Manual Thinking, a hands-on tool for creative minds
08 / 30 / 2017
The winners of the One Day Design Challenge Spain 2016 edition took part in a Manual Thinking workshop, led by Tomoko Sakamoto, as part of Roca’s best interest to further develop young talent and creativity.
Manual Thinking is a hands-on tool for organizing thoughts, ideas and projects, through a system of foldable maps and removable labels, of various sizes and colors. In times where digital apps are announced as the best solutions for creative processes, Manual Thinking reclaims the importance of the brain-hand connection in order to provide a playful and tangible aspect to content creation and the development of ideas. By working manually and visually you strengthen the right side of your brain, bringing out the creativity in you.
Especially suited for teamwork, this tool, designed by Luki Huber and Gerrit Jan Veldman, ensures collaboration within the group and an innovative approach to reach the desired goal. A three-step process —learn, take decisions and find new solutions— Manual Thinking maps allow a better understanding of a situation by adding hierarchies, categories and relations to its information. They help to gather information in an organized way to create an overview of a situation to take decisions in an easier way. Collect pros and cons, alternative options and figure out the next steps to take. And finally, with Manual Thinking, creativity can be treated in a pro-active manner, with organization as an important basis. It allows you to arrange ideas by groups, making it easy to expand them and find alternatives. The format allows team members to share ideas with each other swiftly through writing and drawing.
As the labels are removable, you can arrange and rearrange your mind maps as many times as you want. A useful tool for presentations, the visual map gives you a straightforward and complete picture of the concept. A Manual Thinking book is available too, which offers a comprehensive account of the tool, a user’s guide, some templates, organizational methods and a few tips on how to start using it.
Get creative with Manual Thinking and start developing your own projects.
