Complexity and contradiction in ideation

Design ideas. generally speaking can be characterised as either simple or complex where the simple idea proposes a fairly straightforward solution at low risk to implementation whereas the complex idea combines several simple ideas so as to produce one idea but with a less obvious solution and at higher risk or level of uncertainty. Designers deal with both simple and complex ideas although simple ideas are typically easier to generate and communicate to clients and other stakeholders. Overall, simple ideas are preferred as they are easier to understand and execute and are less likely to go wrong. Yet complexity reflects the multi-layered reality of the world around us which calls for deeper levels of understanding and greater problem solving ability on the part of designers. So what about contradiction between simplicity and complexity? Well, design ideas, as elements of thought, are interrelated and expressed through the project. And so, ideation, as part of the design process, is a puzzle of simple and complex ideas put together by the designers and stakeholders involved in the project, and increasingly so with the help of Generative AI, which has become a powerful ideation tool, and a virtual member of the design team.

2025: What have we here?

In a famous 1903 letter, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) urges a protege of his to 'be patient toward all that is unsolved ... to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue … The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.' And so, what have we here? A bit of self-help, perhaps, that is relevant to ideation in that it suggests how questions generate ideas, and vice versa. In other words, through the dynamic interplay of questions and ideas designers - and increasingly with Gen AI in the loop generate plans, proposals and ideas, and further questions to meet, and excel the requirements set out in the design brief.