Ideas for sustainable design

As we enter a new decade, today's designers find themselves caught between the fierce competition of the market place and the calls for sustainable production, of ever satisfying consumers needs and desires yet in environmentally responsible ways. But this dilemma also highlights the ideological difference between modernism (c. 1920-70) and postmodernism (c. 1970-90) regarding what is art and design. That is, between the meta-narratives and somewhat elitist ideologies of modernism, within a broad social and political context and the subversive and glossy statements of postmodernism. Because in the over-reaching debate about climate change, the ideas, theories and methods of modernism (which also embraced experimentation, new technology and rigorous and systematic research) rather than the fragmentation, simulation and deconstruction of postmodernism might offer a more fruitful and effective approach to reducing the negative effects of global warming, and therefore a better ideas base for sustainable design futures. Discuss.

Bauhaus ideas

As the centenary year of the Bauhaus, possibly the single most influential modernist art and design school of the 20^th century, draws to a close, it may be wortwhile to recall the creative drivers and main ideas behind the school's achievements. First, Bauhaus didn't emerge from nowhere; it was inspired and influenced by the international Arts and Crafts movement (c. 1880-1920), the Werkbund, the creative associations of artists, architects and industrialists established in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the early 1900s, and the Dutch de Stijl movement (1917-). Second, it saw as its mission to bridge the gap between traditional arts and crafts and modern industrial manufacturing aiming at an alliance of the arts under the wing of architecture. This mission also paved the way for the International Style and Brutalism as well as postwar modernism in architecture. Third, Bahaus developed a pedagogic model which combined the teaching of arts, crafts and architecture stressing design as a process where ideation and experimentation with new materials were integral to problem-solving, a model that later became a blueprint for design education worldwide.

Narrative ideation

The narrative is one of many ways to generate, develop and communicate ideas. That is, an approach whereby the narrative, or story telling, is the propelling agent of the idea, the agent here being the designer-ideator, from first thought to description or exposition of the idea through the means of words (written and spoken), freehand sketches, physical models or computations (digital media), or combinations thereof. Moreover, as the idea is a form of proposition, or argument, that is, although the idea may be "fully formed", it is not yet realised, and whether expressed verbally or visually, it sits within the narrative approach in either fiction or non-fiction mode, or, again, in mixed modes. Design ideation, then, becomes a process akin to that of narration, where the designer is not only the ideator - the creator of ideas, but a story teller too. A variation of ideation as narrative is interactive storytelling, that is, the designer interacts with clients/colleagues/users/consumers. In this mode, the designer is not necessarily the leading ideator, or protagonist propelling the story (idea) forward. Narrative ideation, then, becomes a shared creative and collaborative experience.

Computational ideation

Design ideation is integral to design thinking, a form of strategic and practical process for problem-solving. Computational thinking is part of this process too, that is, thinking computationally can help designers identify, organise and represent the problem in new and different ways through computer aided abstractions and pattern recognition. However, computational thinking, as a thought process, is sometimes criticised for being too externally guided or structured (programmatic and algorithmic thinking) leaving little or limited room for human "free form" creativity. But this seems a narrow view because the design field is part of ongoing rapid technolgical change and necessarily engaged in challenging complex problem situations, for example issues of sustainability and climate change, which require an understanding of underlying science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM skills). Indeed, design thinking already involves STEM skills, from architecture to fashion design. This suggests that introducing and applying computational thinking in the early stages of the design process expands rather than narrows the potential of the development of a creative solution which is authentic, valuable, and useful for a given situation and context. A prime example hereof is Gehry's  design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in which new computer software helped materialise new architectural forms.

Glocal-ideation

Glocal-ideation, a contraction of globalisation, localisation and ideation, and borrowing from the notion of glocalisation in the social sciences and postcolonial studies, may be understood as an ideation process that combines the concerns of localism with the forces of globalisation, or a local adaptation and interpretation of global forces. That is, adaptation of universal ideas to local levels and conditions. The spread of universal design ideas has had, and continues to have an impact on a range of specific design areas in local contexts, from design education to architecture, product design and media. For example, the Bauhaus pedagogic model, modern and postmodern architecture (theories, styles and materials), high-tech consumer products and social media platforms. With growing concern about glocal issues such as climate change, waste products and sustainability, glocal-ideation becomes a necessary approach in the early stages of the design process.

Comprehensive design ideation

The notion of comprehensive design ideation suggests not only designers' use of the full range of ideation tools, viz. words, sketches, and models - in physical as well as digital modes, but that design ideation can be pursued by anyone engaged in activities that apply ingenuity, originality, strategic thinking and other qualities that are indispensable to good design. In this sense, comprehensive ideation highlights the view of design as a fluid, intuitive process, or "open design" that goes beyond traditional boundaries of professional or commercial application of design. Such inclusiveness and widening participation in the design process seems particularly useful and meaningful in dealing with everyday design issues such as wasteful packaging, or design for the elderly.

Advantage AI-deation

CAD programs, such as Rhino, are already great at researching algorithm-based design solutions which allow designers a high degree of flexibility in creating both simple and complex forms. Now the use of artifical intelligence, AI, which writes its own algorithms through coded programs based on data fed to it, is supporting design ideation by researching and calculating responses to well-defined design problems. Although AI works on a system of probability, it may come up with creative surprises. But it is not so much the case that AI "tells" the designer what the best idea is for a given problem, rather AI enables ideas to scale, test and measure more easily and quickly, producing hundreds of possible iterations of an idea instantly, which the human mind never could. So the main advantage of AI, as the technology appears currently, is to minimise mundane and repetitive tasks thereby freeing up designers' time for more human-centered inventiveness as well as keeping the emotional resonance of the idea. Or put differently, while the design brief is inspirational, AI makes the brief aspirational, enhancing existing ideation processes.* It may be worth pointing out that AI-ideation carries the risk of algorithmic bias, that is, different types of outcomes depend not only on the amount of data, but also what kind of digital information is being generated, classified, stored, and made available for analysis.

Ideation as stream of consciousness

Ideas are elements of thought. But ideation, at the early stages of the design process, is not just thinking. Because thoughts create feelings. And feelings create actions. And actions define design outcomes. Ideation, then, is a process, or a continuous flow of  thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, thinking generates ideas, which, combined with feeling, produce a desire to express the idea, which, in turn, triggers the action to communicate the idea, and through using a range of ideation tools, such as words, sketches or models. Ideation, then, could be perceived as a stream of consciousness, or a narrative mode, device or method that attempts to capture and express an idea made up of numerous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of the ideator.

Bauhaus and the culture of drawing

Designers talk ideas but better still, they visualise them. And drawing is a prime tool for ideation, as celebrated by Bauhaus, the German design school founded 100 years ago (1919-1933). Paul Klee was one of the school's teachers promoting drawing not only as a practice but a practice underpinned by theory, as articulated in his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925). This was in parallel to his Bauhaus colleague Johannes Itten who emphasised the psychological and emotional aspects of drawing, as well as colour, including gymnastic excercises to loosen up the body before drawing. Klee's lesson plans included hands-on step-by-step approaches to creative expression, such as outlining the types of lines and how a line can become a plane; drawing from observation analysing natural forms (from fish to plants to the body's circulatory system); drawing with colour (explaining Goethe's colour wheel) also making connections between colour and music; and researching contemporary and historic drawings in terms of line, form and colour. Klee, like Itten, provided student feedback but did not give individual grades believing that this would stifle the creative impuls.

Situated ideas

An idea is an idea is an idea. Or is it?  If ideas can be understood as elements of thought that can be either abstract, concrete or visual, is design ideation situated in any particular element of thought? Although design is often thought of in visual terms, as expressed in, for example, 2D and 3D images, graphs, prototypes or models, design can also be articulated in the abstract, say design theory or programming, or in concrete terms, in which the idea has physical referents. So what seems to matter in design ideation is that the idea is not localised in any particular element of thought but that which best expresses the essence of the idea, and be it in the context of, say function, styling or production.

Idea generator

Words are prime tools in the ideation process. But with the advancement of artificial intelligence, AI, the distinction between natural language, as spoken and written by humans, and formal or built language, as used in computing, is narrowing. For example, recent machine learning research has revealed a new text generator, the GPT2, which is capable of performing goal-oriented tasks including translation and summarisation, and pass simple reading comprehension tests giving the model more knowledge of how to understand written text. Moreover, the unsupervised transformer-based language model, created by nonprofit company OpenAI, and trained on a huge dataset, can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. That is, the model is capable of generating samples from a variety of prompts (human written) that feel close to human quality and show text coherence. This, in turn, may suggest that if the model were to be trained on a dataset of designs, it is conceivable that the text generator, given sufficient and contextual relevant data, could turn idea generator. This raises furter questions, such as, what is the most authentic, or the highest valued idea: human generated ideas - the human connection or ideas generated by the algorithms in machines? That is, questions about the impact of AI system design on ethics, trust and humanity. See also: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/ ; https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/

Ideas overload

It may be argued that ideas per se don't really matter because in a world of social media and global networking there's the risk of too many ideas, or an overload of ideas. That is, more ideas don't mean better ideas (also reflected in the fact that neither copyrights or patents protect ideas). Indeed, with pervasive digital technology, there's not only quantity over quality but also superficiality giving way to the illusion that every idea is a good one. What matters, then, is that ideas have to be communicated effectively, that is, argued truthfully and convincingly to persuade and win over stakeholders. This is particularly true in design where ideas are put forward aiming at changing for the better existing realities in some shape or form. Effective communication of ideas, then, highlights ideation skills, that is, the skillful use of ideation tools (words, sketches, models and computing) gained through practice.