mean how I run exercises in my classes particularly the making specific ones. And so let me I'll just give you a simple example um let's say I I ask you to do something where you tell me a story of how you got here and you know to school and you can interpret that how you want. So already you can say like how did I literally get there that day or what was the all the journey of my life to this moment right like they can that's up to them. And then I say let's do it in a three panel strip comic strip or oh and sorry and and a two page comic. So you've gone and made two versions of it right so you've gone home so everybody in class so let's say you have 25 people everybody in class has gone home and they made two versions a three a three panel and a two page and they've come back and they hear they've done this thing. So now all of a sudden you have all these you have all the choices that they made for their three and for the two and sometimes they overlap like they use the same panel sometimes they don't have anything to do with each other but they've like taught themselves an enormous amount about how the form works about how the differences and then they have 24 other people to look at who've also been trying the same constraint which is kind of narrow right but it's wide open in its you interpret it how you want I mean I think that's kind of what I meant by the you know that's that's an example I mean the the the exercise maybe I'll tell you because I I know it's a question that might come up an exercise that I do a lot I I call grids and gestures which I made up the first time I taught a class, a comics class. And I've now done it a couple hundred times in workshops and I start all my classes with it and I've done it as a Twitter challenge a few times. And the the prompt is pretty simple you take a single sheet of paper and you think about the this the structure of your experience of a single day and it could be that day or it could be your typical day or an average day or a particular sort of extraordinary day and you carve it up into some sort of grid-esque fashion that represents the shape of the experiences you move through in that day. And I want them to inhabit it rather than with people or coffee cups or things with some sort of lines or marks or gestures that represent how you felt or what you were up to throughout that day. And the trick with this I mean and I set it up a little bit more than I there will now but is is to get them to understand enough about how I I want them to approach it like to think about organizing space and organizing sort of a reading flow without telling them too much. And I think this comes to the failing part I think I could show them like here's an example of what it is and then I will see 25 of those right yeah the dangerous part is that without showing them anything there are some people who are going to be very nervous about it. It's going to be it's an intentionally ambiguous prompt right like like talk about the shape of your day in the sort of grid esque fashion but but those that trust it and I it's rare that I see people don't I mean they might take a little more encouragement than others they end up in a I mean some do it very dramatically different than I want and a few of them break so many of the rules it stops being quite as useful I think you know like they draw things they they don't do you know they just do whatever they feel like so they've sort of abandoned any sense of the rules I've given but even those tend to teach them something. But I think the kinds of results that come out of it are very there's a commonality across the room but then there's a there's a signature to each of theirs that is very much like you can look at your partner you know the person sitting next to you at the table and they've like drawn all these like little tiny boxes very carefully and they're all got and then this person has drawn these sort of swooping things and they've you know instead of reading left to right left to right there's reads in a circle and and now all of a sudden we have a different picture of what everybody's thinking kind of looks like or at least in this particular context. And I think that to me that it it it opens up what they can do. It starts to show you what it teaches you something about comics which is true but it also teaches you how much you know about thinking in a visual way that can be limited in another context. And I think I'll say the reason I came up with this and maybe this it probably won't still answer your question but is that I I've seen things where you go to a workshop and somebody says well divide your you divide your piece of paper into six boxes and tell about your day in those six boxes. And what they tend to do is draw a stick figure of themselves or whatever across the day and and that's not bad but they've basically sort of come with the skill you know maybe they've learned a little bit about what are the key moments to show but that hasn't really taught them a lot about how much they know about their own capacities for making marks and for thinking through marks.
SPEAKER_01So I don't know sorry though those are things I do I'm not sure it quite answers your question but and maybe it's not uh relevant whether you do or not you tell and I think it is so how would you help then people to be more abstract or go more in depth in this exercise because I can perfectly see it happening. Six boxes my day okay I draw a bed I draw maybe a moosly bowl or work the bus and bed again.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01So how do you help then the group or this individual to go deeper?
SPEAKER_02Well I mean again I I I think giving them the sort of abstract thing and with very little time. So that's part of it too they have seven minutes to do it when I do it as a workshop. So I think you know time is a really useful constraint and I wish I could do this to myself too because it would really both speed me up and I think let get me to let go of some of the habits that I have that I think it's sort of time and and I'll say this also and and this has now become very difficult in our current moment that collaboration has been an enormous enormous help in my classes and and this is you know starting to get more much more specific to comics but but there may be some overlaps uh with with your work that you know where well just to give an example let's just say I come up with some silly prompt for class like every panel has to do something with an I. And so everybody you know and we're gonna we're gonna we'll do seven passes. So everybody gets a sheet of paper they draw first panel whatever they feel like but it has something to do with an I and then they give it to the next person. So and then we do it again seven times and and so the shape of the page isn't determined what they're gonna do. But what's interesting is like each sheet of paper from the first move starts to have a character that's very different than the other sheets of paper because the first move like set it in motion. We did it I think the most interesting example I've had recently was a was a picturess comic. So they just used words so they but like sound effects words so they could be and some and they were like visually dramatic I mean and here I'm talking about picturess comics but they were visually dramatically different from each other because you know somebody started with like an explosion of letters and then so the next person took it and did something with it. Whereas the other you know the person who started the different piece of paper it started with these sort of quiet moments and then that one had gone that you know so they had these characters now they had a character a characteristic to them that was quite identifiable. And I think what happens when you do things like that with like two minutes like do your thing two minutes, two minutes two minutes, that they have to let go of they have to let go of fear they have to let go of perfection. And in in the sort of cartooning world they have to learn like shortcuts to make things that work which isn't maybe less important for you know this is that's a little more specific to our thing but I do think that that when you're making something that's not yours and you're sort of following along or just setting it into motion that it it frees you in a way that's really interesting and really hard to replicate on Zoom. I'm having a hard time with that but that's you know someday we'll all be in the same room again. Well if you're using an online whiteboard yeah it we've I have my daughter and I have tried that because she's on Zoom kindergarten Zoom as well. That can the trick is you got to have everybody with the right equip you know everybody has to have something they can draw on the screen with and but yes yes those things maybe maybe I will try that.
SPEAKER_01Anyway we don't need to go down that road at all I just and thank you for sharing this exercise because there's I think even for non-comic students it's interesting because there's this yes ending so a concept from improv theater where you would continue a story someone else wrote which is totally verbal but this is now in pictures so it brings people out of the comfort zone. You need to understand what they're drawing and kind of build on it and just accept as it is and add your own little idea.
SPEAKER_02So and to yeah to try to empathize to see through the eyes and make it whole yeah that's interesting I mean yeah you mentioned improv before and I yeah that's so I hadn't really thought about it in I mean I thought about it being improvisation but not the sort of improv that that it is really what it is and I it's so I mean watching improv is fascinating and and it's certainly the same way right somebody starts this prompt will lead to this kind of story or the you know I guess the second person might really shape it even more in that case but um they have this character that emerges I keep using that word but um you create something together you you make the other person look good by adding something that increases the value. So try that out I'll tell you and every and every person has so little to do with it. You know and you have no stake in it really I mean you have a stake in wanting to keep it going but you don't have that sort of ownership that can be paralyzing.
SPEAKER_01True and then it's yeah you don't feel the burden of perfectionism anymore.
SPEAKER_02Yeah I don't know that's uh uh I I the more I teach the more I've been doing things like that and I and and seeing really exciting results about it and I I I feel like that's pretty easily transferable to other uh to other uh kinds of work uh yeah just to come back and then I just realized that we are we I could go on and on forever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah I like that thank you um don't want to eat too much of your time. To come back to the simple exercise with the six squares of asking someone to tell their day would you then think that the way to help people to be less specific or to be more creative is just to change the exercise and not ask them to draw their day but something more abstract?
SPEAKER_02I mean you might be able to do it. I mean the reason I came up with the grids exercise is because I wanted to go as far away from that six, you know, the six box stick figure thing as I could. Could I you know and I I'm really not trying to denigrate that and there's plenty of good cartoonists who use that and I think it's fine. It's just like I said I just think you come in into it with the skills that you leave with or you leave with the skills you came into and and what I see when I ask them to do something you know abstract and very quickly and organizing space how they want is like you know somebody will put a box on top of a box so they overlap a little bit and like why did you do overlap? And so all of a sudden you can have a conversation about well you know at this moment my kids are talking to me at the same time I'm making breakfast at the same time I'm trying to get ready for work. So that feels like an overlapping moment. Whereas here, you know, there's all these staccato moments or whatever whatever those kinds of words are that they can then turn around and analyze what they did in a really sophisticated way. And they all I mean what's what's shocking to me about it is that in seven minutes people can make this enormous amount of decisions and and sophisticated decisions. And so what I see with it is that rather than saying I'm a bad drawer that if you sort of reconceive what drawing is that it's making marks in space you know sort of the organization of space more than it is about like representation if you start to see it that way as a as a way of offloading your thinking and doing your thinking in collaboration with your paper, everybody can do it right we all do it. We all can do that level of it not everybody's gonna maybe have the dexterity or be willing to train to have the dexterity and I don't know where that falls to draw in a certain way. But everybody can make some kind of mark that helps them think. And I think for me I mean just to come back to my own work you know this work started very much about making complex ideas accessible not simple but accessible but I think in making the work it really became about how much I could think in ways that I couldn't think without the drawings without all those sketches you know a few of which are at the back of the book the sketches are really teaching me what I'm doing. And and what I see in classes and in workshops is that that's true of everybody. And it doesn't mean they're all going to be comics makers or drawers in any way but it does mean that they all in in doing these kinds of things can help themselves understand their own thinking in ways they couldn't and I I think that's transferable to every field on the planet. And if you know words are super useful I'm not I I'm not trying to say anything anti-word in the least but why not use well but I but but to come back to the very beginning of this conversation like like the idea of unflattening is how do you bring in the things how do you bring in all the things that make you human and I think that was that was what really it came from me. Like I sort of suppressed my comics making for a long time because I saw it as like this thing over there, this sort of entertainment thing. But when I realized you know that that this was a way that I thought better and I could express myself better and articulate things better and bringing it into my work you know I I I think we spent a long time sort of trying to say well well humans you know to do smart things we're supposed to look like that. But if instead we say what are the things that humans can do well humans make marks and humans are visual and they're spatial how do you bring that into your thinking and I think if we do it we start to be able to see ideas to be able to make connections that we absolutely wouldn't have been able to do when we limit ourselves to only one mode. At the end of the day maybe it comes out as a paper and that's fine but but having that those resources at your disposal is is crucial in my in my perspective thank you and thank you also to bring it back to the beginning and still I always like to finish the conversation with if someone fell asleep after minute one and just woke up and doesn't have time to listen to the entire conversation again what would you like them to take away that last bit was about as good as I'm gonna say it. If they fell asleep well good for them people need sleep right now I'd like them to think that number one you know there there tends to be this attitude that I can't draw or I'm not creative and I think that's false. I think by virtue of being human by virtue of being a visual and a spatial creature those are things we all have access to and by understanding what that means in a different way I think it can help us all think and see and make connections better than we could without it I think bringing and it is not just drawing I mean I think of people who've done dances in response to my work and stuff like bringing in the different ways we make meaning in the world into our thinking and saying oh this counts this is part of something I did why why did I let that go? I think bringing those things into the conversation allows us to see in a much more dimensional way than we can without beautiful thank you.
SPEAKER_01And do you have a hashtag or not?
SPEAKER_02Do I have a hashtag but no I don't I don't know how to sum up my work with the hashtag I I'm I leave that to smarter people. I like the unflattening hashtag I just couldn't use it too no fair enough final question and no it's fine. Great um yeah thank you for taking the time oh thank you so much Miriam that was lovely.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for staying tuned and listening to the show I appreciate your attention as I know how busy you are. If you enjoyed it please subscribe and engage by sharing your comments and thoughts and visit workshops.org to download the one page summary. I'm looking forward to seeing you back at the next episode and I wish you a fruitful day.
