Ideation by Twombly

Cy Twombly was an artist of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and the rush of ideas. He blurred long-held distinctions between drawing and painting depicting refined Classical themes with unidentifiable doodles and splotches. Writing and language served as major conceptual foundations for Twombly's art; the written word, in the form of poems, myths and histories, inspired much of his work. He focused on the process of writing, both by sketching words directly onto the canvas and by creating line- and handwriting-based compositions. Twombly's process illuminates ideation as practised by artists and designers alike.

Dialogical ideation

Ideation through dialogue inspires openness to others' viewpoints and to learning from one another. Ideation through argument, in contrast, might stimulate obsessive thinking holding on to ideas with defensiveness and/or try to push ideas onto others.

Ideas matter

'Individual history matters because ideas matter; people who have the ideas matter; learning the genealogy (if not progressive evolution) of ideas matter; Sure, human life and ideas and their relationships and influences are complex and unguided. But they aren't patternless or boundless.They are only made possible with the stuff in circulation (including the limits of language itself), and if we're sure to align the type of claim we make to the kind of evidence we have, we actually can help bring our ideas and practices into focus for due consideration and learning'. Derek B. Miller, The Policy Lab.

Ideation as science fiction

Design ideation may show communality with science-fiction where speculation and storytelling play out within scientifically established laws of nature. But as design, like science fiction, has entered popular culture, some designs may become associated with low-budget, low-quality stuff, similar to B-movies and pulp science fiction.

Form follows Function?

Increasingly the form of manufactured objects does not follow their function, says artist Michael Craig-Martin. "Think of a mobile phone. You used to have a receiver with a defined earpiece and mouthpiece. Now you just have a box. Today everything looks like everything else. A phone looks like a computer looks like a camera."

Computer Aided Ideation, CAI

Most post-modern architecture, arguably, couldn’t have been designed or built without the computer. But computing goes beyond the purely technical aspects of design. As exemplified by Guggenheim Bilbao, the computer was harnessed to create a "stirring emotional experience". What does this mean for producing inspirational and transformational ideas? Will computers in the future by-pass the human creative process of ideation?

If ideation can be seen as a form of human dialogue, then the challenge for ideation by computer is revealed in the difference between "stateless" and "stateful" conversation, as found in research on artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

In a "stateless" conversation, each question and answer is self-contained, providing its own context and responding only to the immediately previous remark.

In contrast, human conversation is generally in the "stateful" mode, where each remark and reply builds on the last, creating an accumulation of context in which later remarks gain additional shades of meaning (without this context, an eavesdropper would find the conversation difficult to understand).

However, humans don't always converse in the stateful mode, and bot programmers (who write software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet) explicitly try to steer the conversation towards the mathematically simpler stateless forms of dialogue.

Brian Christian*, a researcher in the field, describes how he found the chatbots' deliberate attempts to simplify language reminiscent of human conversation at its most lacklustre. Hardly then the mode of conversation that helped create Guggenheim Bilbao.

Christian, B. 2011. The Most Human Human: A Defence of Humanity In The Age Of The Computer. Viking

Why ideation skills matter

In a globalised design industry there's a shift from the maker and the craftsman to the market strategist and the innovator. Designers, then, will have to work as a team with other professionals. But above all, what designers truly get paid for is their creativity and ability to generate ideas. Ideation skills, then, become crucial in order for the team to produce creative solutions for their clients.