Tools and materials, you have a variety of options for mapping flows and journeys. Remember, you are working with ideas and use any tools that makes sense to you. Whatever you use, it needs to be able to take notes. And you need to be able to be able to arrange notes. And you need to be able to add or annotate to those notes. Use what makes sense to you.

Why natural media for this class, it's hard to break, it doesn't crash, you don't have to recharge it. It's very durable and stable in a variety of ways doesn't really come out in the laundry. Typically, if you're using pen and paper, but it's pretty durable, it's accessible. For a wide audience. There are some cases where digital tools will be more accessible. As far as literally using different methods of input for including different abilities and whatnot, you're going to find greater accessibility likely through Digital.

Let's go through a list of natural media options to you and some trade offs. Natural media, dry erase board, great if it's available. It can be big and bulky. It's not very portable, something to keep in mind. It's nice to have different purposes for different colors, sticky notes helpful in a variety of situations. It's it's easy to also be vertical and broadcast to a room and whatnot create a way for many people to participate with ideas that are easily self contained in a small space limitation is fantastic for creative endeavors of all sorts.

And the focusing ability of the regular size sticky note is wonderful. There's a good reason why oftentimes designers have Some kind of strong feelings about these notes. Because they are so prevalent and useful and used, your mileage will vary as far as investment and if you feel they are affordable and reasonable for you, I carry a little kit of sticky notes and markers with me and a couple highlighters and some some dots for voting. I know that there's a lot of a lot of a lot of these tools can have a divisiveness, why not to especially if you're in a team, you're in a company where they've been used a lot, then the people can associate experiences if the collaborations have gone well or poorly and symbolize that in these tools. Overall, if you practice in an inviting curious, playful facilitation style, they I find them pretty well met even even in an audience that may be a little bit tired of them.

I find it really handy to just carry a little toolkit around where can do this kind of facilitation just about anywhere easily fits in my backpack, pen and paper, very handy. Reliable, you can have paper in the form of note cards, writing utensils of all kinds are commonly available. pen and paper is going to be a strong way to to work with your ideas. It's common, it's portable, great for affordability, it has a little bit of a negative in that how flexibly size paper can be. Paper can be less of a design constraint, which is a mixed bag when you're trying to quickly capture ideas. And so you could go too far or be daunted by the big blankness of a page so not always approachable, yet affordable, widely available.

It's great to pair with blue painters tape. Whether you're using printer paper, no cards, what have you. Any paper that's available, blue painters tape helps you go vertical and get more people seeing and participating in a thing that maybe a table would would create limitations for smartphone. smartphone is handy in all cases because once you have captured your collaboration or you're working even in a solo session, and you're integrating research and notes from other places, the smartphone is going to help you document and share one tip or idea when you're exporting images from your journey mapping and collaborative sessions via smartphone. Be sure to export it with a useful name. Because even if you save these kind of pictures in something like Evernote, some tools like that will do some handwriting recognition it will not be as good or accurate as if you named it right then in there, name your file in any way that will help you remember and help your collaborators identify the purpose and the content.

Text surrounding this map that you've documented, captured like so dry erase board, or collaboration board, hyphen, project name, hyphen, project phase hyphen, something about the session hyphen, other notes you have, go as deep as you can or want to or care to, because you'll be able to find the file later. As I mentioned, any tool that can diagram will work. So digital tools are fantastic. Of course, their challenges are when you're collaborating in a space and the control can create barriers for everyone who wishes to participate, and to unlock their ideas and get their collaboration. If this works for your team. If this is a solo project, digital tools totally work.

You've got your traditional design tools like Aqua or balsamic mind mapping tools are fantastic text files that can work to just putting text in space with tabs and spaces. That's fine. Using a spreadsheet, using any any any application that can do flow and diagramming from like desktop publishing to Visio, or omnigraffle. All work. Totally awesome. Just not the focus as far as the examples in this class.

Yet, if that's how you wish to build your project in the class, totally cool. Use the tools that work for you. What's most important is that we're working with ideas, you need to be able to take notes, arrange notes, and then add to those notes. Whatever tool you wish to use to convey that is totally welcome. So next, let's do this project. We will step by step make a journey map.

And by all means, at any point if you have notes you've been taking or you want to share some diagrams, some doodles, feel free love to see your work as we work along