MIND MAPPING

A huge thank you to Denys Levassort over at Mind-Mapping-Decision.com. The link to Denys’ site is here http://www.mind-mapping-decision.com     Although I do not speak French, Denys offers services in which mind mapping is applied to organizations, educational settings, marketing efforts, etc.

Although I did not know anything about mind mapping until Denys schooled me, it is a technique in which a drawing is used as a tool for thinking thru the complexities of relationships, communication and effectiveness.  The idea is to produce a drawing that crystallizes the focus or concept into a single image.

A quick search will bring you up to speed on what a mind map is. And the elements of it are quite well defined. You start your drawing with a center element. And you then arrange around this center the elements, dynamics and properties of the situation that you are working to understand. Typically mind mapping activities are done in groups with a facilitator. The end product is a drawing that gives a visual summary of what has been observed and resolved. Typically the drawing is a tree like structure which shows branching, noding, and

Wikipedia tells us that the earliest mind maps were done in the third century. Apparently, one of the first mind maps was used to image the concept categories of Aristotle. The mnemonic properties of the mind map have kept it in service since then. There are of course software applications and apps that aid in your mind mapping.

Denys wrote in an e-mail that the benefits of mind mapping are “…keeping alive opposite ideas in the map, seeing the evidence behind, pushing paradox emergences…” In his work with organizations, to fully understand exactly what is going on and how it really works, you do have to address elements that are opposite and hidden. And when you do that, new understandings emerge.

And of course, these exact principals are what we are concerned with here at Transparent Drawing. The basic concept of transparent drawing requires that, because nothing is hidden, you must keep opposing and non complimentary ideas in your mind as you solve how it works.

We will need to think more about mind maps, and the concept of mapping in general. I am starting to realize that there are all sorts of similarities and overlaps of mind mapping to transparent drawing that will be fun to pursue.  For the moment, it is safe to say that maps are deeply symbolic and typically are two dimensional. Despite their very high degree of abstraction, we typically have absolutely no trouble immediately understanding and using them.

Every example of mind maps that I have seen are two dimensional. Denys might know of examples of three dimensional mind maps; I’m sure they exist. At any rate, two dimensional mind maps make sense. A three dimensional mind map might be similar to playing three dimensional chess.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to take the basic elements of mind maps so as to produce a three dimensional, let’s call it a map. The drawing at the top of the page might be some sort of mind map, with it’s centered element and then branchingly arranged surrounding elements.

And then as a last thought, since I started this project, this is the first time that there has been the organic growth of this blog via a link from another blog. Personally, I am not sure about the efficacy of organic web growth of an idea. When there was simply less web, then there might have been a greater chance that your idea would be found to be interesting to others with a similar focus. Now, with the increasing vastness of web, I’m not so sure anymore.  But that’s ok. For the moment, with Denys’ link, this is the way I’ve always heard it would be.