Sketches and images. You have sketchbooks or notepads full of idea maps, visual explanations, process diagrams, grid maps, and all manner of visual thinking sketches. You have pictures of you whiteboard wizardry, graphic recordings, and collaborative adventures with sticky notes. Great.

Making them improved your understanding, solution, and/or your ability to share with others. What now? How do you get the most of visual thinking tools you’ve created?

Part of the design thinking process is constantly reviewing your ideas and making improvements and generating new ideas. You can tape your sketches and images to the wall, stick them to your whiteboard, or make a project space using rolls of poster-size paper. You can review a few visual thinking sketches you’ve done each morning to jump-start your day. A mix of these process-related techniques will keep you actively creating and solving problems in the background.

What if you have 50 sketches and images in your catalog? Or 500? Or 5000? Many will contain ideas, questions, or creations you don’t want to forget. Most people don’t have space to put up 5000 items. If you travel, you’d often leave them behind. You need a portable solution, and preferably one that is flexible and automates when you see your sketches and images.

The Anki Solution. Anki is a cross-platform, open-source software program that is very popular with language learners. Anki uses a spaced-repetition algorithm show you a flashcard just when you are likely to forget about it. Repetition helps us remember, but it turns out that we form stronger memories if we are exposed to something just when we are beginning to forget about it. Anki keeps track of the forgetting curve for each card in a subject deck and you can have multiple decks.

Anki works just as well with images as it does with words. Scan your visual thinking sketches. Size the images to about 1000 pixels wide. Set up a deck in Anki. Drop your visual thinking sketch scans and pictures in, and let Anki do the rest. Add a piece of scheduling software (like Scheduler for the Mac OS or Windows Task Scheduler) to automatically schedule Anki launches, and you’ve have a great design and visual thinking software solution running quietly in the background.

Combining Anki with your visual thinking sketches and images helps you remember important ideas, keeps your creative and problem solving processes active, and leaves you free to focus on new challenges and ideas.