DESIGN THINKING TOOL – MIND MAPPING

CHALLENGE

I am a design student currently in my sophomore year. During the summer break we had to  take up a project and for this my topic was ‘Future of Retail Spaces’. In the recent times,  because of this pandemic people are becoming more hygiene conscious and are staying  indoors which would definitely affect the retail sector. The country wide lockdown has  increased the online sales and some of the restaurants, stores are closing down  permanently.

Hence the challenge was to design a retail store with social distancing and hygiene in mind.  This was further divided into two parts, the first – deciding which retail sector will need a  store, that which is most demanded by the customers and the second- coming up with a  futuristic design plan which makes the store safe for people to enter.

SELECTION OF TOOL

The tool which was most suitable for this design challenge was mind mapping. It is a  diagram used to visually organise information, it also links your thoughts, ideas and any  other relevant information. I selected this tool as the challenge included gathering customer  data, changes in the retail industry etc. and summarising it. Selecting this tool also helped  me to predict the future with the help of past and present data along with understanding  the customers’ wants and to deliver more than what is needed.

APPLICATION

I created a mind map on how covid affected the four pillars of sustainability that is  environmental, human, social and economic. This helped me gain a macro view. From this I  understood that technology would affect the retail sector in future.

Hence the second mind map was based on stores which was changing the most because of  technology and the ongoing pandemic. This map was divided into six stores which is  grocery, liquor, fashion, restaurants, medical and stationery.

With the help of substantial research and rule of elimination, I selected medical store to  further work on the project. The reason being purchasing medicines online during  emergency won’t help, the existing stores are not spacious and the staff working in a  medical store were also getting infected because of lack of social distancing.

I further on conducting surveys targeting the medical store owners, employees and the  consumers so the design of the store would benefit both of them. The entire process of  mind mapping along with research and surveys (conducted with an ethnographic approach)  helped me to come up with a design brief (with a particular target audience) and a design  layout for a medical store with the space layout, material, ventilation and hygiene in mind.

INSIGHT

The tool assisted me in gaining a different perspective through many ways, it made me  aware about the existing ideas in the retail sector so I could combine two ideas or improve  the same in my design plan. Mind mapping encouraged discussion, disagreement and  reflection because of different ideas. This did not give me the solution but led me in the  right direction.

One of the key elements of design thinking is empathy and hence completing the project  with this approach was the only possible way it as the project was human centred, was  abstract, had a subjective definition of the problem and had insufficient data. Design  thinking makes us realise that there are uncertainties in every solution and therefore we  must be ready for new experiences and have a learning mind set.

APPROACH

If I could use a different tool the next time it would be visualisation plus mind map. As  visualisation is a more graphic tool with no text, it makes it easier to analyse the situation  than it would have been otherwise. Using less text helps in having a common perception.  But this time I used mind maps which worked in the best possible way it could have.

