What medium the idea?

'The medium is the message' is a statement by Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher (1911-1980) meaning that the form of a message (print, visual, musical, etc.) determines the ways in which that message will be perceived. McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications (including radio, television, films, and computers) would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world. So, McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study. For example, he describes the light bulb as a medium without any content stating that 'a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence'. Now then, what about the proverbial light-bulb moment? A moment of sudden spasmodic effort that accomplishes nothing, or a moment of sudden inspiration, revelation, or recognition?

Idea ex machina

The notion of idea as an element of thought, or a way of thinking, as the result of mental activity, or conception in the mind of something to be done, such as a plan, or intention for doing something, goes back to the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment (late 1600s to the end of the 1700s). This in contrast to the Romantic Era or Romanticism, a movement that started around 1770 (with its peak from 1800 to 1850) in response to the rational views of the age of enlightenment. The romantic thinkers felt that reason was overemphasised and that more focus should be put on the attributes such as aesthetic experience, human emotions and free expression. Now, Enlightenment is more closely related with natural sciences while romanticism is more associated with the arts and humanities. Ideation, then, in the context of design, from the First Machine Age, or the Industrial Revolution, to the Second Machine Age, or the Digital Revolution, interspersed by the Arts and Crafts movement and Modernism, draws inspiration both from the sciences (rational reasoning) and the arts (human subjectivity). In the wake of artificial intelligence, AI, this may suggest idea ex machina as an idea device, or generator or plotter of ideas. But while AI has established a direction and momentum of its own, the march of technology does not necessarily separate the ideologies of enlightenment and romanticism. True, Romanticism was a counter movement to the Enlightenment in its rejection of Enlightenment ideas about the primacy of reason and science. Science, however, is not an activity that goes on independently of all others. Thinking and feeling, then, are better seen as forming an indivisable continuum creating meaningful possibilities in contemporary design.

 

AI-powered ideation tool

The idea that software development (coding) would allow artificial intelligence, AI, help generate ideas seems, well a great idea. After all, with millions of design ideas out there, past and present, why start from scratch, or a blank piece of paper when most innovations are incremental, rather than truly original. That is, based on collection of data of designer knowledge, experience and perception, or through visual search engines, such as Pinterest, AI can help designer with ideas  The challenge of AI-powered ideation though is to develop AI that is context sensitive rather than producing copy-pasting ideas, or a catalogue of ideas for any given design situation (which also raises copyright issues). Moreover, AI-powered ideation might shift the role of the designer from that of a generator of ideas to a discriminator of ideas. AI Research & Development, however, is moving fast, both in terms of output quantity and quality.