Challenge I am in an industrial design college and we have a class of project of product. The major challenge for the group and for me is to understand each others ideas and dynamics and then reconcile our ideas to form our initial stages of the project, after we’ve already collected data about the given theme. Even though all of us, seven, are in the same course, we come from different backgrounds and usually have very contrasting ideas. Here I learned that us having different mindsets is actually very good, but in practice, it’s very hard to find a way to make things understood and we end up having a lot of discussions, ending up with no solutions and delaying the project, which usually has a month to be completed. We’re looking for making this process more efficient, making the workflow and group dynamic better and enhancing our creativity.

Selection Since our problem is in the idea generation state, the problem-solver tool incremented was mind mapping . Mind mapping is a tool that helps generating and choosing ideas through identifying patterns in a large gathered quantity of information, as well as putting them in a way that’s easy to visualize and understand, instigating creativity.

Application

As a first stage of the mind mapping, I proposed a certain structure to it.

We had a memory board with all data -research and brainstormed ideas about the materials, functioning, and design of the product, target customers, financial and other resources. Then we’ll have another board with a basic settled structure and blank space to put annotations or more optional branches. The first circles will be for the data categories sorted by color and as it branches there will be stored information in an organized way.

The activity proposed will be done in steps: First step: A person is going to the first board

taking a piece of information. Second step: We will have a brief conversation of it and decide how to move on. 3. Based on the decision, it will be added into the mapping board in it’s respective place or be discarded. The focus of the activity and the board display is making the analysis, selection and placing of data more organized and fast. This way we’ll have better communication and visualization of the ongoing project.

Exemple of mind mapping arrangement that I created for this process:

Insight By applying this tool our team learned the importance of an intuitive display of organized ideas. It gave us freedom to think and analyse things in a different way, bringing innovations to the design of the product based on data that we haven't had the right approach before. It helped to keep our communication smooth and inspiring, not only providing creativity and organization for the project but for our discussions on it. Additionally, we became faster and were able to understand our priorities and group dynamic.

Approach

I learned that visualization and mind mapping come together in projects like this and while mind mapping was the right tool for us at that moment in the project, we had problems that came from before this stage and had to do with the lack of visualization of unprocessed design ideas and data, so in future projects we’ll install a better system previous to mind mapping. But even then, the mind map not only worked as it helped fix this minor problem we had by giving us a better data scope and approach to work with. That was a very helpful tool that we’ll intend to use in more projects, keeping in mind the insights gained.

