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.