MIND MAPPING FOR CLASSROOM PEOJECT ON DISABILITY

CHALLENGE

I am pursuing my master’s degree in design. In our course, we have a subject about social needs and  solutions. The subject spans for 5 weeks and its scope demands us to select a social issue and further  understand, investigate, study the history, the users, stakeholders, find gaps if any and suggest a  sustainable solution for the same. We have to work in a team of 2.

In the first phase – ‘What is?’ we started with the social issue as – the plight of disabled population  of the country. Further we have collected quantitative data about the various work done by the  government and private sector NGOs. We have conducted ethnographic interviews of users affected  by one or more disabilities and have visited hospitals and schools catering to the targeted users. We  have also maintained customer diaries and observed users as they went on with their daily lives by  passive observation techniques like fly on the wall and shadowing. Phase one has given us a huge  amount of data to be worked on.

The challenge is, to move on from ‘What is?’ to ‘What if?’. In phase 2 – ‘What if?’ we should be able  to filter out one important, impactful and achievable issue to work on during the 5 week fixed  timeline and propose a concept or solution for the selected issue.

SELECTION

The ‘What if?’ phase fetched us varied data from different activities. We have to distil the data and  find meaningful observations and make decisions about selecting an issue to go ahead in the course.  Using mind mapping tool, we can categorise the vast data into various sections and subsections and  find the best fit issue on which we can work.

APPLICATION

As a first step towards building a mind map, we discussed the various information we had from  phase one. We collected all the information in one folder before we begin. We wrote down the  important keywords from the Interviews and findings on sticky notes. I have mentioned two of the  examples below:

User statement 1: A user suffering from polio mentioned that ‘many public places have slopes as  alternative to climb steps, but the grip of the railings used for support to climb up is not the best’.

Keyword: Grip Material for Railings

User statement 2: A user suffering from partial Visual Impairment mentioned that ‘the websites are  not accessible and my text to speech convertor doesn’t recognize many web pages’

Keyword: Websites not Accessible

By the end of our reviewing the user interviews and quantitative data, we had many keywords with  us. Each keyword depicted an issue faced by the disabled population.

In the next step, we had to categorise the keywords in different groups and sub groups so that we  have a visual understanding of the entire scenario. We started putting the sticky notes with similar  properties together on a whiteboard until we had exhausted all the notes. At the end of this exercise  we had 8 major groups and they had subgroups. Further we included our peers and our professors in  our discussion, to find their inputs and feedback for the issues we had noted down and it became so  much simpler with the help of a mind map. We were able to explain the extensive research we  carried out in phase 1 through this one page summarized map and it was an instant win!

INSIGHTS

The mind mapping technique here, helped us organizing the cluttered data into one single map, thus  giving us one page overview of the findings from phase 1 – ‘What is?’  We further marked each of  the 8 issues with the priority level and impact it has and figured out that one of the issues, that of  ‘Issuing a disability certificate’ needed immediate attention. We decided on the issue we are going  to take forward and further investigated the same and found many gaps in the process of obtaining   the disability certificate. After much brainstorming and discussions, we proposed an improvement in  the current process by making the entire process digital and more structured.

*You can find the mind map at the end of this report.

APPROACH

Given that we were moving from ‘what is?’ to ‘what if?’ phase, to be able to manage the exhaustive  data we had collected by then, the mind mapping tool is the appropriate tool to be used here. This  gave us a summarized view of the data and also easier to convey to our peers and professors about  the research work to save time and get their feedback on the same.

