DesignByNumbers

Have you ever participated in or facilitated a brainstorming session? Did you find it hard to keep track of all the ideas and organize them after the fact into a clear document that you can share and review with your co-workers and clients? Enter Freemind - a free cross-platform mind-mapping application that can help you capture,organize and work with free-form information.

In any design project, there is a discovery process where you need to collect information and generate new ideas. The process of brainstorming is a free-form and often chaotic process. The flexibility that the brainstorming process provides as a collective creative tool can make it hard to capture all of the ideas and organize them into an effective document for review after the session.

Mind maps are an approach to organizing free-form information that places a single concept or word in the center of a diagram. Related ideas and information branch-off from the central point, and in turn these can branch off to other ideas or information. Unlike more traditional linear or hierarchical ways of presenting information, mind maps simulate the associative way that people think about and store ideas.

Freemind has many features, including the ability to easily collapse and expand the branches on the diagram, create hyperlinks to files and URLs, import images into your mind maps, and embed long-form notes that expand the content in each branch of your diagram.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 10:44 am and is filed under DesignbyNumbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.