Exercise: Spider Diagram

A “Spider Diagram” is a tool to generate ideas from one word or term. To create this type of diagrams, the main word should be in the center and to write down all the words that come to mind and keep expanding from these new words, basically creating less obvious connections. 

To generate our own spider diagrams, we were given the words: seaside, childhood, angry and festival. Finally we were ask to answer the following questions:                   

• Which word was most difficult for you to work with
    For me the most difficult word to work with, was “angry” and I can imagine a few reasons why. I guess that coming up with words related to a feeling or emotion is more complex than coming up with words related to objects. It’s much easier to think about colors that are related to the world “sea”, for example.
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Also, I think that the negative connotation of the word angry, created in me a discomfort of some kind and this made the process slower and difficult. And finally, I think one needs to approach these types of terms in a more abstract way, which to me is always a challenge.
 
• The strategies that suited you best to come up with more words. 
    The best strategy I found was searching through social media, especially Instagram. It turned out to deliver more personal results for the words I was searching since people are sharing their own content and labeling as they see fit. I found some “obvious” words in the images I saw and I was sometimes excited and sometimes disappointed in not having come up with this myself.
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On the contrary, the Google searches were not very helpful since the main and most repeated results were the most obvious ones and mostly I already had them in my list.