Example Reflection – Mind mapping

Challenge

Last year I was a member of the coordination team of a project that developed a  participatory process for the regeneration of a derelict public space. The project’s  coordination team consisted of architects, urban planners, designers, cultural  managers and lawyers. The project’s goals were both to develop a prototype process  which then could be also used as a guide in similar projects, but also to produce  strategies and design proposals for the square. We first needed to understand the  area surrounding the square, and therefore, we started the process by collecting data  about it. On a second step, we wanted to get people involved in the identification of  the most important elements of the collected data.

Selection

The collected data consisted of a lot of information that we could present to the  community we would like to engage, but we understood that we should do it in a  way that is simple to understand, inspiring and engaging. Therefore we chose mind  mapping, as a tool that allows creativity and free thinking, but that can also result in  concrete statements about what the next steps of the process would be.

Application

As said above, first we collected data about the square. That is data about the people  who live and work around and people that actually use the square, the connections  to surrounding area; data about the existing uses of the square, as well as its  historical context. Then, we organized a workshop, where we invited locals and  presented to them the data we collected. We used simple visualization techniques to  make the presentation more vivid, like old photographs, maps, charts etc.

After the presentation of this information to the participants, we asked them to just  think about the information and their experiences in order to identify the most  important data that should be used for the shaping of the proposal for the square.  We, thus, made questions like: Was anything of what was presented a huge problem  for the square that we should try to resolve? Or, on the contrary, was there any good  characteristic that we should definitely keep and highlight it, through the  regeneration? Then, they were asked to write possible answers on post-its. These  answers were then presented and put on a board by the participants themselves,  under thematics-categories that they created. At the last part of the workshop,  people were asked to “transform” these thematics into design criteria, that is into  design solutions that the regeneration of the square should include.

Insight and Approach

The implementation of mind mapping tool in this case seemed to work well, since it  provided a lot of answers, based both on the information given or other sources, like  personal experiences. People recalled experiences and related it to the data, like for

example the relation among the traffic and the noise. What I noticed, was that the  tool would function better to smaller groups, because at the beginning not everyone  seemed to feel comfortable enough to express himself/herself in public. Moreover,  the mind map tool helps a lot to “open the discussion”, but a longer and deeper  process is needed in order to reach to design criteria about the square. Despite a lot  of clear design criteria arose from the workshop, a longer discussion would have  been more productive and would have helped to make connections among the  results or even produce more.

