My two cents

An affinity sorting is a visual sorting, often done with sticky notes, of many different informations into categories.

When you take a lot of different informations for example, you might have a ton of ideas on different sticky notes, and you take the time to rearrange them by little categories.

That's an affinity map.

Yes. I know service designers and innovators love to have fancy names for very simple stuff.

But often, even if the methods are very simple, they are extremely helpful.

In fact in my job, I have often noticed that people get overwhelmed with information.

For example, when they ask for feedback in a survey, they don't know what to do with all the hundred answers.

They are just lost and overwhelmed by all the different directions and different feedbacks that people have. It feels as if people just like to disagree.

That's where doing an affinity sorting or affinity map, really helps.

First, you separate every tiny piece of data into, a different element.

Service designers often like to do that on little sticky notes, they can be digital or on paper. That doesn't matter.

Then you take one sticky note after the other.

You take the first one and put it somewhere on a big table, big wall or big digital whiteboard.

Then you take the second one and you think: does this one belong with this one? No. Okay. I put it somewhere else.

Now I already have two groups.

You take your third one and you think: does it belong to the first one or to the second one? It's a third group. And you repeat that.

Slowly you start to create categories.

And then it's like gardening. Once you have a group of sticky notes or data that gets too big, like a tree, you have to cut a few branches and maybe create a new one.

With an affinity sorting, you don't start by defining categories and then force the data to fit these categories. But you start from the information and then make up the categories as you go.

Obviously you then can get very crazy with this kind of sorting by having, not just categories, but categories that go on top and then even using their positioning to show that this category is connected to this category, or maybe that this idea is the opposite of this one.

Even a simple method can be used in a very expert way.

In the end affinity sorting is basically making categories of data that felt overwhelming before.