In praise of ideation tools

Being conversant with ideation tools facilitates access to designers' intuition and imagination and helps externalising and communicating ideas. Being familiar with ideation tools, moreover, helps promote a practical and goal-oriented approach to idea realisation as well as providing a good sense of purpose and confidence in pursuing creative endeavours.

Multidimensional ideation tools

Ideation tools help give shape (2D) and form (3D) to ideas, help find, explore and make sense of relationships, proportions and patterns, and help create idea dynamics and tension (4D) towards idea actualisation, or making real of what is suspended between illusion and predictability.

Critical use of ideation tools

Excellence in the use of conceptual tools is achieved through rigorous practice and mindful command of their use. Having skills in a wide range of ideation tools, then, help designers recognise and question their underlying assumptions towards well thought out conclusions and solutions, and communicate their ideas effectively with others. In this pursuit, ideation shares traits with critical thinking, or, in short, self-directed, self-monitored and self-corrective thinking.

App ideation tools

Visual appeal is crucial to communicating or "selling" ideas. And so it is in the development of ideas in the early stages of the design process because what is visually appealing also helps motivate ideation and creative expression. And hence the appeal of using creative app tools or web platforms, digital pens and touch screens to generate, develop and synthesise ideas, for getting ideas feedback, for creating interactive timelines, for sharing stories using storyboards, movie posters or customised comics strips, or for creating mobile visual studios - just to give a few examples.

Why ideation skills?

Ideation skills include the skilful use of ideation tools (words, sketching, modelling and computing), which help not only in generating ideas but in developing and communicating ideas effectively. Moreover, ideation skills foster self-discipline, and help build designer confidence. Although different design disciplines may have different visualisation customs and habits, ideation skills apply across subject boundaries and enable designers to capture and convey ideas in any situation and medium.

Tool-idea cycle

While there is much speculation about what aspects of designing will be taken over by computer algorithms in the years to come, the future of the design profession will probably require much more creativity, flexibility and adaptation. Such requirements highlight how designers make use of ideation tools, analogue and digital, and how tool use, in turn influences ideation. This iterative adaptive process, or tool-idea cycle, which includes copying of procedures, typically triggers new ideas and innovation. The tool-idea cycle, then, as evidenced in the world of ideas, from the ancient Greeks to Silicon Valley tech geeks, signposts design futures.

Rhetoric as an ideation tool

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and part of human communication that includes purposeful and strategic manipulation of signs and symbols, and whether in the form of written and spoken words or visual elements (verbal and visual rhetoric). Designers too, in communicating ideas, may use rhetoric when addressing  a particular audience, from design team members to clients to end users, in specific situations, from ideation sessions to pitching for work to public consultation, in order to win over the audience for their idea. Rhetoric, then, and particular visual rhetoric using images as sensory expressions of cultural meaning, can be seen as an ideation tool.

Instrument ideation rules?

Working with conceptual tools can be messy - for example, sketching using graphite, inks or colour paints, or modelling using scrap paper, wooden sticks, and glue. It might then be tempting to let go of messy or untidy conceptual tools, and fly the idea by digital instruments letting software show the way. But, and using the metaphor of instrument flight rules, designers, unlike pilots, do not typically operate under conditions in which ideation by outside visual reference is not safe. Although software guided ideation may appeal to improvement at micro level, for the bigger picture, which is not easily quantifiable, there can be no instrument ideation rules.

Ideation perspective

Although the idea of the sole creative genius may be seductive, the reality is that ideation doesn't work in isolation. The world of design ideas is truly contextual, embedded in individual and collective memory, evidenced in history and material culture, and reflected in everyday life of talent, passion and ambition. The ideation workshop, then, is not an ahistorical event, lacking a historical perspective or context, but an imaginative engagement with conceptual tools communicating first thoughts and ideas relevant to contemporary design practice.

Moore on seeing more

Design ideation is about new ways of seeing, and experiencing the world around us through the use of ideation tools . But in increasingly digital and virtual environments, should we, like Mary Moore, daughter of Henry Moore, the sculptor, be worried that we're losing our skills to see things properly? 'We don’t look at things, it’s terrifying, it’s happening more and more and more. People see two-dimensionally on their phones and laptops and iPads; they don’t see shapes or understand form'. Moore is hoping her father's sculptural work would encourage people 'to explore what is in front of them with an open mind and in a fresh way, so that they might re-evaluate or see things that they have never seen, understand things they have never understood.' Source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/feb/27/damien-hirst-set-back-art-by-100-years-says-henry-moores-daughter

Groupthink

The ideation workshop goes beyond "brainstorming", which can be a rather shallow creative activity where participants are typically told to go for quantity of ideas, and withholding criticism of each other's ideas. Instead, and without any particular script to follow, participants in the ideation workshop are encouraged to dig deeper and enter into discussion and criticism, in the belief that such debate can stimulate rather than inhibit ideation. Moreover, and although the participants may choose to ideate alone, in pairs or small teams reflecting individual preferences, research suggests that brainstorming teams generate fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

Hybrid ideation tools

Combining traditional ideation tools, such as freehand sketching and physical sketch modelling, with immersive experiences, such as augmented reality, suggests new ways of ideation where ideas are generated and developed in virtual immersive environments in a creative mix of the visionary and the practical, or the concrete and the abstract. Such hybrid ideation tools, inspired by virtual reality in gaming and training fusing hardware (VR headset) and software (visual effect and design), would enable ideators to interact with immersive environment using their own body (tactile immersion).

Perfect tool - imperfect idea

Whatever the designer's skill and preference for any particular ideation tool, the ubiquitous pen and paper sketch may seem the perfect tool for expressing and capturing ideas; its immediacy and ease of use. Yet whatever ideation tool is employed, and to whatever level of perfection, the idea itself, in its substance, cannot be perfect. This is because the word, or concept of, perfection suggests "a finishing" or "bringing to an end", whereas the idea, in a creative context, remain incomplete or open-ended implying comparison to other ideas. Better then, perhaps, to talk about "excellent" rather than "perfect" ideas, where the former imply comparison. However, the idea expressed may be considered perfect when it perfectly serves its purpose.