Connecting the dots.

Photo by D koi on Unsplash

In both design and research, it’s hard to keep track of your thoughts as you work on multiple projects. If you’re anything like me, you tend to get scattered with your thoughts and ideas, and you need a visual anchor to keep track of how your ideas connect. One tool I can’t get enough of is the Mural board or a similar web application, the Miro board. There are many templates to start ideation and brainstorming, but my go-to lately has been the concept or mind map.

We created a concept board to connect our research and the emerging trends that came up in our data collection. Branching out from our goal of designing a “learning commons space,” we defined six core topics to explore: learning, productivty spaces, multi-sensory, mental health, sustainability, and adaptive systems. From there, we brought out some research that would help us inform a design that not only met some of our design goals but also connected how they relate to one another. This visual map helped out team stay focused and on track with our co-design prototype of a learning commons for graduate students.