Example Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

Recently I have participated in a project competition organized by my university. It is an  annual competition for students where they apply their project plans, then people vote for  best projects and winners get financial support from the university for the actual  implementation of these projects. I was a leader of a team of six members. We needed to  create a volunteer project that, on the one hand, would be a solution to some socially  important issue. On the other hand, it must promote the university’s reputation.   Before brainstorming, we had already made a survey of students at my university. In  addition, we looked through all projects of the previous years and the ideas that were  behind them. Therefore, the challenge was that we had quite a lot of data that needed to be  systemized somehow in order to find the best idea for our project.

Selection

To get to the “What if” phase I have decided to try one of the suggested tools. My choice  was the mind-mapping tool as it was a problem of dealing with all the data we had  collected. As I see it, mind mapping is a universal tool to distill all the data that you have  into clear pieces of information that can be easily used. The application of this tool also  helps with the final idea generation: the result of mind-mapping process is design criteria,  which are crucial for creating the “product” with necessary features.

Application

We made it differently than it was described in the lecture (the “art gallery” or “yard sale”  formats), as our mind mapping was small-scale. Therefore, we just gathered all the data we  had in print in front of us on the desk, each of us chose what s/he considered important in  terms of our final idea and wrote down on stickers some thoughts about the data they  picked. Later we started making our mind map by placing stickers on the board and adding  other relevant stickers creating clusters. Each cluster represented a particular topic and was  named accordingly. As a result, we got a list of design criteria (e.g. free activity; placed in  the main university building; concerns career issues), which consequently helped us to  choose our final idea.

Insight

By applying this tool we were able to process and systemize the data in a faster and more  effective way than if we had used lists-making, ranging etc. In addition, the application of  mind mapping allowed us to take into account opinions of every member of our team.  The main result was that in the end we found the most suitable idea and applied for the  competition. This practical experience showed me that design thinking is not always  connected to pure talent of creativity, but can be also taught and developed. Certain results  can be achieved by implementing particular techniques.

Approach

I think that later on, while applying design thinking to solve some problems, I will try to  combine different tools for more efficiency. Speaking about the project I described, we

could have used the combination of the visualization and mind-mapping tools.  Visualization would have helped with better common understanding of our views. The  other issue I would like to mention is that members of my team had the same backgrounds  (students of the same faculty; more or less the same working experience etc.) which  resulted in similarity of our approaches towards finding the most appropriate data and in  explanations. In order to avoid such problem, it is necessary to involve members from  different fields into the mind-mapping process, if possible.

