Mind Mapping: A Futures Initiative Session
During our last Futures Initiative co-working hours, the team spent half an hour doing some mind mapping to visualize our program and what it is connected to. This session was led by Futures Initiative Fellow Kalle Westerling.
We are currently completing our second year as a program, and as we look towards the third year, we wanted to think about the spaces where we have impact and what areas may seem more disparate.
Mind mapping can be a great tool for any organization, as creating visualizations of key players and connections to others can render patterns more visible that may not be readily apparent. A map can of course mean many things; it can be geographical, or political, or a network map.
Research projects can also benefit from visual mind mapping to hammer down the exact structure of an essay or a dissertation perhaps.
Most importantly, mind mapping can be an engaging activity for team building and thinking through big ideas in a fun way. We used glitter paint, markers, and big pieces of paper.
Some of what we thought about during our initial mind mapping session were
- Mentoring
- Workshops
- Team-taught courses
- CUNY campuses
- Students (undergraduate, graduate, mentors)
- Co-sponsoring institutions
- Public programming
- Geographical
- HASTAC
Full photo set from our session: