Mind Map Trend in Asia

Ten years ago, I learnt about Mind Map during a psycholinguistics course. Asking students to associate the colour of red with anything relevant coming up to their minds, Dr. Mulyani Djojomihardjo, demonstrated a Mind Mapping technique. It was quite interesting to recall that students who used to be silent and passive became curious and actively engaged in the class discussion. At the end, we were all astonished to learn that we could associate the colour with different interpretations. Since then, I have used Mind Maps to generate, organize and visualize my work and research ideas.

Several years ago, I co-designed a board game that use keywords to facilitate design communication among multidisciplinary players. We applied Pair Mind Mapping to generate a set of keyword seeds with potentials users during the development stage. It was interesting to find out that even though we gave the same keyword seeds, each pair produced a different set of keywords. In a Card Sorting session, we categorized the generated keywords and eventually chose some keywords for the board game. We learnt that Mind Mapping was powerful in generating creative ideas.

Today, Mind Mapping seems to become the latest trend in Asia, including Singapore. During the month of September, Tony Buzan, one of the Mind Mapping gurus, will come to Singapore and lead a series of Mind Mapping seminars at SIM University. It is also announced that Tony Buzan will introduce his new Mind Mapping software called iMindMap. It is good to know that the professional community in Asia starts to be interested in Mind Mapping and see how the information technology has become a tool to facilitate the use of Mind Map for professionals.

It is also encouraging to hear that Mind Mapping has started to be introduced widely in many parts of Indonesia through a number of teacher training and student development programs.

Thanks to Victoria Tio and her work as the source of inspiration for this writing.