Digital Roam

Mosquito on a napkin. The one that got away.

Last week I came *this* close to buying a 50-year-old airplane. A 1952 de Havilland Chipmunk became available at a very reasonable price (less than the price of a new Toyota, in case you're wondering what "reasonable" means for an airplane) at an airport just north of San Francisco.

Many people asked me why I would even contemplate buying a WWII-era airplane. (Luckily, my understanding wife was not one of them. She saw the plane. She understood.) The answer is simple. Love. 

And the back of a napkin.

The first movie I remember seeing as a kid was Guy Hamilton's now-classic "Battle of Britain". I was five years old, my father was in the United States Air Force, and I lost my heart to airplanes painted with British roundels saving the world. 

While some people claim the Spitfire is the most beautiful airplane ever created, those people are wrong. The most beautiful airplane ever to fly is the de Havilland Mosquito. Conceived on the back of a napkin by designer Geoffrey de Havilland in the late 1930's, the Mosquito became the fastest, most versatile, and safest aircraft in the British arsenal.

The Chipmunk was designed by de Havilland's Canadian division at the end of the war as a trainer. It went on to become the first airplane that tens of thousands of British, Canadian, Australian, Portuguese, and Swedish pilots flew. Looking at the design, you can see it is a direct descendant of the Mosquito. Look at the tail on this red one; identical curve. (BTW, this red Chipmunk is the  actual plane in which Prince Charles learned to fly.)

In other words, it is beautiful -- sketched on the back-of-the-napkin beautiful, if you get my meaning. And to those who learned to fly in the Chipmunk, that beauty is much more than skin deep; pilots who know it claim the Chipmunk is the sweetest flying airplane ever made.

So how come I said no? Good question. I'm still torturing myself. The next day the plane was gone, purchased by a more dedicated Chipmunk fan from Reno. Now that bird has flown. But I keep my eyes open for the next to fly along.

"Drawing is how I think" - Milton Glaser

Whether you think you can draw or not, it's worth watching this short clip of award-wining designer Milton Glaser talking about the importance of drawing as a life skill. (While drawing, of course.)

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES from C. Coy on Vimeo.

Select quotes from Milton:

Drawing is how I think.

Accuracy is the least important part of drawing.

Art schools have abandoned drawing in order to make time for all the software they have to teach. We get what we need for our professional life but don't have an instrument for understanding the reality of life.

Napkins in Seattle

I'm up in Seattle today to give the opening keynote at the 2009 Society for Information Management SIMPosium. While preparing, I came across a wonderful back-of-the-napkin story. It turns out that Seattle's most famous landmark, the Space Needle, owes it's origin to a simple sketch drawn by a one-time gas station attendant, seaman, and hat salesman named Edward Carlson.

By 1955, Edward, a Tacoma native and classic "self-made man", had become a successful hotel manager in Seattle. To boost civic pride, he undertook a feasibility study to determine whether Seattle could possibly become the venue for the 1962 World's Fair. While thinking through many ideas, he one day pulled out a napkin and sketched a tall tower capped by a rotating restaurant.

He thought it would make a great centerpiece for the Fair. The state legislature agreed.

Architect John Graham Jr. used Edwards's initial sketch as the conceptual basis for the design that became America's tallest structure west of the Mississippi River. To this day the Space Needle remains one of the greatest examples of "rocket-age" architecture. The tower welcomed its 45 millionth visitor in May, 2007.

And whatever happened to Edward, the guy who drew the first sketch on that napkin?

He became CEO of Westin Hotels Inc. Which is where I happen to be staying. I feel like I'm in good company.

The Health Care Rollercoaster Unplugged

Time for a ride on the health care roller coaster again. Only this time forget about the Senate Finance Committee; we're talking the Big Dipper on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

Next Thursday, Nov. 12, the Health Improvement Partnership of Santa Cruz County has invited me to share my health care napkins at their gala event.

Join me and Healthy Kids of Santa Cruz County for a rolling ride through the ups and downs of H.R.3200, The Baucus Bill, Nancy Pelosi's new price tag... and of course, solving problems with pictures.

Thursday, Nov. 12, 6:00 - 8:00pm. The Dream Inn at 175 West Cliff Drive on the Santa Cruz Beach, Santa Cruz, CA. Tickets are $25 per person, and all proceeds benefit the Healthy Kids program.

Health care napkins take top honors

I'm excited that the health care napkins I created with Tony Jones have just been announced as the "World's Best Presentation 2009" by Slideshare.net and Business Week.

It tells us a lot about the power of simple pictures that over 100,000 people have viewed the slides. After all, this is a PowerPoint presentation about health care; what in the world could possibly be more boring?

Yet by making it visual, simple and clear, people don't mind taking the time to look it over.

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

This is the real lesson for all of us who need to present information to others:

There is no such thing as boring knowledge.

There are only boring ways to present it.

The second and third place winners make the same point. Orphanages and kidneys? *...Yawn...*

NOT.

Sheltering Wings

View more presentations from Sarah Cullem.

Feels Bad On The Back

View more documents from mohamad faried.

Scaling the Grand Hyatt SF

On Sept. 23 I'll be talking and drawing at the SF Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I hope to touch on:

• Solving any problem with a picture.
• How anyone can draw.
• The best 2 business pictures ever made. (Einstein drew one of them.)

Reception starts at 6:00pm at the Grand Hyatt, drawing on napkins starts at 7:00. Thanks Mark Evans for setting this up. Hope to see you at the Hyatt, right off Union Square.

Register here.

My Speech to Congress (anticipating Obama)

Just when you thought health care was over... BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! (Now how much would you pay??)

After the success of our first round health care back-of-the-napkins, Dr. Jones and I realized we still had a bit more to say. When we heard that President Obama was going to be speaking to an extraordinary joint session of Congress next week (Wednesday, Sept. 9 at prime time) we took upon ourselves to say it for him.

So here are the index cards we recommend the President take with him when he mounts the stage next week. (Yes, we know he uses a Teleprompter, but we kind of liked the old-school approach. It lends an additional needed air of 'authenticity'.)

You can recite our proposed speech index card-by-index card below (click on each image to enlarge for better readability) or view as a PowerPoint on Slideshare.net.

We'll be watching next week to see if he takes up our talking points. Anyone have a direct line to Jon Favreau?

Health care napkins update: FOX news, Huffington Post, etc.

Two weeks ago, I published here and on slideshare.net a series of "back of the napkin" visual explanations of the health care debate. I created the napkins in order to myself understand the essentials of a public debate which had become more vicious than any in recent memory. I also hoped others might find them a useful baseline description of the issues.

The response has proven to me (again) the staggering power of simple pictures.

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

Since I posted the slide show, it has been viewed more than 76,000 times, embedded in 265 other blogs, cited on the HuffingtonPost.com and prompted FOX News to ask me to explain on air what the debate is really about.

(On a side note, I find it interesting that FOX was the first network to call. My politics rarely align with those of the pundits appearing on FOX, so it was gratifying that they found the clarity of my napkins more compelling than any political slant. That's something to be especially optimistic about.)

As the government reconvenes in the next weeks, I'm sure health care will remain as contentious an issue as it was before vacation. I plan to create a second set of napkins as the debate heats up again. Watch for them here.

Hey Jabba: can you draw me a map to Tatooine?

Nothing makes me happier than seeing a simple picture clarify a complex issue. This is especially true if the issue is one critical to the cohesion of society. Like understanding health care. Or like finding a good bar in the Dagobah System. 

Authors Dan Wallace and Jason Fry have taken three years to help us with that second, and it looks like it was worth the wait. Their brand new masterwork is called STAR WARS: THE ESSENTIAL ATLAS and it looks spectacular.

The best part for me isn't necessarily the beautifully rendered color maps (although they do look like something we could pour over for hours); what I'm most excited to see are the original "back of the napkin" sketches.

In the words of author Jason Fry:

In December 2006 I sat down at my desk, pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer, and started to draw. Using a blue ballpoint pen, I roughed out the approximate borders of Hutt Space, then added dots for the region's star systems that had appeared on maps: Here were Sriluur and Klatooine, there were Kessel and Honoghr, farther down were Toydaria, Nal Hutta, and Ylesia. There were eleven in all. Hutt Space looked awfully empty.

I put down the pen and picked up a pencil.

Here is a detail of Jason's original drawing of "Hutt space":

 

And here is the whole thing: (click to enlarge)

Why do I like the hand-drawn versions so much? Because I love to see someone's thinking made visible. Like grandma said, "It's the thought that counts."

American health care on (4) napkins. Now all together!

You can now download my entire series of four "back of the napkin" health care sketches as a single PDF file here.

For additional commentary, you may read them on my blog here:

Napkin #1: The health care equation.

Napkin #2: It's not about health care.

Napkin #3: The plans on the table.

Napkin #4: What's it mean to me?

These napkins have been getting a lot of circulation. They've been ranked among the most frequently cited presentations on SlideShare since I've been posting them this week. I've sent links to my Senators Pelosi and Feinstein, and have sent them through to contacts I met at the Senate while giving a workshop there last year.

If you know somebody in the administration who could use help clarifying what the heck is being talked about, please pass along these links.