Art & Design Research

Mindmapping can help you get the lay of the land for a topic and all the subtopics, so that you can go from a vague idea for a topic into a specific research question.  For example, I started the map below with just "stickers" as my research topic, and eventually arrived at the question: How have artists used stickers as a form of protest?

If I Google "stickers" I'm just going to get a lot of popular sources (websites just trying to get as many clicks as possible; businesses selling stickers).

Here are some ways to get an overview of the artistic and scholarly conversations happening about a topic:

• Wikipedia or Credo (Credo is like a library-paid version of Wikipedia where all the articles are pulled from published reference books)
  • Look at the headings of the encyclopedia article to get a lay of the land
  • Click into the references cited at the end for more detailed discussion and sources you can actually cite
• Come to the library to browse around
  • Search engines are trying to give you exactly what you're looking for, so it's hard to discover things you didn't know to look for
  • You can browse for books and see what jumps out at you
  • There are all different types of books, for now, look for broad overviews or visual inspiration (we'll get to the scholarly book chapters later)

After consulting the overview/background sources, I know all the subtopics related to stickers. I've chosen stickers as guerilla activism and graffiti. Now, I'll consider some questions that can guide the rest of my research.

I'll brainstorm a bunch of questions and then pick the one I like best:

• When have stickers been used as a successful community organizing?
• Are stickers considered vandalism and graffiti?
• How have artists used stickers as a method of protest, globally?

I like the idea of comparing different protest stickers globally, so I'll choose the last question!

Try the library search and Google as your starting points. Google is easier to search because it will take what you type and try to figure out what you mean. However, the library search includes paid resources that aren't Googleable, so try both!

Brainstorm all the different keywords you could use: