This exercise in mapping is really about putting down on a display surface (paper or board) all the keywords that you can think about in your 'problem area' organised into appropriate categories. This helps to form a worldview (also known as long-shot-view or a birds-view or overview) about the problem that you going to solve.

You could look at your problem from the following viewpoints to get an overview:
   a. Physical Aspects - includes Sensories, Activities, Artifacts, Environments, Materials
   b. Social Aspects - includes Relationships, Emotions, Groups, Celebrations, Communications
   c. Cognitive Aspects - includes Memory, Medias, Business, Functions, Processes

One could start by forming a team and then do brainstorming for keywords about the problem area.

1.0  Brain Storming for Keywords (Form a Worldview of the problem):
•   Brain storm for keywords ‘Topic’ and through associations think of other keywords
•   Brain storming always works better if you can gather together a group of participants with diverse background and experiences
•   Write on a large surface so that everyone in the group can see
•   Build on each other’s ideas, never crticise
•   Brainstorming helps generate out of the box connections
•   Also write down each of the keywords on separate post-it’s or cards for sorting into categories.

2.0  Information Structuring (Categorisation into groups):
•   Sort out cards one by one making appropriate groupings – collective participation and argument is required by the whole group.
•   Make classifications in different groups
•   Name the groups appropriately

3.0  Information Mapping (Making a visual layout):
•   The keywords in different categories are organised and drawn on a two dimensional surface.
•   These could take the structure and shape of Mind Maps (One central theme sub-branching into different categories) or Network Maps (Many sub-themes forming different clusters and interconnected through links)
•   You could include hierarchy into the mappings i.e. Ordered according to importance

Brainstorming session in progress - write the keywords on a display surface:


Keywords being sorted into appropriate categories:


An Example of a Mindmap:


An example of a Network map with Inter-connections:


This exercise on doing an 'User Worldview Mapping' helps in making visible the different topics and branches connected with the problem area and displayed in a given space. It's great to display this in your workspace so that your group could look at it and make inter-connections or use it as a template to look at possible connections for further research and understanding. Doing a worldview mapping can be a useful part of the design process.

We can call this as an exercise in 'Problem Space Visualisation'.