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 likely 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 using advanced design techniques like scripting (in Mel Script or Rhino Script) and parametric modelling (with tools like GC or DP). 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. But connections between architecture and art follow a long tradtion. What Hadid is proposing is a different kind of architectural form in the digital age, what her office hails as parametricism, or the great new style after modernism.