I have talked about the concept of Flow being the ability of tools like mindmaps to help with keeping the process of thinking enabled and not subject to physical constraints of software or physical tools ... creating the visual connection between seemingly disparate thoughts is the heart of brainstorming and the incubator of ideas and conepts.
Micrsoft Office Labs has one more application that takes a common practice of sticky notes and a whiteboard called affinity diagrams ... thoughts are placed up on a board and rearranged into groupings to discern and reinforce ideas or processes, or simply to put a starting point on further work that needs to be done .... the software availble for download here is called StickySorter ... it is not unlike many electronic postit notes, with a new twist ... once you have arranged and sorted and displayed your thoughts, you can download into an excel or access database or sheet to now refine and/or collect more data or information .... saves file as standard csv format
I have used it for another purpose ... screen 1 shows a note cluster that I simply put up as an example ... great stuff if just for that, the means to create groupings is the essential link for information ... here is where it starts to get fun ... in shot 2, I have taken the first grouping and reordered the info, then asked the software to stack the notes ... voila, I have a really nice representation of work ... you could use this as the basis for organizing info into a presentation, book, white paper ... etc etc clean and easy to use ... try it ...
No comments:
Post a Comment