Designerly wasy to overcome 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 is inspired by looking at a lot of books, stimulated by long walks, or just by allowing herself to do nothing. That is, 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, GenAI, is enabling the development of ideas and concepts as well as refining visual outputs based on mimicking of what is already there. GenAI as an ideation tool, however, is only as good as the datasets it is trained on and therefore produce images that risk being rather repetitive or "in the style of". But GenAI models ability to mine vast open datasets on which they are trained can be problematic in that such datasets also carry creative ideas, for example, visual style and likeness which have no copyright protection. GenAI, then, poses both risks and opportunities for designers. The risk is posting creative work online without getting due credit or compensation. The opportunity lies in augmenting human imagination. Positively, however, in the bigger picture, where design is both a competitive and collaborative activity, and where creativity signifies empowerment, GenAI and human intelligence can complement each other. Moreover, when successfully combined, GenAI + human intelligence become collective intelligence, as suggested by Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design.