MIND MAPPING

Challenge and Selection    In the past year, I was part of a team whose main focus was to come up with solutions for  problems in our environment. One of the projects that we worked on was developing a  web/mobile application that detects face masks in public spaces. We felt this would be useful in  certain healthcare facilities where face masks are mandated.     Our goal was to build this AI based application from the ground up and make it appealing to the  users. One of the tools that we used, and the one I liked the most, was Mind Mapping. We  wanted to scope out the project and cover as much information as possible regarding our  product.     Application    First, we just had ‘Face mask detector’ on our map. Then, we drew our first branch and  discussed why our product would be important and whom it would benefit. Things got really  exciting once we started drawing mini branches.     Our next branch focused mainly on the design of our product. We discussed how the front end  of our product would look like, what software we would use to build the app, what sort of AI  model we would use to detect face masks and how we would implement it, and what the  working condition of the application would look like.     We then moved on to discuss the testing methodologies and talked about how we would test  the AI model (functional testing) and later how we would test the non-functional aspects of our  application. We had to research different testing methods and decide which ones we were going  to implement to improve our product. RIght away, we discussed how we could get feedback on  our design iterations so that we don’t go off rails and build something that would be unappealing  and unusable for our users.     Our final branch focused on the main risks of our project. We talked about longevity,  sustainability, maintenance, competitors and other aspects of the post-development phase of  our project. Everything we discussed was written down on this map and it ended up looking like  a giant tree.    Insight and Approach    I personally felt like this process was the ‘glue’ to forming the structure of our project. And the  best part was that it was visual. Another thing I realized was that even though we did a lot of  brainstorming before we began this project, we continued doing that during mind mapping.  That’s one thing that I would definitely consider doing again in any of my future projects.  Brainstorming gives you a lot of creative ideas, especially when you are in a group, and Mind  Mapping, in my opinion, is a solid tool, while being able to visualize, to give form, structure, and  basic timeline to any project.

