Exercise 3: Mind Mapping Exercise

Go somewhere with rich visual evidence that you can pretend are field observations. Your well-decorated refrigerator is an ideal spot to practice this type of visual triage. Alternatively, you could use a bulletin board, a desk that requires sorting and cleaning, or a junk drawer. A very full bookshelf will suffice if you do not have anything disorganized in your home or office. The only other things you need are a pen and notepad.

This activity is designed to be a 30-minute-long, iterative exercise, but it does several

jobs at once. So take your time. At the end of the exercise, part of your home will be optimally organized to suit your priorities and you will have learned to use a new design-thinking muscle.

You have assumptions, such as, This is my refrigerator door, and I already know

everything that is on it, or, This is my refrigerator door, and I already know what is most important on it. You must always be aware of your assumptions because that is the only way you can challenge them. What if you do not know what is on your refrigerator? What if what you think is most important is not what you feel is most important? Are the materials on the refrigerator decorative or utilitarian?

Start: Make visual order from visual chaos. Take everything down and lay it out on a table or floor in a neat, ordered way (but not an

organized way). You will be spending the next few minutes creating different methods for organizing these pieces of evidence and rearranging it accordingly.

Step 1: How are these pieces of evidence alike? Begin grouping by theme. Create clusters of things that are similar. Think broadly about

your themes. You can cluster important phone numbers together, group pictures of family, a separate group for pictures of friends, and a group of to-do lists and grocery lists. You can group together things that are predominately blue or predominately red. Arrange and rearrange your clusters. Do not be afraid to take things apart and make them into new groups. Throughout the process, feel free to use loose organic cluster shapes or tidy rows depending on the working style that suits you best. Jot down on your notepad which clusters are useful or meaningful to you.

Step 2: How are these pieces of evidence different? Are the themes of any of your clusters opposites? Move the clusters as groups into a pair

of opposites. If not, reorganize and regroup your clusters so that you can create opposite groups. What do you learn by comparing and contrasting these opposites? Jot down how these differences could be meaningful or useful to you.

Step 3: Experiment with an approach. Prepare to tear your clusters apart. Regroup the pieces of evidence into clusters

depending on who gave them to you or who put them on the refrigerator. Is that a useful organizational system? What about grouping them into clusters according to whom in your household each piece of evidence is most important to? Jot down thoughts on how these clusters could be meaningful or useful to you.

Step 4: Experiment with an alternative approach. Tear your clusters apart and organize them in a chronological way. In what order did

these pieces of evidence arrive in your home? Try again. Do they form a to-do list that can be organized in order of urgency? In order of importance? Try another chronological organizational scheme. Perhaps you can create a narrative from these items? Is there a way to organize them that tells a story that is meaningful to you? Jot down thoughts on which of these chronological orders are most meaningful or useful to you.

Step 5: Reflect. You now have a notepad full of reflections of which organizational methods were the

most useful (functional) and the most meaningful (emotional). Some may also have social benefits to you and the other members of your household. You can now recreate the organizational method you found most useful on your refrigerator or bulletin board.

Of course, in business, you dont have only one refrigerator. As with other forms of data,

it can be very useful to slice and dice the data, or to organize and display the same data set in a variety of different ways. Some organizational frameworks will help you make decisions, some will help you share what you have learned, some are high-level and abstract, and others can capture more detail. Coming up with these different frameworks to sort through data is a messy, iterative process. Any designer can tell you the process and the outcome looks a little different every time you do it. But it works. You now have the tools to create order from the chaos.