Bauhaus and the culture of drawing

Designers talk ideas but better still, they visualise them. And drawing is a prime tool for ideation, as celebrated by Bauhaus, the German design school founded 100 years ago (1919-1933). Paul Klee was one of the school's teachers promoting drawing not only as a practice but a practice underpinned by theory, as articulated in his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925). This was in parallel to his Bauhaus colleague Johannes Itten who emphasised the psychological and emotional aspects of drawing, as well as colour, including gymnastic excercises to loosen up the body before drawing. Klee's lesson plans included hands-on step-by-step approaches to creative expression, such as outlining the types of lines and how a line can become a plane; drawing from observation analysing natural forms (from fish to plants to the body's circulatory system); drawing with colour (explaining Goethe's colour wheel) also making connections between colour and music; and researching contemporary and historic drawings in terms of line, form and colour. Klee, like Itten, provided student feedback but did not give individual grades believing that this would stifle the creative impuls.

Situated ideas

An idea is an idea is an idea. Or is it?  If ideas can be understood as elements of thought that can be either abstract, concrete or visual, is design ideation situated in any particular element of thought? Although design is often thought of in visual terms, as expressed in, for example, 2D and 3D images, graphs, prototypes or models, design can also be articulated in the abstract, say design theory or programming, or in concrete terms, in which the idea has physical referents. So what seems to matter in design ideation is that the idea is not localised in any particular element of thought but that which best expresses the essence of the idea, and be it in the context of, say function, styling or production.

Idea generator

Words are prime tools in the ideation process. But with the advancement of artificial intelligence, AI, the distinction between natural language, as spoken and written by humans, and formal or built language, as used in computing, is narrowing. For example, recent machine learning research has revealed a new text generator, the GPT2, which is capable of performing goal-oriented tasks including translation and summarisation, and pass simple reading comprehension tests giving the model more knowledge of how to understand written text. Moreover, the unsupervised transformer-based language model, created by nonprofit company OpenAI, and trained on a huge dataset, can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. That is, the model is capable of generating samples from a variety of prompts (human written) that feel close to human quality and show text coherence. This, in turn, may suggest that if the model were to be trained on a dataset of designs, it is conceivable that the text generator, given sufficient and contextual relevant data, could turn idea generator. This raises furter questions, such as, what is the most authentic, or the highest valued idea: human generated ideas - the human connection or ideas generated by the algorithms in machines? That is, questions about the impact of AI system design on ethics, trust and humanity. See also: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/ ; https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/

Ideas overload

It may be argued that ideas per se don't really matter because in a world of social media and global networking there's the risk of too many ideas, or an overload of ideas. That is, more ideas don't mean better ideas (also reflected in the fact that neither copyrights or patents protect ideas). Indeed, with pervasive digital technology, there's not only quantity over quality but also superficiality giving way to the illusion that every idea is a good one. What matters, then, is that ideas have to be communicated effectively, that is, argued truthfully and convincingly to persuade and win over stakeholders. This is particularly true in design where ideas are put forward aiming at changing for the better existing realities in some shape or form. Effective communication of ideas, then, highlights ideation skills, that is, the skillful use of ideation tools (words, sketches, models and computing) gained through practice.

Ideation futures

Design ideation, despite the computer revolution, may still project or conjure up the romantic notion of the lone genius or inventor coming up with brilliant or breakthrough ideas. However, the reality of everyday ideation is more collaborative and down to earth; designers building on what is already out there in the world, reconsidering, remodelling or recombining existing states of thinking or being. Yet adding the latest digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, AI, ideation continues to trigger "what if?" questions and scenarios exploring new ways of thinking and doing. However, AI, in the context of design thinking characterised by "trial and error" and "problem solving", is largely fed and scripted by human, or natural language and these inputs, directly or through feedback loops, influence outcomes which, moreover need to be evaluated and explained by humans, and whether in forms of simple suggestions, complete proposals or elaborate narratives. Ideation futures, then, is not so much about any perceived dichotomy between AI and human intelligence, or whether AI can match or even surpass human intelligence, but rather how computers can complement and augment human creativity, not replacing it. In short, interactions between AI and human intelligence to enhance human judgment and aesthetic sensibilities.

Idea ex machina

Deus ex machina, is a Latin phrase meaning 'god from the machine', a term originating from ancient Greek theatre where devices ('stage machines') were used to either lower or raise actors, from above or below onto the stage to dazzle the audience with the appearance of the gods in the drama, as a kind of 'coup de théâtre'. Used as a plot device evers since in theatre, literature, cinema and video games, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Wachkowski's Matrix and Rowling's Harry Potter to solve a seemingly intractable problem by adding in an unexpected character, object, or situation, to bring about a pleasing outcome, the device has, however, been crticised as an inept, or too simplistic plot device. Yet, arguably the device opens up creative possibilities and, in the digital age, the notion of 'deus ex machina', where the computer would be the machine, may suggest 'idea ex machina', that is, in the ideation process software becomes a plot device towards problem solving.

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.