Reflection – ​Mind Mapping    Challenge and selection  I work for a government agency responsible for environmental protection. One of our key  programs involves finding innovative ways to reduce the use of plastic bags by consumers. We  were at a point in the program design where the design research was complete. We had  conducted interviews, observational research and used other deep dive projective techniques to  collect high quality data on the people who needed to change their behaviour to reduce the  number of plastic bags used in our community.     Our next step was to go through all the data and identify insights to inform our design criteria for  the next ‘What if’ stage of the design process. The mind mapping tool, as outlined in the Week 3  Module, was chosen as the most appropriate technique for this because it is great at identifying  meaningful insights from large amounts of data to inform the development of design criteria.     Application   A team of 15 people, a mixture of consumers and team members involved in the project were  selected to participate in the mind mapping process. All the data was arranged on the walls of a  meeting room, blown up to large sizes to make it easy for participants to see and draw insights.  Participants were given sticky notes and markers to review all the data and write down the  insights they drew from it that they thought would help inform design criteria.     Participants then went to another meeting room, and individually arranged their sticky notes into  themes. We then collected all the participants sticky notes together into themes (including any  outliers). As a group we reviewed the collections of ideas and drew out the essential insights.  The overall insights were written on different coloured larger sticky notes and placed at the top of  each cluster of theme sticky notes.     We then drew a final mind map that brought all the insights together showing the overall themes  and their relationships to help us develop the design criteria.     Ensuring that each person wrote the original sticky notes individually and grouped them together  by themselves was very important to ensure that the loud or high ranking people did not  dominate the insight generation and that all voices could be heard. This made the process an  efficient way of gathering all available perspectives and insights from team members and  consumers.     Insight  Applying the mind mapping tool to the data enabled us to draw out the overall insights as a group  and ensured that no one person's assessment of the data skewed our insights.    The mind mapping processes also prevented the team from assuming that we knew what the key  insights from the data were, reviewing it as a group with outside consumer perspectives helped  draw out other insights and other perspectives.     Approach   I would use the mind mapping tool for this purpose again because it was a very effective way of  pooling ideas and insights to assess the data quickly. It also balanced out the insider/outsider

perspective by conducting the activity with team members and consumers. One thing I would do  differently is potentially providing the participants with some more context about the purpose of  the design process at the start. Some of the consumer/user group were unclear about the  purpose of the project and what insights they were looking for in the data.

