For this exercise, I had to create a spider diagram for four words: seaside, childhood, angry, and festival. I had to use different ways of generating ideas for it, including asking at least one other person.
I started by doing each spider diagram and just referencing my memory, and the thoughts/ideas that I thought of without external input. I realised after the first diagram that I was using too big of a pen for the amount of ideas I was generating, hence the change after that.
Next, I searched each word on Google and looked through the images it brought up. I then wrote anything I thought of that I hadn’t written yet, and underlined them to show they were influenced by this search. Anything I thought of that connects to the underlines words, I didn’t underline, but they were still relevant to the Google search.
Then, I called my girlfriend and my mum and asked them both to tell me anything that came to mind when I said each word. I wrote anything that I hadn’t yet written in a different colour, and ticked the words that they said that I had already written. Anything that is ticked twice, they both said.
It was really interesting hearing their thoughts and the words that were prompted. My mum grew up at the beach, and I spent part of my childhood there too, so to us both ‘seaside’ prompted similar words. Childhood, family, growing up, home, rain and bad weather, processing emotions by the sea, and a general sense of familiarity. Whereas my girlfriend grew up in London, pretty far from the beach, and her responses were mostly holiday themed, summer, sunshine, going away, and escaping the bustle of the city.
Seeing how different people may have different responses based on their experiences was really eye opening. It made me realise how we can’t rely too much on our own experiences when working with clients. We can have our own spin on things, and our experiences offer unique perspectives, but there could also be perspectives we’re missing by limiting our ideas to those experiences.
I found anger to be the hardest word to do this for, and also childhood. I think that’s because both things are so subjective and can be quite vague. They’re experiences rather than tangible things. Seaside and festival were very easy and words just kept flowing to me, but I found myself quite stumped with the others. Googling the words helped a lot, however, and I think I’d do more of that in future.
Overall, I enjoyed this exercise, and found it a useful way to generate ideas. I do struggle with spider diagrams, as I’m actually not a very visual thinker, so looking at the final diagram and trying to make sense of it and actually develop an idea is difficult. But I think as a starting point, it’s good.
Learning Log 