Contextual ideation

Design ideation is about generating and communicating ideas, not about evaluating ideas per se because ideas represent proposals, or work in progress, rather than final plans, products or systems. Yet to help evaluate how good, or rather meaningful an idea is for a new product or service would be to look at the design context, that is, the intended users' working or lifestyle environment.  That is to say, designers, when generating and communicating ideas, need not only understand what matters to the customers who will use the product or service (end-users), what might be called contextual enquiry, but also be able to represent the proposal (solution) in such ways that the the idea (proposal) would meet users' satisfaction, what might called contextual ideation. In short, if design is contextual, so is ideation.