Reflection on mind mapping

Challenge & Selection

As a Master student in design and innovation, I use the mind mapping tool very frequently, in  order to generate ideas, whether it's for creating an innovative product, to enhance it, or to find  solution to problematic situation. It does not only help me to generate ideas but also to  synthesize them. It’s a diagram where you organize information visually in hierarchical way, it  also reveal the relationship between the ideas generated and the single concept that we try to  deal with in the center. There ideas that are connected directly to the central concept, while  other are branch out from those ideas. During this Master I had to do a lot of projects, one of the  main ones is a project on circular economy. The subject is to work on the circular economy in a  district of the city where I'm doing my master's degree. The aim is to raise awareness among the  inhabitants of the district about ecology and sustainable development. Other members of the  group and I decided to implement the design thinking approach to do this project.

Application

Before to start generating concepts and Ideas, we first had go through an empathy phase where  we gathered enough data, we started by looking for the concepts, identifying the stakeholders  and interviewing them… then we defined the problematic as clearly as possible. And last but not  least, we started the ideate phase by generating concepts, we started by writing the problematic  in the middle and thinking about the activities where we can use different resources, that are all  located in one district, these are the resources we gathered during empathy phase, we thought  about the links between our stakeholders and the places that can be exploited in that district,  little by little, Ideas began to emerge, and we land on some very interesting concepts and  solutions.

One of the stakeholders that we have identified in the resourcing phase are, a retirement home  and a kindergarten, we have thought about engaging both them in an activity where they can do  something that is ecology related, to raise the kids awareness about the subject. After more  investigation we have found that the retirement home has some garden the elderly people can  do some gardening.

Insight

The mind mapping tool allowed us to organize the data in different solutions, it also helped  organize the different stakeholders we had, and draw links between them, and these links were

the keys to the emerging ideas. We were able to have a global and simplified vision of the  situation.

Approach

I think mind mapping one of the very most important tools in the design thinking approach, it’s  not only a tool to generate ideas but also to organize the gathered data. During the project we  were limited in the exploration of this tool, which we could go much deeper such as making  different mind maps for different solution until finding the most optimized solution.

