Ideation and plasticity of the brain

'The ability to personalise our brain in response to environment and individual experience is known as "plasticity". As we make our unique way through life, we develop our own particular perspectives due to the connections between our brain cells that are driven and shaped by our specific experiences. It is these connections which normally enable us to associate people, actions and objects with the sequence of episodes that amount to our life story. Our brain is in constant two-way dialogue with the outside world, shaping and re-shaping our neuronal unique configurations into a unique "mind"'. Susan Greenfield, pharmacologist.

Innovation spaces

'PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives'. Mark Dean, IBM Research.

Idea representation

‘A lot of young artists now have an idea and want to illustrate it, but they do almost everything they can to avoid paint and the sensuality of painting. It’s all so concept-based – and the real killer is computer art. Some of it is all right when you first look at it, but when you look closer it becomes more vacuous. The whole thing for me is the spontaneity that happens in the process of creating something’. (John Hoyland 1934-2011)

Ideas going Gaga

The singer Victoria Beckham's foray into fashion design (own label) and car design (Range Rover) has prompted her footballer husband David to turn designer too (underwear and T-shirts for H&M), two examples that illustrate how design ideas are being launched by celebrities. But lamenting how branding rather than real design thinking is shaping the design industry, product designer Kenneth Grange says that whereas in the past firms like Braun, Pirelli, Olivetti, and Hermann Miller all had powerful design identities now corporations in straight forward heavy duty commerce will bring in someone like Lady Gaga to boost the brand’s image (and the company's share price).

Ideation by Twombly

Cy Twombly was an artist of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and the rush of ideas. He blurred long-held distinctions between drawing and painting depicting refined Classical themes with unidentifiable doodles and splotches. Writing and language served as major conceptual foundations for Twombly's art; the written word, in the form of poems, myths and histories, inspired much of his work. He focused on the process of writing, both by sketching words directly onto the canvas and by creating line- and handwriting-based compositions. Twombly's process illuminates ideation as practised by artists and designers alike.

Dialogical ideation

Ideation through dialogue inspires openness to others' viewpoints and to learning from one another. Ideation through argument, in contrast, might stimulate obsessive thinking holding on to ideas with defensiveness and/or try to push ideas onto others.

Ideas matter

'Individual history matters because ideas matter; people who have the ideas matter; learning the genealogy (if not progressive evolution) of ideas matter; Sure, human life and ideas and their relationships and influences are complex and unguided. But they aren't patternless or boundless.They are only made possible with the stuff in circulation (including the limits of language itself), and if we're sure to align the type of claim we make to the kind of evidence we have, we actually can help bring our ideas and practices into focus for due consideration and learning'. Derek B. Miller, The Policy Lab.