Safety in ideas

It's the business of designers to challenge convention from time to time. But when we do this, we risk alienating those with a vested interest in maintaining tradition. And often too, we just can't tell if a new idea is a stroke of genius or a stupid notion until we have begun to try it out. So we have to take that risk. It takes courage to explore different ideas, approaches and solutions. But designers owe it to themselves to ideate and experiment. And as long as we keep reaching for new ideas and possibilities we are sure to find one that works.

Ideation the Hadid way

Zaha Hadid's Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome is completed. The script-driven architecture began as a jagged scribble on a page of lined notepaper turning into an artwork in acrylic paint. And that, in turn, spawned hundreds of pages of computer-generated images creating a building for the presentation of the visual arts. Hadid describes the architecture as "porous, immersive, a field space, the notion of drift". The idea of architecture whose masses and spaces drift, says Hadid, has been alien to architecture but is well understood in art. The fact that Hadid makes connections between architecture and art suggests ideas from new sources – and different kinds of architectural form.

Committed to ideas

Do ideas demand definitions, structures, and commitments? But once our ideas are defined, structured and committed, we might feel caged, trapped, or limited. Yet if we want to realise our ideas we have to take them seriously: In ideas start responsibility!

Ideation as essay

Design is a hybrid medium reflected in how designers employ ideas from both fiction and reality. This suggests that the designer, in articulating ideas in written form, becomes an essayist whose narrative veers in and out of experiential knowledge framed within a fiction. The literary form of design ideation, then, is the essay rather than the hard science paper.

Community of ideas

Within the general framework of ideation, where intuition, information and matter converge, we find, with the emergence of new knowledge and cross-pollination of ideas from design and science, a community of ideas where there is not only variety of ideas, and rivalry between them, but also awareness and respect of how each idea fits into that community.

Idea prototyping

Prototyping, or modelling design ideas is evolving. Developing from the tradition of the crafts, prototyping in the digital age with the aid of modelling software can now be seen as both generative and dynamic, offering new ways of exploring and communicating feasibility of ideas, and whether in form or appearance (aesthetic model), or function (proof of concept) . The distinctions between analogue and digital idea prototyping, or the physical and virtual are dissolving to the point where they have now become outmoded terms in design ideation.

Ideation in the digital age

The digital age urges us to move fast forward. But technology does not neccessarily cut us off from traditional ideation tools such as pencil and paper that make for a gentler and more comfortable step into the future.