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.