One of my frustrations with the current “crossroads moment” I’m in is that I am once again pursuing a career path that requires explanation. My very first “goal” in a career was to become a “shaper” – based on a made-up science-fiction job of a person who created environments for zero-gee dance. As an idealistic undergrad, I put that title on the business card, thinking that it would be the start to a conversation – and it was. I simply wasn’t prepared for how tired of that conversation I would get.
Same thing happened when I started working as a “creative”, and also as a “open-space facilitator.” Often I would simply dodge the conversation and say “I’m an event producer.” People didn’t understand really what that was, either, but they thought they did – it sounded like a real job – so it was sometimes easier to use.
My feelings about this list of names is a mixture of “Hey, cool!” and “Oh, boy, here we go again.” There are three versions of the title that do appeal to me, however:
Visual Practitioner
I am the epitome of the person who wears many hats (or, as I’ve been thinking lately, a version of the One-Man Band epitomized by Bert in Mary Poppins) and I like this title because, in my mind, it is more about a way of doing things – a practice – than a job in and of itself.
Visual practitioners can be counselors, bloggers, facilitators, cooks, whatever – they simply integrate the visual part of it into whatever job they do. It becomes more of an adjective (or maybe adverb?) than a noun, in my mind.
Visual Synthesis
In my mind, this would change in title to “synthesist” and it appeals to me because the ability to synthesize information into a useful form is one of the most crucial skills needed in this latter part of the Information Age. I tell my own kids and grandkids that it’s fine to learn about subjects that interest them – but the most important skill they can learn is figuring out how to learn, and how to learn quickly.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.creativegray.me/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ulabSource.jpg?resize=300%2C300)
One of the most resonant parts of Kelvy Bird’s writing and practice is the idea of tapping into and becoming a conduit for the “source”. In my mind it can (to some extent) represent the kind of Jungian collective unconscious, but more immediately I feel that this is a skill that can be used to perceive the gestalt of any particular group, synthesize their interactions and have it expressed on the wall in a form that helps them understand the concepts and conversations even better. The ideal form (in my mind) is that it has no particular component of my own biases or opinions – the goal is to serve as a synthesizing agent for their experience in a non-time-based second-person-plural iconographic format to complement their linear-time-based, verbal/written and first-person subjective experience.
Which leads me to my all-time favorite term…
Scribe
Part of my personal practice lately is to try and de-center myself in my work, or at least leverage the privilege I have in an effort to “first, do no harm kind of way and possibly help others. This comes from a growing awareness of the power projected simply by my demographic (cis het-presenting white male) especially among the populations I serve with my work (such as LGBTQ communities) as well as continued horrified understanding of the damage that has been done (#MeToo is the obvious example, but there are so. many. Others.).
This is one of the reasons “Scribe” very much appeals to me as a title, because it is non-authoritative. You don’t heard about “alpha scribes” or “how to be a Fortune-500 Scribe” or “the Morning Routines of the 1% Scribes.” At the same time, it is a skill, and a skill that is put out there for the service of others.
I’m also not entirely altruistic, and I recognize that a truly good scribe does have a lot of power, and can be an essential part of an organization’s success. I confess that I also am working through some of the resistance to the word “art” and so borrowing from a tag that I had on a notebook also appeals: “Artisan Scribe. While that might bring to mind small-batch man-buns and hipster mentality, I think it can also help express that this is not simply a literary scribe, but also one who uses images in a careful and hand-crafted way to further empower the messages being inscribed.
In short: when talking to others, I like “visual practitioner” and “visual synthesist” best, but for my internal practice and ideals I am striving to become an Artisan Scribe.