The notion of workshop

While the ideation workshop is typically studio-based, this does not mean that workshop activity, or "ideation process" is exclusively taking place in a single physical space. Ideation, like design itself, is an iterative process, and so ideators typically thrive in flexible environments, or nomadic contexts, both physically and mentally. Indeed idea generation knows no borders and can happen anywhere. Yet the physical studio provides a convenient and effective creative space for the workshop facilitating the use and practice of a range of ideation tools. The studio also functions a social space for sharing the ideation experience. A such it can take place both indoors and outdoors. Indeed, the ideation workshop is not a narrow but an expansive notion and in moving from, say semi-private to public sphere may inspire and engage cooperative or communal approaches to ideation, such as placemaking.

Ideation interaction

Virtual platforms and video calls have become commonplace yet their queues of monologues cannot match the directness and rigour of in-person conversations, as exemplified by the ideation workshop. It is when the participants interact in the real studio, with the power to improvise and cross-talk that the creative juices start flowing and ideas spark. The in-person interaction electrifies the ideation process, forces the participants to think at pace and enriches the conversations from which the participants learn from each other. Virtual platform meetings may have their place in formal or business-like contexts but rarely sits comfortably in creative environments as virtual discussion can only superficially compensate for the full three-dimensional chemistry of face-to-face conversations. With the body language and all the tiny cues that form the visceral insights that come from in-the-flesh interactions missing, how to tell whether the participants are fully engaged in or really understand the ideas discussed?

Ideation learning

Ideation is a process of generating and communicating new ideas. It’s a process, not a single event, a process involving critical thinking as well as imagination. Ideation, then, is not just about having that “Aha!” moment, it is about being prepared for that moment, then knowing what to do when it happens. While the "Aha!" moment can happen anytime and anywhere, the ideation workshop encourages participants to use a range of ideation tools in a learning environment, a space set aside for creativity, typically the design studio. So ideation is also a learning process in using conceptual tools in order to better generate, articulate and express new ideas. But ideation is not about evaluating ideas. The real test of ideation lies in the ability to communicate ideas to another. That is, when you sketch out an idea from start to finish in simple visual/verbal language that even a child can understand (that is, a child with enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships), you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and relationships and connections between ideas. In this way, the ideation workshop provides an opportunity to learn new skills and ways of thinking.

Ideation workshop as adventure

Setting time aside for ideation, and in an informal way, that is, focusing on generating ideas towards finding a solution for a given design problem, means opening up oneself to the adventurous practice of uncertainty. Adventure not in the sense of excitement associated with danger or a reckless action but rather an unusual or daring experience, to quote from OED as to the meaning of the word in English. Experiencing ideation, then, is to practise creativity purposefully, a process of going backwards and forwards drawing from past knowledge, observation and experience (memory) combined with present thoughts, skills and activities in order to generate new ideas, which run forward not backward. The adventure, then, lies in what was before and after, and what is the difference between the two. And the consequence of the difference should we pursue the idea towards realisation. Only the realisation of the idea, of making it happen, can overcome the uncertainty of the idea.

Mind the idea

The ideation workshop can be seen as a kind of mindfulness practice, that is, mindfulness as in focusing in the present moment, the here and now. Or, in a state of being aware, of noticing things, as in "if you are noticing things, you are mindful of them". And noticing things include first thoughts and ideas that pop up in our mind. Ideation, then, is mindfulness. And the ideation workshop mindfulness practice.

Sensory ideation

The workshop encourages creative activity that involves all the senses, that is, touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing. The workshop's hands-on sensory activities thus facilitate exploration and naturally encourage participant designers to use a range of ideation tools in order to create, experiment and explore. The workshop, then, in stimulating the senses, helps designers develop cognitively (creative thinking), linguistically (idea communication), socially (collaborative ideation), emotionally (emotional design) and physically (tool skills). Moreover, in this way, the workshop offers opportunity to engage all of the senses to explore ideas and concepts that might be too abstract to express without the tactile experience.

Design representation: Perfection and imperfection

Says Craig Mitchell (Dip AA): 'Nowadays on larger projects you’d have a facade specialist, amongst many other specialists, to whom the architect's historic role is relinquished. You don’t need an Architect to build a building. The architect works on the peripheries of projects, more removed from the process. Specialists in their field work towards optimisation, even in a design capacity they might become obsessed with generating the perfect swoop, the perfect parametric hard line.I don’t really subscribe to this. Hand drawing and physical model-making give you access to imperfect surfaces, which are crucial to my project’s proposal. Through making or drawing something, you have a deeper understanding of scale and its implications. If they had been perfectly smooth, computer generated, calculated surfaces, they would have been much less tactile than this ‘vernacular’ aesthetic that I was interested in generating' - 'I found it so interesting to draw and design like that. I was exposed to the work of other units during my time at the school who have a very precise way of drawing, based in plan and section, more historically typical of professional architectural drawing. But then I was thinking about how space could be produced in a totally different way, that freed me from a prescribed way of drawing. Source: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/news/craig-mitchell-winner-of-the-nicholas-pozner-prize-for-drawing-discusses-drawing-photogrammetry-and-architectural-representation

Hands, eyes and mind: Ideation as a holistic process

The workshop highlights the use of ideation tools, that is the use of words, freehand sketching, physical modelling and computing in generating and communicating ideas. But the usage is not just in the context of tools being practical or necessary for producing texts, images or artefacts: The tools are also thinking tools. This becomes clear when ideators, who, at first, may be less skillful in using the tool/s in a routine technical sense but through familiarisation, application and practice the ideator will gain confidence in creative engagement and action increasingly shifting attention to ideation as a holistic process. Eventually, through practice the tool/s become an almost automatic extension of the ideator's hands, eyes and mind. In other words, the ideation workshop demonstrates how thinking and doing support each other and become one enhancing the ability to generate new ideas and artefacts.

Advantage workshop

The ideation workshop opens up the mind for speculative investigations and experiments and whether they function as mere representations, serious or ironic proposals or conceptual models. That is, hands-on use of ideation tools (words, sketching, physical modelling and computing) stimulates ideators to express, articulate or materialise their ideas giving them shape, form or substance resulting in proposals for, say new products through exploring new technologies, methods or materials. This multitudinal approach to generating and developing ideas has a further advantage in that the ideation process is not necessarily driven by what the market wants, or is perceived to want, that is, commercially driven experimental design, but can equally enable the designer to envision new things for consumers for which there is not yet a conscious need or desire, that is, designer-centric or autonomous experimental design.

Ideation and innovation platforms

Communicating ideas is part and parcel of the ideation process. To have an impact, the idea must be externalised and made known or targeted to an intended audience, be it specific or general. In the communication phase, which is not necessarily the final stage of ideation as ideation is typically an iterative rather than a linear process, the ideator has to work out which is the most appropriate medium, from traditional channels to the latest dissemination technology. In a culture of digital ecosystems, including innovation platforms, or spaces for learning and change, such platforms can be used as tools for growing and building ideas to tackle challenges and opportunites at various levels; private or public, local, national or global. And as such platforms are not rigid or predictable supporting an open innovation process, they can lead to unexpected directions or tangible results which may be a good thing for ideators.

Ideation: solo or collaborative act?

The participants in the workshop can either work on their own or together with another participant or participants forming a duo or small team of ideators. This is a voluntary arrangement based on personal preference but does the choice make a difference to the ideation process and if so is ideating solo, or on one's own a more selfish act than ideating in a collaborate mode. Conventionally thinkig suggests that generating ideas is an individual pursuit where imagination, creativity and talent are most fruitfully manifested where "novelty" or "originality" are key words of achievement signifying single ownership of the idea. Generating ideas in a group, on the other hand, may seem more of a social activity where the dynamics of two or more individuals collaborating may produce more inclusive ideas covering a wider perspective of the design task or problem in question where the objective or vision is shared. As there is no conclusive evidence what mode works best, and ideation is contextual too, this suggests that ideation operates in either mode, or in combinations thereof. That is, the ideation process could be staged so there are a number of acts where the solo or collaborative mode alternates. This mixed mode of ideation is evident in design practice where individuals start ideating own their own but then come together to share and discuss their ideas. If there is a convergence of ideas, this then implies co-ownership of the ideation outcome by two or more ideators.

Experiencing ideation

The workshop's objective is to offer a hands-on, studio-based experience of generating and communicating ideas for a specific purpose using a range of ideation tools, viz, words, sketching, modelling and computing. Through this multi-sensory creative engagement - where emphasis is laid not only on the appearance of surfaces but contrasting effectss of solids, voids and textures the participant ideators become author, director and producer of their own thoughts and ideas.The ideas are then presented and shared in a joint session. This is in contrast to "brainstorming", a group-thinking activity where the participants are asked to come up with as many new ideas as possible to a given problem within a short period using words only, and often on post-it notes which are then shared. In short, the ideation workshop encourages the participants to engage the full range of human senses to become experimental designers through their own experiments, rather than just "talking design".

Digital dependency

Today, design is an activity infused with a wide range of technology from CAD and the Internet to big data and social media. As a result, a series of complex interactions of people, places and data are creating, planning and building environments with the help of digital tools. Digital interactions, then, produce data that feed the creative industries and design ideation. Using digital tools have enabled designers to generate and communicate more realistically ideas and visions of possible futures. But as data is increasingly used as both tool and motive for design work, there are concerns. For example, CAD and 3D printing highlight the digital dependency on visualising and communicating ideas whereas social media question what happens to interpersonal interaction in built environments where virtual and real phenomena compete for attention. In this context, the ideation workshop offers an opportunity to gain greater awareness of the role and use of ideation tools in the digital culture.

Tool connectivity

Before the modernist movement of the 1920s, the creative process was firmly held in the designers' hands as they were the ones to translate ideas into drawings and gave them the formal expression.Then, as modernism progressed in the post-war years, and the complexity of society increased and made new demands, many other considerations beyond the formal, which also constitute the design process, were recognised resulting in a shift towards user-centred design and multidisciplinary design teams. In addition, the advancement of computer and telecommunication technologies, which brought the the micro computer into the design studios in the 1990s saw digital tools, and notably CAD becoming part and parcel of the design process, from first thoughts to final outcomes. But equally important for the ways designers work has been the expansion of the internet and social media broadening as well as speeding up the design process, including ideation. In contemporary technology and media-driven societies, where ideas, images and texts constantly interact with each other, the new digital tools, including computer modelling and 3D printing have enabled connectivity between designers and end-users on an unprecedented scale facilitating collaborative and participatory design. The new tools, moreover, help designers to expand creative boundaries, both conceptually and practically.

Workshop context

While the aim of the ideation workshop is to raise awareness of ideation tools in generating and communicating ideas, equally important is the cultural context of the workshop, that is, how the workshop relates to the concerns of design in contemporary societies. To get started, each workshop has an ideation theme agreed beforehand, themes that can relate to, say a function, object, place or narrative. But also how the individual workshop theme reflects the complexity, diversity and ambiguity of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. But whereas design in recent decades have followed the path of playful postmodernism or been strongly influenced by economic neoliberalism and privatisation of the public sphere, the financial crisis of 2008, and the virus pandemic of 2020 suggest a renewed awareness of and interest in the greater role of design in society. That is, a role that embraces social inclusivity, sustainability issues and care for the environment as well as the possibility of a political re-engagement of design so absent from the design discourse since the 1980s. In short, the workshop addresses through its themes not just narrow personal interests in design but concerns that are affecting us all: What is design, what does it mean, what does it do?

Lofty ideas

Technology, or the science of craft, has facilitated ideation throughout history and has given rise to a broad range of ideation tools. And when aviation became widely available in the 1920s onwards, it seemed only natural that designers should take to the skies to gain a new perspective or bird's-eye view of mother earth. Or, as the French writer and pioneering aviator Saint-Exupery put it: 'The aeroplane is not an end in itself: it is a tool, like a plough'. The "top-down" tool enabled Le Corbusier, the architect and urbanist, to fly over vast stretches of South America, an experience which afforded him an aerial view which up til then had only been an imaginary view. Le Corbusier explains: 'In the plane I had my sketchbook as everything became clear to me I sketched. I expressed the ideas of modern planning.' In fact, the impact of the aerial view prompted Le Corbusier to write the Radiant City (published in 1933), a modern doctrine of urbanisation. Today, of course, aerial views are commonplace, from drones to web mapping, or geodata processing inspiring and fascilitating new ideas across design fields.

Research as an ideation tool

Research is a vital element in the design process, and although described variously in terms such as research-based design, research-driven design or research-focused design, the meaning is similar, that is, research helps designers better understand and formulate the problem towards finding a solution that meets a user's needs, wants and goals. And while there are many types of design research, there are two research methods that are particularly helpful at the early stage of the design process, or the ideation phase: Exploratory and Generative. The explorative method is useful to gain background information, where little or none is known about the problem in order to help frame the problem (what, why, how), whereas generative research, based on existing data (from sources such as the internet, books, or articles) can help generate ideas and therefore solutions, and whether new or an improvement in an existing problem.

Ideas turned stories

Ideas can be expressed and formatted in many ways using both verbal and visual languages. Indeed communicating ideas is a creative activity in order to capture the intended audience, be they a colleague, a client or a group, say a planning committee, and convince them that the idea is worth pursuing towards realisation. Or, as put by the Danish architect, Bjarke Ingels, 'My drawing skills probably froze when I was 18 ... Now I'm more interested in the story, how the drawings, the layout can help express the stories and communicate them'. Significantly, each of his buildings has a signature visual gimmick that plays well on Instagram and on the image-heavy web sites that make up much of online architecture media. Interestingly, Ingels first wanted to be a caroonist and graphic novelist but as there was no cartoon academy in his native country, he got smitten by architecture seeing architecture not as style but comparing it to portraiture where the success lies in its power to capture the subject's soul and potential. Not surprisingly, then, Bjarke's published architectural monograph uses the comic book format to express its groundbreaking agenda for contemporary architecture.

Game, Set and Ideation

Gaming technology has moved a long way since its early days of arcade video games increasingly making inroads into many different areas of design - indeed the development of gaming technology is in itself a design activity. The advancement of gaiming technology, which includes virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), renderings with photo realistic textures, gestural control, face and voice recognition provides accurate simulation of design situations, for example Cities:Skylines (a city building experience game). Such games point to scenarios where designers, as players, and across disciplines, immerse themselves in the world of ideas, of telling stories, of ifs, ands and buts. In short, gaming technology is set to become an integral part of ideation in innovative and collaborative environments .

Ideation language

Words, written or spoken, play an essential role in the ideation process because language forms our thoughts and ideas. Ideas as language, then, recalls the Swiss linguist Saussure (1857-1913), who argued that language is a system of signs expressing ideas. His structural model of language, that is, of relations among words, thoughts, concepts, metaphors and process, might then be applied to ideation. That is, ideators use a range of ideation tools, viz. words, sketches, models, and computing, to shape, form and manipulate design elements, which include both verbal and visual components, in order to express their ideas. The design elements, then, can be regarded as a system of signs expressing ideas. Now, when ideators use a combination of tools, say words and digital software, such combinations may help building a relational grammar or system of rules for ideation. This, in turn, may help advance not only the role of digital software in the ideation process but also that of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning.