My experience with mind mapping was, I think, a positive one. I went about it by simply writing down everything I know about the big long project I’ve been dragging my feet on finally getting around to sitting down and working on. In that way, I came to see how much I knew, how much I didn’t know, how much I knew I didn’t know, and how much I didn’t know I didn’t know. It seemed pretty much like for everything I wrote down, two or more things came to mind that I would need to figure out in order to complete the project. This was, initially, pretty dispiriting.
But after stepping away from the thing for a little while and taking some time to get used to it, the main takeaway for me was that there’s just a number of particulars I need to figure out in order to be able to accurately represent the lives of people who work in an industry I’m not all that familiar with, as well as the lives of the people they come into contact with. For example, the fabric used in athletic apparel, where it comes from, who makes it, how it’s made into pants, the discrete steps taken to get the fabric from wherever it comes from into the pants it eventually gets made into, etc.
My next step, I think, will be to figure out how I’m going to figure all this stuff out. I do know a more than normal number of people with a lot of experience in the retail industry, so that’s probably a good place to start. And also there’s been a great deal written about a particular apparel company (i.e., Lululemon) that’s pretty similar to the one I plan to write about. But still I’ll probably need to find a number of other good resources with info about the athletic apparel industry in order to finish my project.
Research Methods 