Reflection - Mind Mapping

Challenge:

I am an entrepreneur, I found myself starting for the first time a fashion design business by my  own. The purpose of starting this business is to help my compatriots. As is well-known fact, at  this time of the year in Peru, the temperature starts to decrease, especially in the highlands of  my country, where people die. One of the main reasons of the demises is the lack of polar  clothing. The vulnerable population in this region are children and seniors. To get the context,  this people do not have much money to purchase clothing, they try to make them by their own  using sheepskin to manufacture ponchos, “polleras”, sweaters among other clothing.  My  challenge in this situation is to know which style do people prefer and get to know them,  understanding their necessities. Using this data will help us to produce according to the  requirements the specific clothing items they need.

Selection:

I select this tool mainly due to the dynamic and information we get through the activities and  the participation of the guests. Also, the mind mapping help us to find patterns and insights so  we can stablish a criteria for the design of our project.

Application:

This tool may help us to recollect information about our guests as important as their lifestyle,  kind of work, principle activities during the day, number of people living with them among  other specification we consider valuable for the criteria of the project.

We start by finding a comfortable place where the guests can open their minds and tell us  what they expect and get information about their lifestyle. Then invite a group of people who  live in this area of the country. After the event, the guests can tour the place.

Afterwards, our staff starts by picking the crucial information and taking notes individually  about any learning they consider important to formulate new ideas. Then, the review of the  information is made in teams, so it gets easy to find the insights and look for connections.

Finally, the insights are translated into a design criteria.

Insight:

By applying the mind mapping tool, the team identified the criteria to treats the line of polar  clothing. As we found interesting, the group of people show that most of their time is  dedicated to hard work on the farms, they need practical and comfortable clothes as trousers  and jackets combined with light work shoes. They also take care of their children at the same  time, so it is important to design clothes for them. On average, there are at least 4 people  living together in one house,  the income is not enough to keep a family, so this fact help us to  choose the material of the clothing so it turns affordable, further, an alliance with Ong’s must  be helpful in this position. On the other hand, the team discover that during the night,  temperature drops dramatically, we consider manufacture blankets with the disposable  material.

Approach:

This first attempt gave us meaningful information that supports the criteria made by patterns  and insights the team found in the large quantity of data we’ve collected , specially knowing  the people and understand their necessities, it is important to remember that mind mapping is  a graphic way to represent the min of our shopper. Nevertheless, a continuous study about  their lifestyle may be helpful to redesign and innovate. It is required to apply the mind  mapping for second time to find more details.

