This week I spoke at a workshop on agricultural extension and adoption of new farming practices. As part of the event, they had an artist capturing our key points. I felt it really added something to the event.

My talk on “Critical Adoption Principles” was meant to help the participants (mostly people from the Grains Research and Development Corporation – GRDC) develop an Extension and Adoption Plan for the GRDC.

The artist, Will Bessen, was capturing (illustrating and annotating) the speakers’ points live as we spoke, and we could see his work developing as it was projected on a screen. I thought that might be distracting but once I got going with my talk, it was easy to ignore what he was doing.

Here is what he produced for my talk. To see it full size, click on the image.

I’m not sure how easy it would be to understand the details if you didn’t see the talk, but for people who were there, I reckon it would be a great prompt to remind them of what I said. It’s like a fun version of taking minutes.

At the end of each half day, Will ran through the images he had done for each speaker as a way of summarising and reminding us of the key points. I thought he did a really good job of picking out the points that were worth recording.

If you’re interested in the talk, the slides are here, and below there’s a recording of a talk I gave last year that is a bit similar.

“Understanding, influencing and predicting farmers’ adoption of new agricultural practices”, ZALF Internal Colloquium, 21 June 2022