A colleague of mine once told me that “Designers are thieves, they steal bits from here and there and put them together in new constellations”. This professor, Simon Clatworthy, inspired me to use a design method during my Master project (at KHiB), which I call Inspirational Cards. The most important thing about them is to extract knowledge from something that inspires me, and transfer the core of the knowledge into my own topic. I've developed the method to fit my own needs, and the cards has proven very useful also during my PhD, and this is why:

1) Initiating complex challenges: the method helped me to start working on this PhD when I had no idea what I was doing, and only had the topic youth, social media and society. In the beginning I would make a card for everything that inspired me, even though I didn't know what to do with it.

2) Research diary: The method works almost like a research diary for me. Ideas and sources of inspiration behind my theories can be tracked in time, as they all contain month/year and chronological number.

3) Mapping of how I got to my results:The cards, now around 150 of them, shows very much the way I got to my results and what I've been interested in along the way. They show inspirational sources, but also reflections, ideas and other design research.

4) Understand my project: I have layed out the cards, sorted them in different ways, just looked at them to see patterns, and used them to explain e.g. my supervisor what I'm working on. So the cards help me gain an understanding of what I'm really into, the overall patterns of my design- and research interests.

Feel free to download my inDesign-template here, but please refer to me or my PhD when using it.

Here is a selection of the cards, see close-ups on press (totally about 150 cards, as of today, august 2015):

Four categories of cards:

Yellow cards: Inspiration from others; an idea, a design, a detail or a concept I’ve come across somewhere, that somehow is relevant for my process –indirectly or directly. See for example the cards "The Confessional", "Sonder", or "The Knitting Clock".

Red: Personal reflections on process. Paradoxes, questions to myself, epiphanies.

Green: My own ideas for designs and smaller features of design. This can also be ideas developed in corporation with student assistents working on my topic.

Blue: Research discussing design concepts in some way. For research I normally keep track of it in Mendeley - a reference tool software, so this category is mostly for research that is related to visual stuff or design.

IDEO Method cards

I used the IDEO Method cards during my Master degree, and really like how IDEO works and how they make their methods accessible to everyone. This is a deck of cards with a design method on each one, and tips on how to use it in projects. And these are really not just useful for designers. They are divided into the categories Ask, Watch, Learn and Try. http://www.ideo.com/work/method-cards (they also exist as an app)