Playfulness

Playfulness is evident in children all over the world. Children play to create, learn and communicate. And playfulness plays an important role in design practice too. Indeed it can be seen as a methodology to support the design process. In this, playfulness reflects an attitude to designing that encourages creative thinking and behaviour, from motivation and exploration to stimulation and collaboration. Moreover, playfulness can help design teams to focus on creative potential rather than criticism of each others' ideas. A current example of playful design is the Play Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, a temporary summer venue open to people of all ages.The pavilion, with its curving forms, acrylic skin and bold colours, is a joint project by the Lego Group, the Serpentine Gallery and the architect Peter Cook, a co-founder of the avant-garde Archigram collective in the 1960. Cook describes the pavilion as a “theatre of formative play” where architecture becomes a stage for unstructured creativity. The project also expresses Cook's idea that building should be joyful, social, and open-ended, a reminder that architecture can be soft, silly, experimental, and still deeply intelligent.

Ideation structure

Ideation, as a form of creative activity can be either structured or unstructered , as enjoyed or observed in the way we play games. Structured play, then, includes board games, such as chess, or organised sports, such as tennis. Unstructured play, or free play includes many collaborative improvisational games such as story-telling or role-play. Games can also be played solo, of course. But there is no single definition of free and unstructured play, nor are there any specific prescribed methods. And so, structured and unstructered creative activity may overlap. Brainstorming, for example, is a technique to generate ideas that can be either a managed, goal-oriented session or a more spontaneous, open-ended affair, or both, that is, hybrid. And so with ideation.

Original ideas in the age of AI

An original idea is said to be one not thought up by another person beforehand. Yet, arguably, there are few truly original ideas in design. Most ideas consist of combinations, developments or byproducts of other ideas, or are inspired by old ideas. Moreover, the concept of originality is both culturally and historically contingent. The modern idea of originality goes back to the Age of Enlightenment (knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism) and its response in Romanticism (the importance of subjectivity, imagination and appreciation of nature). In law, originality is a legal concept with respect to intellectual property, IP, where creativity and invention are manifested as copyrightable works. But while the battle over artificial intelligence, AI, and copyright continues, ideas (and facts, and abstract concepts), are not protected by copyright law. That is, copyright protects the tangible expression of an idea - not the idea itself.. This principle ensures that while unique expressions are safeguarded, the basic building blocks of creativity—ideas—are free for all to use and build upon. And so, because ideas per se cannot be copyrighted, anyone, including AI companies and creative industries can build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by someone else. But while combining AI and human intuition and emotional depth expands possibilities for human expression, the question about what is originality remains and so the nature of creativity itself. In addition to ideas, there are several other things that are not eligible for copyright protection: https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/whats-not-protected-by-copyright-law/

Ideation and the 80- 20 rule

The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, was introduced in 1906 by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. The story goes that Pareto noticed that 20 per cent of the pea pods in his garden were responsible for 80 per cent of the peas. Pareto expanded this principle to macroeconomics by showing that 80 per cent of the wealth in Italy was owned by 20 per cent of the population. In the 1940s, Dr. Joseph Juran, a US engineer who took an interest in operations management applied the 80-20 rule to quality control for business production. He demonstrated that 80 per cent of product defects were caused by 20 cent of the problems in production methods. At its core, then, the 80-20 rule simply underscores the importance of focusing on those aspects of your business—or any other problem-solving area —that get you the best results. In short, the 80-20 rule is a principle that states that 80 percent of all outcomes are derived from 20 per cent of causes. Although there is little scientific analysis that either proves or disproves the 80-20 rule's validity, it is said that you can use this concept in any field. So, let's try and apply the 80 - 20 rule to design ideation. For example, using a range of ideation tools - from sketching to prompts for AI - which tool(s) would help generate most of the ideas for any given task? That is, keeping track of ideation tools used in the project might reveal, say, that ChatGPT, representing 1/5 of all tools used, is responsible for 80 per cent of the ideas generated. Q.E.D. P.S.This is, of course, a quantitative, not a qualitative measure. (The above Pareto text is derived from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp)

Constraints in the ideation process

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), the composer, wrote: 'My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.' At first this may seem to go against conventional thinking about creativity, that is, "do whatever you want with no limits" (divergent thinking). In contrast, constraints may be perceived as reducing options and so inhibit creative risk-taking and innovation (convergent thinking). Yet, ideation is iterative, like the design process itself, a constant push and pull between divergent and convergent thinking. Ideators, then, would benefit from a balanced approach that provides enough freedom within a framework of constraints to yield the most creative outcomes.

From Shakespeare to AI and back

When Polonius asks Hamlet what he is reading, Hamlet's answer is: 'words, words, words'. And so since Shakespeare's days, language, spoken and written, has had a privileged position in Western culture. Indeed both natural language processing, NLP and machine learning, ML, as sub-fields of artificial intelligence, AI, learn from historical datasets by finding patterns and relationships in the data and are widely used in generative artificial intelligence, GenAI. And GenAI models are used both for text-based tasks and text-to-image content, as exemplified by chatbots like GPT4 or by content generators such as Midjourney, which generates images from natural language descriptions known as prompts. When these technologies are combined they complement one another by using NLP’s ability to understand and analyse language and GenAI’s capacity to produce new content. And so both technologies underline language as key to human communication, like in Shakespeare's days. Moreover, AI, as a sub discipline of computer science is transforming the methods and nature of scientific research and its use of language highlights the most crucial aspect of science. That is, the skill to ask the right questions - not from answering known questions, but from asking challenging new questions and questioning previous ideas. The challenge for ideators, then, is to see things in a new and different light. But while ways of seeing may come before words, the use of language, in defining the problem and getting closer to the solution is at the core of design. And so, whether Shakespeare or a present-day designer (in communicating in the context of design), they both turn words. *Cf. Dostoyevsky's psychological exploration of a murderer in Crime and Punishment, his remorse and redemption posed an immense challenge for cinematic rendering, as in the 1935 US film version of the novel: 'as there could be no visual equivalent [for] the author's detailed reasoning and elaborate description of [his characters] mental attitudes'. Baxter, J. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. The International Film Guide Series. A.S Barners & Company, New York.

Idearo, ergo sum

Ideas appear extensively in the sociology of design, in the sociology of innovation and culture. While content and context naturally vary, the way the idea is being communicated affects the perception and appreciation of, and the response to the idea. The presentation of the idea also releases and conveys the emotion embedded in the ideation process. All which reflect and deepen individual and societal understandings of design, both as process and outcome. The advances of technology has not fundamentally changed the underpinnings of ideas. For instance, GenAI simply masks the simple art of observation or what is seen in the imagination. And so, ideas are generated, developed and shaped by the cultures we live in, by the circumstances of life, or by the particular gifts or weaknesses we have as individuals. Indeed ideation lies so deep in human nature that one is tempted to think of it as innate. To paraphrase; I ideate, therefore I am.