Ideas hub

Creativity engages everyone, embraces everything, and happens everywhere - without borders. Thus ideas are not just generated in offices, on college campuses, or within the walls of studios. On the contrary, it is the ideas that are brought in that make the office, the campus, and the studio a hub for creativity and innovation.

Reading for ideas

Designers are visual thinkers who typically generate, develop and communicate ideas with the help of analogue and digital tools, from freehand sketches and words to sketch modelling and computing. But ideas also come out of reading books (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry). And so reading texts, and illustrations that may go with texts, becomes a form of exploration, of ideas, places and people that opens up new opportunities for designers. Reading, then, not only help designers generate new ideas but also develop and communicate ideas as narratives.

Visualising the dream

Sometimes design ideas appear in dreams or daydreams, produced by the subconscious mind. But whatever their source, ideas need to be visualised and acted upon, or they risk remaining fantasies never to be realised. To exemplify, this month saw the opening of a new museum in Paris designed by architect Frank Gehry, and commissioned by Bernard Arnault, head of Louis Vuitton. Shaped like a massive glass cloud, the building, nicknamed the iceberg, is a metal and wood structure with 3,600 glass panels. Says Gehry: 'This project is a dream , so the first idea was to create a dream. I wanted to create a dream for Bernard, who has dreamed all of this. The idea of creating a glass building that is transparent, ephemeral, and like a cloud is difficult to achieve in architecture'. The museum took eight years to realise, from initial sketches and 60 physical scale models, to complex structural engineering design and construction.

Are ideators introverts?

Ideators are often seen as sensitive people, and a lot of the words used to describe that sensitivity are used to describe introversion as well, for example, needing time alone, more reflective, more independent, and more refined. Indeed, introverts are often thought of as ideas people who are inventive through individual creative work without needing hype-filled brainstorming sessions to bounce ideas back and forth. Yet ideation is a continuum of introversion and extroversion, from idea generation to idea communication, and so ideators need to be flexible capable of switching between the inner world of ideas and images, and the outer world of people and things.

Tools of desire

While ideas often appear in a flash, the ubiquitous "Aha" moment, the realisation of ideas takes more patience, wisdom, and maturity. To make ideas happen, and when this calls for a collaborative approach, the idea has to be communicated effectively. It is here ideation tools, and whether in forms of words, sketches or models, in analogue or digital modes, or combinations thereof, prove central to forward the idea to a desirable outcome.

Act now

Simon Woodroffe, the Yo! Sushi founder, says: 'You cannot really be successful without putting in an enormous amount of work. And you can’t do that just from the desire to get richer. You need to have an idea that you want to change your world.' As an entrepreneur, Woodroffe is an ardent believer in self-appraisal, and prefers giving individual employees money to develop an idea on a hunch, both to encourage creativity and to speed up the process. He continues: 'As soon as you start a debate, it becomes a committee. Committees have a rather clever way of stopping anything happening'. This is unthinkable in Woodroffe’s world, where the whole idea is to make things happen; to confront fear of failure and move past it. Whatever the issue faced by a business or individual, he is adamant that the best time to act is now. Source: The Times; Power in Partnership.

Constructive ideas

The plan to demolish and rebuild each of the four stacks of London's Battersea Power Station seems straightforward enough: To duplicate exactly the original design and construction of the chimneys. But the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the 103-metre tall stacks have called for fresh ideas. First, the southwest chimney will be scanned, with the resulting 3D model used to rebuild all four chimneys. Then the stacks will be destroyed by a self-climbing rig which will start at the top and work its way down using four concrete crushers to demolish the structure by breaking off six-inch sections and sending the debris down a funnel inside the chimney. Finally, the rebuild of the chimneys will use a rig carrying a reconfigurable mould to cast the new chimneys' 1.22m-tall sections in situ.

Ideas from everywhere

Where do we get our ideas from? An old question, with many answers. Says author Neil Gaiman: 'You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions, like "What if...?", or, "If only", or, "I wonder"'. Continues Gaiman: 'An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is'. Moreover, 'Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven't come together before'. So, where does Gaiman get his ideas from? 'I make them up. Out of my head'. It seems his observations may apply to design ideation too. Source: neilgaiman.com

Ideation walk

While many designers anecdotally say they get their best ideas while walking, research now shows that walking can indeed improve creative thinking. The educational psychology researchers at Stanford examined creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting, or an increase by an average 60 per cent when walking. The walkers did particularly well on a “divergent thinking” creativity test – a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions, or what is sometimes known as “thinking outside the box”. For example, the participants had to think of alternate uses for a given object, such as a tyre. Many more original ideas came from the walkers. The study found that walking itself, and whether indoors or outdoors, was the main factor boosting creativity. Productive creativity involves a series of steps – from idea generation to execution – and the research demonstrated that the benefits of walking applied to the "divergent" element of creative thinking, but not to the more "convergent" or focused thinking characteristic of insight.

Cultural literacy

Design ideation is not just about the ability of individuals to come up with great ideas. It's also about how an individual's idea connects to other people's ideas. In a global context, where innovation is at a premium, ideation, then, becomes an issue of social connectivity across borders, or and expression of cultural literacy, that is, a mindful openness to other cultures. Such openness, in turn, becomes instrumental in the creation of high-value goods and services for international markets.

Ideas and entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur Richard Branson's top tips for success include: * I think lots of people have lots of great ideas, but very few people actually go out and try to put them into practice. * The first thing to do if you want to become an entrepreneur is basically to have an idea that is going to make a positive difference to other people's lives. A business is simply that. * You definitely need to believe in your idea. There's really no point in doing something in life unless people feel really good about it and proud about it. You've got to have passion for it and you've got to be able to inspire other people to have a passion for it too.* If an idea is a good idea you should be able to pitch it in two or three sentences and two or three sentences fit very neatly on the back of an envelope. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26575792

Connecting

A strong feature of ideation is that it is dynamic. It is in fact the dynamic use of the human brain, which is intensely interactive, that things suddenly become clear, the ubiquitous "Aha!" moment. What happens, then, is that we see new connections between events, ideas, and circumstances that we hadn't noticed before. That is, seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different.

Robust ideation

Although inspiration and imagination play essential parts in generating and forming ideas, bringing a sense of organisation and structure to ideas makes for a more robust ideation process. Moreover, at the presentation stage, ideas may need to be edited or fined tuned. But this does not necessarily mean that any elements that have been edited out cannot be inserted back later or put into another creative project. Skilful use and management of creative resources pave the way for effective communication of ideas towards their realisation.

Ideation strategy

After the Aha-moment it may seem urgent to realise one's idea. Yet to hesitate to act on the idea is not always a bad thing or a sign of weakness. Indeed many times, holding off on making a decision or coming to a conclusion is the best possible thing to happen, and can even be considered a good ideation strategy.