Boredom

Boredom is not necessarily miserable and harmful, as designers know. In fact, they want to get out of a boring state, so they indulge in novelty-seeking unique thinking, which brings out creativity. Indeed, boredom is not something to fear, but to embrace. Graphic designer Paula Scher of Pentagram design consultancy, for example, finds that ideas come in all kinds of ways and that she gets her best ideas when stuck in traffic, in the back of taxis: 'Boredom as the key to getting the best ideas'. Moreover, to stir creativity, Scher upholds looking at a lot of books, stimulation by long walks, or allowing herself to do nothing - where she lets her mind wander, rather than occupying it with apps on the phone: 'Spending time on your phone won’t provoke any new ideas, that’s for sure', she claims. 'One needs to be in a state of play to design', she continues, 'I generally push something as far as it can be pushed. For me, that’s the fun'. https://www.stirworld.com/inspire-people-design-icon-paula-scher-on-embracing-noise-to-recapture-the-creative-edge

Ideation as collective intelligence

The advance of generative artificial intelligence, GAI, for example, AI image generators, is enabling GAI to develop ideas and concepts as well as to refine visual outputs based on mimicking of what is already there. GAI as an ideation tool, however, is only as good as the datasets it is trained on and therefore produce images that tend to be rather repetitive or "in the style of". But GAI's ability to mine vast open datasets on which GAI models are trained can be problematic in that such datasets also carry creative ideas, for example, visual style and likeness which have no copyright protection. GAI, then, poses both risks and opportunities for designers: risk, in posting creative work on the interent without getting due credit or compensation - or, opportunity, in using GAI technology to augment human imagination. However, in the bigger picture, where design is both a competitive and collaborative activity, and where creativity signifies empowerment, GAI and human intelligence can complement each other. Moreover, when successfully combined, GAI + human intelligence become collective intelligence, as suggested by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design.