So this will be my first blog entry for my COMM 165: Visual Communications class and I’m not really sure how these blogs are supposed to go exactly but I will write down what I was thinking during our first assignment, Mind Mapping, and what I learned from this assignment. The requirements of the assignment were to create a mind map, a free form, brainstorming outline if you will of a topic or question of our choosing. Since I will be going through a transition of leaving college and entering the “real world” during the next month I decided to focus on one of the many questions I have been asking myself; where do I want to live after I graduate? I found it easy to get a few branches right off the bat such as I would rather live in the city than suburbs and the surrounding landscape that will support my two biggest lifestyles, skiing and surfing. After these initial branches I started getting an idea for what I would like by visualizing things in places I like without trying to focus on that specific place. This led me to add in transportation, culture, jobs, and people to my mind map in which allowed me to also expand on these branches such as I would prefer to walk or ride a bike over using a car for the transportation branch. The next phase of the assignment was to pick one of the branches and do a mind map of that. For this part, I choose the city branch because I felt as though by visualizing what a perfect city would be for me, it would allow the topics to flow more freely. I found this to allow all the ideas to flow way more quickly than the previous mind map in that most of the branches formed within the first 7-10 minutes of the mind map. After an hour break or so I returned to add a few more branches that I missed within the first go at it.
Overall I found the mind mapping process to be very conducive for brainstorming the possible influenced and answers to my question of where to live after I graduate. The most interesting thing I found was the use of the Gestalt Theory, closure by always leaving a branch empty to allow my mind to find something to fill it. This allowed me to never fully be stumped or blocked on an idea and to continue to allow new ideas to flow. I found a few issues with mind mapping one of which was that I found it difficult to maintain a non-hierarchical order of the mind mapping as tended to focus on certain branches more than others. Another issue was that during the second mind map was that I found myself repeating some of the same ideas I mentioned during the first mind map. I did however, find the process of mind mapping to be not a painstaking process in that it allows for ideas to constantly be formed do to the very flexible and informal structure of the mind map.
Nicholas (or is it Nick?) I found your maps thoroughly delightful! You are very talented at visual expression. And your rationale was well done and covered the main points I want to know. You did veer from the "grammar" of the maps a bit, but you kept to the spirit of it. Repeating ideas from the big picture to the detail is not a problem... it merely emphasizes that these are important aspects of the problem/solution. I know what you mean about hierarchy. A mind map allows an organic hierarchy to emerge... instead of trying to artificially force ideas into a pre-ordained hierarchy. Perhaps I didn't give that point enough emphasis in class. It's not total anarchy... the sub-conscious brain constantly orders and organizes so it's not at all surprising that it kept popping out onto the page. The point is that this "organic" organization of things helps us better than artificial structure, where the emphasis is on the formula and not on the content or context. I'll bet you see that in architecture as well. Good work.
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