Word-image cycle

The ideation workshop isn't a talk shop. True, words matter but so do doing and making. And so design ideation is manifested by interaction, or dialogue between visualisation (non-verbal) and language (verbal). An example of the image-word cycle is Corbusier who, in his final interview of May 1965, explained it as follows: 'As it turned out later that, not being able to build certain things, I could draw them; but not being able to explain them entirely in drawing, especially when it came to urbanism, I had to explain them, so I wrote.' In the interaction between words and images, however, words place the image in context. Moreover, the contextualised image highlights how ideation is as much process as outcome. That is, the process of visualising and verbalising the idea towards realisation, step by step. Or, idiomatically speaking, to take the idea from "talk the talk" to "walk the talk" to "walk the walk".

Intangible concepts

Design has many aspects (charactertistics) or perspectives (contexts), both tangible (the physical object) and intangible. Time, light and darkness are examples of intangible factors investigated, articulated and manifested in the design process. Take architectural space, which, like time is a convention and cannot be grasped in a handfull and therefore intangible. Or, say transparency perception which is influenced by light reflected versus light transmitted, both intangible. Indeed an architecture experienced as a spatial phenomenon without physical measurements. And so in the ideation workshop where explorations take place, discoveries are made, and where transformations occur producing tangible forms from intangible ideas. In the same vein, Isozaki, the Japanese architect, urban designer and theorist, developed and worked on the idea of "Darkness" as an architectural prototype (1960s-), holding that architectural design is the process of giving concrete form to intangible concepts. However, it should be noted that ideas can be concrete, visual or abstract.