The Artist
3
Developing What You're Going To Do
Overview
In this chapter, you learn how to…
- Demonstrate and strengthen ideation methods and skills
- Create a mind map related to your project
- Develop strategies to get yourself “unstuck” from anchor problems
Earlier you considered who you are as an artist, the artistic work you create, and how it aligns with your mission and values. Now, we can turn our attention towards what you want to develop.
Perhaps you already have a clear idea of what it is you want to create. If that’s the case—great! On the other hand, you may not be sure what you want to develop or may be feeling stuck. Regardless of where you are in this process, we will be using mind mapping, a technique to help you generate ideas, visualize them, and connect them together.
While there are other tools and strategies available to generate ideas, this chapter focuses primarily on mind mapping.
Defining Mind Maps
At its core, a mind map is a diagram that is developed, often in a freehand fashion, to capture ideas visually, organize them in a hierarchical manner, and discover relationships between disparate pieces within the whole. Mind maps typically emerge from a single concept placed at the center of a page and used as a vehicle to generate material for potential solutions to a problem or a challenge (AF Bureau, 2020).
“A Mind Map is a diagram for representing tasks, words, concepts, or items linked to and arranged around a central concept or subject using a non-linear graphical layout that allows the user to build an intuitive framework around a central concept.”[1]
Below is are two examples of a mind map.
Why Mind Mapping?
“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.”
—Linus Pauling, American chemist
Why should you use mind mapping?
This process of idea generation, or ideation, allows you to rapidly develop possibilities. The more ideas that you might want to explore, the greater the chances of you creating a better idea, project, or design.
The development of more possibilities creates greater access to innovative projects, ideas, designs and collaborations. This process is about creating and developing ideas—not just the obvious ones, but the wild and unexpected ideas.
You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”
—Adam Grant, American organizational psychologist
Letting Go – Where the Wild Ideas Are
We get through life by making judgments—judgments about the fastest way to the store, what we want to eat, what our next project will be, or what to wear. Sometimes we think through these judgements, but other times they happen at the edge of or outside our awareness without letting us consciously take time to consider the decision (social scientists refer to this as heuristics). These unquestioned judgments help us live our life efficiently, but they can put up roadblocks for our imagination.
Busting out of our patterns of thought allows us to create novel solutions and ideas, but