Mission: Ideation

Designing is a social and purposeful activity geared towards improving human conditions and situations, material and immaterial. Often this is seen as problem solving. But ideation goes beyond the mere utilitarian or functional. Ideation involves speculation and risk taking too, and has a sense of vision as well as mission to help solve many of the challenges of everyday life, small and large, locally and globally. In this pursuit, ideators are driven by a desire to create new products, systems or services, or to improve existing ones. But ideas must be communicated effectively to reach their fruition. Ideas, like seeds, aren't enough - they have to be nurtured. Hence the need for ideators to become confident in the way they communicate ideas, in which skills in the use of ideation tools play a part..

Ideation space, problem space and solution space

Ideation space, problem space and solution space are all abstract elements. However, the idea, the problem and the solution themselves can be actual or perceived, or tangible or intangible. The ideation space can be seen as the sphere in which ideas are generated, the problem space the field in which the problem is framed and the solution space the area in which the solution is found. The rational for making the separation between these spaces is to help better understand the role of intuition, the chain of thoughts and logical reasoning in the design process at cognitive levels. Moreover, idea communication resides in the ideation space, idea management occupies the problem space, and idea realisation inhabits the solution space. Furthermore, these spaces, or elements, may be represented in a Venn diagram where the three elements comprising of circles overlap showing their interrelationship.

Creative Imagination

Imagination is a unique part of being human. But although imagination, in a philosophical perspective, can be difficult to describe posing taxonomic challenges, for example, to imagine isn't the same as desiring or anticipating that which is imagined, designers are acutely aware of imagination as a power for visualising and shaping the future of things not yet in existence, of things to come, in what has been called 'creative imagination', as in combining ideas in unexpected and unconventional ways *. Fed by imagination, designers generate ideas as part of everyday creativity, ideas which are propositional and purposeful in that designers want to see their ideas realised. In order to achieve this, the ideation process typically starts with visual imagery, a mental picture to be developed and communicated using images but also words and physical objects, that is, ideas communicated through language-like representations, picture-like formats and objects that have spatial locations. * Currie, G., and I. Ravenscroft, 2002, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Narrative design

Language is integral to design, and it is hard to find a design solution which cannot be described in words. But although designers are trained in problem solving using both words and images, a designer usually starts by getting the client to describe their needs and desires, and often arrives at a solution as much through that interaction as through anything the designer can read from a brief or, say observe from a site visit. Narrative design, then, suggests that clients can achieve a desired outcome only when they can tell the story of their wants and needs, often in the context of a more extensive narrative. In the client-designer interaction, language helps to chart the design process, even when images (such as sketches and computer renderings) can represent its current state. A picture, then, is not always worth a thousand words -sometimes, it is the words that identify the problem. The client-designer interaction, then, is part of the design solution, and is why the narrative can have such a huge impact on the design outcome.

Art before technology

The tag "paper architect" was sometimes applied to Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) in her early career due to her lack of built work, but the term might be appropriate for an architect who painted, scribbled or drew her ideas before they were rendered by computer.  Her drawings and paintings may have affinity with, for example, Le Corbusier, Scharoun or El Lissitzky in terms of colour and fluidity. Yet, according to Hadid, 'the paintings were always part of the building - but they were never done as pure art’. Instead she used her art to test spatial ideas that she couldn’t yet make concrete without the aid of computer algorithms. Paradoxically, then, it might be said that it was technology that had to catch up with Hadid- not the other way round.

Artificial ideation?

Logic and science have an impressive track record. And so do intuition and art. But whereas logic is used in, say computer hard- and software, where "correctness" is key to operation, intuition is used in design to generate new ideas, where there is no necessity to be logical, provable or correct. And because logic-based models require theory, they work for big-data analysis, long-term predictions, or puzzle problems (where there's only one "correct" way to solve the problem). But ideation and innovation do not need theory - they are event-based processes and work for short term predictions (often with incomplete information), or for fuzzy problems (where problem solving allows for ambiguity, skepticism and/or corrective action). And as many design problems are fuzzy in nature, involving human diversity, complexity and unpredictability, it seems intuition will continue to surpass logic for "wicked" problems in the design domain. ["wicked" problems have been contrasted with relatively "tame", soluble problems in mathematics, chess or puzzle solving, see Rittel & Webber 1973].

What's the idea?

When Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, was asked if the New York skyline excited him, he answered: 'It does not. Because it was never planned, it is all a race for rent, and it is a great monument, I think, to the power of money and greed trying to substitute money for ideas. I don't see an idea in the whole thing anywhere. Do you? Where's the idea in it? What's the idea?' From Mike Wallace interview with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957. Wright (1867-1959) believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture.