Creative Cities Summit Lexington is very pleased to announce the participation of a special delegation from Michigan at the conference next week.  The delegation will participate in a special session titled “Fighting Back – Messages from Detroit” on Friday, April 9^th at 11am.

“Detroit remains the psychic center of the American economy” said CCS founder and producer Peter Kageyama.  “People need to know that cities in crisis can fight back and do amazingly innovative and creative things.  That is why we wanted to bring this group from Michigan to tell those stories.”

The delegation was able to attend thanks to the support of the Michigan Municipal League and the New Economy Initiative in Detroit.  Sean Mann of the Michigan Municipal League and the founder of Let’s Save Michigan will serve as the moderator. “We are excited to share our firsthand accounts of Detroit to a wider audience and hopefully shape a richer, more optimistic narrative about our city,” said Mann.

The delegation includes:

Karen Gagnon, Michigan State Housing Development Authority, Cool Cities
Eric Cedo, Unity Studios
Phillip Cooley, Los Pistoleros
Mark Covington, Georgia Street Community Collective
Claire Nelson,  Open City

At CCS2 in Detroit we had the services of Tom Wujec, Autodesk’s evagelist and visual thinking expert, to provide a visual record of the event.  Tom works with groups and events all over the world and provides brilliant sketch notes of key concepts and sessions.  These sketches enhance standard notes and make for powerful reminders of the event.  A picture really is worth a thousand words and can capture complex ideas in a way that makes them memorable and useful.   Below are some examples from Detroit.

In April we will employ this sketch note process again to document the entire conference.  We have retained Michelle Malott, from How Do You Innovate and one of the founders of the Visual Thinking Seven as one of our visualization specialists.  We would like to find a local graphic designer to work on this process as well.  If you are familiar with the process and have a passion for illustration, please contact producer Peter Kageyama for more information.