Ideation as a natural process

Frank Lloyd Wright wasn't just an outstanding architect. He was also a colourful character, a self-publicist who was not afraid to speak his mind: “Early in my career...I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility... I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I've never been sorry.” Not surprising, then, Wright's musings are often quoted. For example, his view on ideation suggests a natural formgiving process that improves through practice: “Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express". (Frank Lloyd Wright, Idea and Essence, September 7, 1958).

Mind's eye

It is said that Frank Lloyd Wright was a mind's eye architect *. '[I] conceive the building in the imagination, not on paper but in the mind, thoroughly - before touching paper. Let it live there - gradually taking more definite form before committing it to the draughting board'. So Wright allowed the idea to germinate in his mind until it erupted as an "insight". The big solution, he believed, must emerge first, then design development and detailing could follow. And this without first jotting down his ideas or preliminary sketches in the pages of notebooks (at least, no sketchbooks have survived). Wright, it seems, built up a "narrative" in his mind's eye, a kind of imaginary designerly walk before committing "the story" to paper. Evidence of his design process, which he described as "fleeting", is that once he put pencil to paper, Wright talked as he worked, what appears like "thinking aloud". And on the drafting table, with T-square and a drafting triangel, and surrounded by his Taliesin apprentices, he talked in an undertone that was both directed to his pupils and a preoccupied expression of his thoughts. * Howard, H. 2016. Architecture's Odd Couple. NY and London: Bloomsbury Press.

"I ♥ NY"

Milton Glaser, (1929-2020), the US graphic designer is perhaps best known for the "I ♥ NY" logo which he designed free of charge for a 1977 tourism campaign to promote his home city, amid a crime wave and financial crisis. The logo, using American Typewriter typeface rapidly gained recognition across the world and has been described as the most frequently imitated in history. He came up with the idea while riding in a taxi and scribbled it in red crayon on an envelope, which is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Glaser later said he was "flabbergasted by what happened to this little, simple nothing of an idea". He studied at New York’s Cooper Union art school but he preferred not to use the term “art” at all: “What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,”, Glaser said in 2000.

Ideation and self-talk

Motivational self-talk is commonplace in various sports to boost performance. Could self-talk also apply to ideation as a performing-boosting power? The idea behind self-talk, among athletes, is that by stepping outside their immediate experiences and emotions, and viewing them instead from the detached perspective of a supportive onlooker, performers are allowed to take the fear of failure less personally and to make better decisions. For example, on a practice trial, performing athletes were asked to say out loud some of the internal thoughts they’d had during the performance. This gave each athlete a set of self-talk statements that was personal and relevant to them and, moreover, showed that they did better with second-person ("You") rather than first-person pronouns ("I"). Now to compare the effectiveness of self-talk using first-person or second-person pronouns is difficult as it is open to individual variations. Still by trying out self-talk as part of the ideation process, designers  may find it a useful tool giving a boost to their ideation power, possibly in addition to the practice and experience of "Thinking Aloud", that is, expressing thoughts as they occur, rather than thinking first and then speaking.

Familiarity breeds ideas

'A period of rigorously correct architecture is often followed by one in which the buildings deviate from accepted canons', wrote Steen Eiler Rasmussen giving as example two distinct periods of history: Renaissance and Baroque. Another example would be how Postmodern architecture replaced Modernism in the 1970/80s. Both examples reflect that 'when once we have become familiar with the rules' - here the Renaissance and Modernism respectively, 'the buildings that comply with them become tiresome' (Ibid). New ideas, then, emerge that propose new forms or combinations of forms heralding a new movement or era. However, the two examples also show how the boredom threshold is getting lower among both architects and the general public: The Baroque period lasted around a hundred years whereas Modernism only about half of that. And Post-Modernism, arguably, was over by the 1990s which suggests a higher turnover of "styles" still. In other words, designers are increasingly engaged in employing mannerisms, that is, creating purely visual effects to impress and surprise the spectator, as exemplified in contemporary design by Gehry (Guggenheim Museum Blibao), Hadid (Heydar Aliyev Centre) and Greyson Perry (A House for Essex).
*Rasmussen (1964). Experiencing Architecture. MIT Press.

Ideation and critical thinking

Creativity and critical thinking, as well as communication and collaboration skills, are considered core workplace attributes for the 21st century, and particularly in relation to complex problem solving. Generally speaking, creativity is associated with generating ideas, while critical thinking is associated with judging them. In practice, however, the two are not so easy to separate. That is, creativity without critical judgment tends toward the fanciful or the impractical. At the same time, critical thinking gets short shrift when reduced to making a judgment, since, at its best, critical thinking is also a way of making a contribution. That is, critical thinking is fundamentally creative in the sense that its aim is to produce something new: an insight, an argument, a new synthesis of ideas or information, a new level of understanding. Thus creativity and critical thinking are improved when in symbiotic relationship with one another. This suggests that ideation, as a creative act, benefits from recognising the role of critical thinking in ensuring the value of novel ideas. See also: https://www.gettingsmart.com/2017/11/at-the-intersection-of-creativity-and-critical-thinking/

Pandemic as generator of ideas

As circumstances are changing under the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic so too must certain ways of living, working and even thinking. For example, rules on social distancing are having an impact on the ways people work and how they travel to work (working from home affects the use of public transport and office space requirements), on the ways people do their shopping (online sales impact distribution and point of sale arrangements) or on the ways education is organised and delivered (online learning impacts the need for traditional teaching and learning spaces). Faced with such challenges to contemporary ways of living and working, designers, through creative questioning (what-ifs), are well placed to help deliver innovative solutions. But attention should be given to the limits to idea communication during a period of social distancing, that is, online communication at the expense of physical presentation and encounters. Or, what is being lost if ideators cannot show, share or collaborate ideas face-to-face?