Power of pen

Neave Brown, the renowned architect of modernist housing in the 1960s and 1970s for London Borough of Camden, used only pen, ink and paper to design the complex Alexandra Road estate of 520 dwellings, from first ideas to completion. This meant drafting and re-drafting of thousands of detailed drawings, for example, staircases were redrawn up to 40 times to get it right. It meant, as Brown put it, spending long hours 'nose down' at the drafting table. Only when all drawings were complete did Brown's team produce a scale model for presentation purposes. Now, drafting with pen and paper has largely been replaced by CAD tools although the practice of freehand sketching is still alive in the early stages of the design process.

Ideation tools in a digital age

Ideation is crucial for originality and creativity that encourage establishment and development of material culture. Through analysis of usage of ideation tools – sketching, words, model making, and computing - the workshop addresses how to maintain and renew tradition by examining the crucial relationship between analogue and digital means. The investigation is important in the context of a design culture where there is strong interest in digital processes and products, providing examples of how to nurture and sustain innovation through a dynamic mix of ideation tools. The tools will be tested in various ways, their strengths and weaknesses will be evaluated, and malfunction spotted.

3D printing as ideation tool

Make-It-Yourself (MIY) 3D printing is the personal manufacturing process of turning a 3D digital design file into a solid object using open-source 3D printers or printers that come in a box ready to print. Involving both soft- and hard-ware skills, the set-up and operation, however, can be more difficult than it seems. For example, using polymer-based materials, a skip of the printer or glitz in the extruder may ruin the print, a failure that happens when the plastic filament melts and get wrapped around the print head. Or, when the gears on the printer's X and Y axis belts slip on the motor shaft causing the print head not to be properly aligned from layer to layer. Or, when the print head knocks off a part of model, or the object becomes loose from the print-bed. Or, when simply using wrong settings. But print failures, although frustrating, particularly when they occur several hours into the print process (and large-scale objects can take anywhere from 24-48 hours to complete), can be seen as learning since failures are often steps towards new discoveries. Indeed failures can be turned into serendipitous art work, or so called "glitch art". Learning from failure, or trial and error, as embedded in creative processes, then turn 3D printing into an ideation tool.

Idea-driven design

Ideas drive design. But ideation is much more than a sudden flash of inspiration from out of the blue, or the Eureka or Aha! moment. It is process work involving skills that can be learned, taught and practiced. It's an incremental process that navigates between ideas which are either too obvious or unclear unleashing the flow of creativity. This is what the workshop seeks to address; to experiment and build experiences with concept tools, from sketching to modelling to sticky notes, to encourage greater transparency of ideation processes.

Ideation as nomadic event

The ideation workshops aim at liberate the participants from the analogue-digital dialectic to engagement with conceptual tools that multiplies potentials. In this pursuit, ideation becomes an improvised event without a model, dynamic and cyclical rather than static or intermittent. Or, in a Deleuzian sense, ideation represents nomadic rather than sedentary thinking that produces difference within its very repetitions and where difference and repetition are both positive forces with unpredictable effects. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (transl.). NY: Columbia University Press.

Mechanical drawing in the digital age

Until the emergence of digital drawing tools, a clear distinction was made between the free-hand sketch and mechanical drawing, the former used by the artist from an aesthetic viewpoint, the latter by the engineer or artisan. The mechanical drawing's main advantage over the sketch is that it is made to scale with true measurements, and all dimensions are proportional and properly placed to avoid errors in construction, whereas the sketch is loose and open to interpretation. But although measured drawings are necessary for fabrication, computer-aided-design has blurred the lines between drawing and sketching, and draughtsmen use their knowledge and skills to translate sketch ideas into detailed technical drawings in a seamless flow.

Design drawing culture

When doing ideas projects, such as architectural competitions or conceptual designs, designers use sketching and sketch models in ways production drawings cannot.

3D printing as ideation tool

Although 3D printing, also know as rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, or solid free-form fabrication, was first patented in the 1970s, it is only with new advances in 3D solid computer modelling that it is enabling designers across disciplines, including product, fashion and accessory designers, to think creatively about their output in ways that were previously unimaginable. 3D printing, then, as integrated into design thinking, has become an alternative or complimentary ideation tool. However, as the 3D printing process requires access to a 3D CAD program, the designer need a good grasp of 3D CAD.

Grounded Ideas

Art and design schools like Central Saint Martins provide students with space and time to grow and mature creative ideas, while remaining grounded in a specific craft. Craft is a divisive element to this form of education because it somehow constrains, shapes and confines the students idea formation (ideation) in order for their thinking processes to expand.

Teaching ideation skills?

Is it possible to teach ideation skills? This might at first seem like a strange one to ask designers because most of them have strong ideas what they want their work to look like. But it's a valuable topic to consider, and it can be a challenge to "teach" designers how to think in terms of conceptual tools and how working this way can lead to interesting and unexpected results. For the ideation workshop, it starts with creating a safe and supportive environment where the participants are able to explore and develop ideas without prejudice or fear of ridicule. The outcome of the workshop is entirely up to the participants; they are in the driving seat when ideating.

Ideation and Language

The view of design as essentially a visual expression of form and function may overlook or underestimate the importance of linguistic ability to develop and communicate ideas. The facility of language, then, in symbiosis with practical studio skills, seems critical for ideation.

Ideation tools and smart power

From day one on the job, Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state, spoke of the need to apply the concept of so-called smart power, using "the full range of tools at our disposal - diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural - picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation", as she put it. Applying the notion of smart power to design ideation, then, may translate into using "the full range of ideation tools at our disposal - words, sketching, modelling, and computing - picking the right ideation tool, or combination of ideation tools, for each design situation".

Multidisciplinary ideation workshop

What is common to design is the process of ideation, that is generating, developing and communicating ideas. But while each design student typically focuses on a single discipline (for example, graphic, product or textile), in practice design is problem-based rather than discipline-oriented. Practicing designers thus work on teams combining skills from many disciplines to achieve their results. Design ideation, then, is a multidisciplinary process, and the ideation workshop exemplifies this.