"I ♥ NY"

Milton Glaser, (1929-2020), the US graphic designer is perhaps best known for the "I ♥ NY" logo which he designed free of charge for a 1977 tourism campaign to promote his home city, amid a crime wave and financial crisis. The logo, using American Typewriter typeface rapidly gained recognition across the world and has been described as the most frequently imitated in history. He came up with the idea while riding in a taxi and scribbled it in red crayon on an envelope, which is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Glaser later said he was "flabbergasted by what happened to this little, simple nothing of an idea". He studied at New York’s Cooper Union art school but he preferred not to use the term “art” at all: “What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,”, Glaser said in 2000.

Ideation and self-talk

Motivational self-talk is commonplace in various sports to boost performance. Could self-talk also apply to ideation as a performing-boosting power? The idea behind self-talk, among athletes, is that by stepping outside their immediate experiences and emotions, and viewing them instead from the detached perspective of a supportive onlooker, performers are allowed to take the fear of failure less personally and to make better decisions. For example, on a practice trial, performing athletes were asked to say out loud some of the internal thoughts they’d had during the performance. This gave each athlete a set of self-talk statements that was personal and relevant to them and, moreover, showed that they did better with second-person ("You") rather than first-person pronouns ("I"). Now to compare the effectiveness of self-talk using first-person or second-person pronouns is difficult as it is open to individual variations. Still by trying out self-talk as part of the ideation process, designers  may find it a useful tool giving a boost to their ideation power, possibly in addition to the practice and experience of "Thinking Aloud", that is, expressing thoughts as they occur, rather than thinking first and then speaking.

Familiarity breeds ideas

'A period of rigorously correct architecture is often followed by one in which the buildings deviate from accepted canons', wrote Steen Eiler Rasmussen giving as example two distinct periods of history: Renaissance and Baroque. Another example would be how Postmodern architecture replaced Modernism in the 1970/80s. Both examples reflect that 'when once we have become familiar with the rules' - here the Renaissance and Modernism respectively, 'the buildings that comply with them become tiresome' (Ibid). New ideas, then, emerge that propose new forms or combinations of forms heralding a new movement or era. However, the two examples also show how the boredom threshold is getting lower among both architects and the general public: The Baroque period lasted around a hundred years whereas Modernism only about half of that. And Post-Modernism, arguably, was over by the 1990s which suggests a higher turnover of "styles" still. In other words, designers are increasingly engaged in employing mannerisms, that is, creating purely visual effects to impress and surprise the spectator, as exemplified in contemporary design by Gehry (Guggenheim Museum Blibao), Hadid (Heydar Aliyev Centre) and Greyson Perry (A House for Essex).
*Rasmussen (1964). Experiencing Architecture. MIT Press.