Activity creates ideas

The trigger for the ideation workshop is that ideation is not a passive pursuit say, simply sitting waiting for ideas to pop up. On the contrary, the workshop is an active engagement with ideation tools, that is, from words and sketching to model making and computing. The activity takes many forms, for example, improvisation, or the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Or, tinkering towards innovation, that is, the practice of experimenting, testing, probing, and making incremental improvements to existing designs and processes. And a great place for tinkering is often he studio (or the ubiquitous garden shed, or garage). And so the ideation workshop, through the activity of playing around with stuff, and asking "what if" questions creates opportunity to problem solving, indeed even problem finding.

Modelling ideas

Although the ideation workshop is, necessarily confined in space and time, ideation itself is a never stopping, never ending process: it's a flow. The flow of ideas reflects how each existence, animate and inanimate, is changing during every moment day and night. The change is like flowing water which does not ever come back and which reveals its true nature in its eternal travel. Indeed panta rei. In this sense, every idea, like every day is a good one from which we can learn something new. However, in design education as well as in practice, there is a tendency not to accept the notion that every idea is good. That is, "the Good, the Bad and the Ugly" are labels commonly attached to design ideas focusing minds on how to categorise and organise ideas in the realm of perception or thinking, or how to systematise and control ideas as sense data of the sensual world. Indeed, in the name of industry efficacy, design ideas are made to fit into the rational design process as early as possible, for example, feeding ideas, as computer files into Building Information Models (BIMs).