How to Map a Neighbourhood of Ideas

Have you ever wondered how you can make sense and uncover connections between lots and lots of ideas? Have you ever wanted to see if you could understand what trends the ideas were shaping on a theme you were exploring?

We’re half way through our competition and as we encourage people to sign up for the eventwhere they can design and develop prototypes, and as the Judges review the ideas, we thought it was timely to see how data visualisation could help join up…and colour in the dots.

Neighbourhood of Ideas

Although this isn’t a map in the traditional sense, from the content analysis above, you could almost make out a neighbourhood of ideas, with “local” as the administrative centre with links to ideas on councils, community, charities, websites and other assets.

People” is much more the cultural centre, connecting up to ideas around skills, news, alerts and trust. “Smart phone” is very much the nightlife hub with clear links back to the cultural centre through ideas around connecting younger and older people, linking back to the administrative centre through ideas around reporting.

It also connects up to the side streets which are the ideas around apps, facebook, video, hyperlocal technology and platforms.

Design, data, information and texting are somewhere in the suburbs, alluding to their emerging potential or perhaps in the case of SMS, a shadow of their former past! Bizzarely online communities and social networking are not connected to many of the other ideas, perhaps foreshadowing that people are either looking to new uses of technology or that these two tools are now mainstream enough to be boring!

If you want to search in all serendipity, you can use this search engine of ideas below…and if you are into mapping our open data challenge will be all about that.

Search engine for ideas

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