Design Methods: Mind Map
Have you ever had trouble starting a project, or continuing one? Well worry no further, I have a solution for you. Mind mapping is one of the best brainstorming tools out there, whether you have many ideas going through your head or very few.
As its name suggests, mind mapping is a way to put all your thoughts into a fun and organized format. You start with a central idea, this could be your theme of the project, a focal point, or even a basic prototype/draft of an idea. You then branch out into subtopics, ideas that connect to the central point. Finally you can branch out each subtopic and add comments, specific ideas, or describe the idea more specifically. Depending on what you are working with, you can branch out as far as you wish, you could also focus on an idea that you are liking, and combine some of the subtopics. Bonus points if you add color and images.
The great thing about this method is that it is also team-friendly. My design capstone team and I used mind mapping to solidify a prototyping idea. We had already brainstormed many prototyping ideas and were stuck in choosing which idea or ideas were best to test.
We knew we were going to test our prototype, so our central idea was Experience Prototype Brainstorming. We then wrote down several ideas that we had discussed and set them as the subtopics. We each individually and as a group expanded on each idea. After jotting all the ideas down, we talked about each idea and discussed which ones were the most defined and which ones we could combine.
This method helped us to focus on a more specific idea to test. We decided on creating an experiential session between high school students and a college/professional mentor, and threw on the card sorting idea as a good exercise to also do.
Conclusion:
There are many benefits to using a mind map. First off, there are many things you could use this method for. As you just read, my team and I used it to organize our brainstormed prototyping ideas, so that we could decide on what to do, but it can also be used to brainstorm in itself, by branching out into many ideas. For example, planning an event? No worries, put a theme as the central idea, and branch out into different categories, what foods will there be? What kind of decorations will you get? How about which music would be playing, etc.
Cons:
It might be harder to understand from an outside perspective to see the outcome of the mind map, unless there are specific colors indicating a chosen branch to go with or other ways to portray one’s thought process. There is also very limited space within each bubble to write many things, you might need to then go write down the ideas more specifically and well explained in another document.
