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.