Mindmapping

Designing for learning spaces is a whole new challenge I faced when I first embarked on my internship journey. Instead of just straight up jumping into the design, we relied on the process of design thinking. Human-centered design was the best approach to this project. Instead of relying on our perspective, we had to know what do the actual users think of the provided space, and what opportunities do they see. Through that, the design will then benefit the current users, mainly consisting of students and lecturers.

The first stage was researching on classroom design. Second stage was conducting interviews with various stakeholders. Thirdly was extracting insights. Now this is where mind-mapping comes in. We had a large group of data, from the various interviews that we conducted. The data was also all over the place, which did not help us at all in our design ideation. We then turned to mind-mapping. This helped us to organise the insights. Through that, we were able to see the basic pattern, and the similarities and differences. For example, many interviewees mentioned faulty power sockets, which quickly moved up to be one of our main priorities. Other similar insights were more focused on how the current furniture is not beneficial and how the atmosphere and dull and boring.

Unlike before, when our data was all strewn over, mind-mapping them, gave us a much better insight on what users want. This later helped us in coming up with the design guidelines and criteria, and finally in crafting the final design. We also were able to focus on themes that the users find most relevant and important. Through this tool, I believe that all our team members were also on the same page. Before, we all had different ideas, different solutions that we wanted to implement. This resulted in our design proposals to be incoherent, with no definite language. However, now, we are aware of the main design intent, which causes our proposals to be more in line with each other.

One thing that I might do differently is to compile these insights as a team, instead of personally doing it myself only. Currently, I was the only one who was working on the mind-mapping, which is a disadvantage as the themes and compilations are mainly based on my understanding and perspectives. As a team, there would be more inputs from others, which would further be able to refine the insights.

