Project Description


Illustrate new tech:
a team-building workshop

© TECH4RAIL

An image speaks a thousand words. How can you find the best one for you?

Some technologies are more difficult than others to show visually. For those of you who work in software development or design telecommunication protocols, you will no doubt have struggled at some point to illustrate your topic. Nevertheless, there are always ways to use pictures to demonstrate innovative ideas. You just need to be creative and think outside of the box. Photographs, illustrations, drawings, graphs, videos and schematics can all be used in a literal or figurative way to help get a message across.

Earlier this year, a department of innovation for the SNCF, TECH4RAIL, called upon Agent Majeur to run a team-building day on the theme, “how to illustrate technology”. This team develops innovations to improve the French National Rail Service. We took around 30 of these forward-thinking specialists on a whistle-stop tour of using visuals in science communication.

For this day-long workshop we pulled together a team of experts in the field of visual science. First on the menu, a talk from superstar YouTuber and astrophysicist, Dr. Sebastien Carrassou about making science videos for YouTube. Then, an interactive session on how to use PowerPoint effectively in presentations by our in-house trainers, Alexia and James. Participants learnt about techniques they could use before being challenged to produce and deliver their own visual PowerPoint presentation in groups.

Finally, we closed the day with a photography workshop run by our science photographer, Gil. Having given them a crash-course in taking good photos, participants put their new skills into action with a hands-on photo-shoot – with constructive feedback from Gil too, of course!
The goal of the day was to inspire the team to the think of new ways to visually demonstrate their innovations. And everyone was ”all aboard” for illustrating their topic!

> Training

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