Mapping your Mind
There’s a near endless amount of ideation techniques, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Oftentimes, this involves emptying all the ideas in your brain onto paper, seeing which ones stick and which are thrown away. This is usually referred to as “brain dump” but another method that presents similar strengths is the mind map.
What’s in a mind map
Mind mapping is common throughout all types of creative exercise, not just design. Part of that is because of the strengths they can provide, as described here by mindmapunleashed.com
Making a mind map is an excellent way for you to be able to sort through your thoughts and ideas. This activity allows you to quickly generate creative and even unique ideas in less time. It gives you the freedom you need when brainstorming so that the flow of ideas is not blocked or hampered like linear thinking does. This method is a great way for you to categorize and organize the ideas you brainstormed and identify their relationships. By using a single page or space you can already place a huge amount of information and check its connections. Making connections is easier to do because you have all the information about a particular topic in a single glance. It can even help you discover new relationships among seemingly unrelated ideas and information.
One of the most difficult parts of ideation is trying to organize your ideas. It’s easy to just start jotting things down, but at the end, you can often be left with a bunch of ideas and limited connection between them. With a mind map, it still encourages brain dumping as a way to come up with ideas, but forces an individual to connect and expand on those ideas in some way. At the end, you’ll have the benefit of all your ideas being out on paper, but also have them organized in a way that’s much easy to turn into actionable solutions
Creating a mind map
As with many other aspects of design, one of the most effective ways to learn a concept is to do it yourself. With that in mind, I created my own mind map, with the focus being on ideation. To create this map, I used the tool coogle.it, which I’m already familiar with
My full mindmap
On one side, I simply listed a few different ideation methods, found here. With those methods, I tried to list what I felt were the key strengths of the method. For some, like game storming, there’s methods within the overarching method, meaning I had to expand on that with an extra set of branches
For the other side, I tried to formulate what the strengths of ideation are. I focused on the brain and how we mentally approach the challenge of ideation. As mentioned in interaction-design’s article on ideation, you ideate when you combine the conscious and unconscious mind. With that in mind, I attempted to list the positive concepts that can come from both a conscious and unconscious mind. For example, we unconsciously become more anxious when spacing between items is off, which means we know to design with proper spacing to avoid this feeling
Another concept mentioned in the same piece is how ideation widens up a person’s brain. When we try ideating a solution, proper ideation involves expanding your mind and becoming more free thinking. Concepts such as “no idea being a bad idea” or thinking of how users use similar products help focus our brain on creating solutions, as well as making sure our thoughts flow freely in our head
