Reflection: Mind Mapping Tool    Challenge   I work in an urban farming company and my design challenge was to redesign the washing  area to improve the workflow and productivity of the employees with mild autism and to  ensure that the improved design is autism friendly. The current design in place lacked  organization and proper shelter (as it was in an outdoor area of the farm). The three tasks to  do in the washing area are clearing the soil from the containers, rinsing the containers with  water and removing the roots coiled around the containers and washing the containers with  soap before drying. The containers in the washing area had been piling up and the  employees were unable to meet the targets of cleaning the containers on time.  Furthermore, the employees often had to stop work on rainy days for fear of the rain.     Selection  After three weeks of working closely with the employees to engage in conversation,  observation and ethnography for the purpose of understanding what works and does not  work for each of the employees when working in the washing area, I was interested in  establishing the criteria for the idea generation phase. Referring to Professor Yolanda Martinez’s lecture, the mind mapping tool was essential in looking for themes and patterns in  the data collected, and establishing the necessary criteria for the idea generation phase.     Application   In order to get expert advice on employees with autism, I invited 10 job coaches from the  autism hiring agency, that our farm partners with, to come down to the farm for the mind- mapping exercise.     Taking the cue from the metaphors of the art gallery and yard sale used by Princess Medina  and Jose Ramos in their book Designing for Growth, I used the washing area as a “gallery”  for the job coaches to view and carry out the three job tasks of clearing, rinsing and washing  the containers. I printed visual charts on the average timing to carry out each job task and  the number of containers each employee manages to complete in a time span of 15  minutes. These charts, along with visual instructions of each task, were placed in the specific  area where the task is carried out.    I tasked each of the job coaches to go in with the mindset of an employee with autism and  to take notes on how they felt whilst doing the job and areas of improvement. I gave them  each sticky notes, a marker and a clip board to take notes after carrying out each task, and  told them to work in pairs. Thirty minutes was assigned to observing and participating in the  job tasks in the washing area.     After viewing the gallery, each of them arranged their notes into clusters on their clip board.  They were then split into two teams of five to begin the process of mind-mapping in a team  to identify all shared themes and outliers. Each theme was then turned into an insight  statement to uncover what was implied by their observations. These insight statements  were used as the necessary criteria for the idea generation phase of redesigning the  washing area.

Insight   By applying the mind mapping tool, we identified the necessary criteria to redesign the  washing area of the farm.      The insight statements gained from using this tool deepened our understanding of the  needs of the employees with autism and the problems that were associated in the current  design of the washing area. For instance, feelings of fear of working in the rain during were  translated into employees with autism would not be able to work comfortably during rainy  days because of the loud sound of the raindrops on the material umbrella shelters and of  getting wet due to the holes in the shelter. I realized that I needed to change the material of  the shelter I was going to use for the new design of the washing area in order to improve  working conditions and productivity of the employees.     Approach   I have a background in Anthropology and Market Research but I have not used this method  of mind-mapping until learning about it from this course. It provided me with a strong  foundation of intentional goals I needed to meet when considering ideas to redesig the  area, instead of purely relying on assumptions.      However, concerns were raised on not spending sufficient time in some stations (i.e. job  tasks) and too much time on others. As a result, these job coaches who raised these  concerns felt that they could have generated more insights had they had more time. An  improvement I could make to the approach is to delegate time to each station in order for  the gallery goers to have sufficient time to take sufficient notes about each job task.

