Free range ideation

Although the ideation workshop is studio-based, realistically ideation is situated  in many 'other places'. The free flow of ideas, then, suggest designers face a minimum of constraints for thinking and making when ideating. In such a creative environment, ideation becomes akin to a 'free range' activity rather than a 'caged' activity whereby ideators can move freely in the ideation space, both physically and virtually while engaging with a broad range of ideation tools. In this sense, the workshop is makeshift or nomadic in character allowing for the greatest ideation experience possible.

Ideas of both artistic and social significance

The workshop encourages the participants to engage with as many ideation tools as possible, from drawing and words to modelling and computing ("sensory input"). This hands-on approach may suggest ideas for ideas sake where autonomy and individualism run counter to processes of socialisation. However, the workshop supports a creative approach to ideation without being "arty" because ideas, while abstract, visual or concrete, have a social context too, that is, design ideas carry social significance if not social obligation. So, the workshop doesn't set up an opposition between self-realisation and social reality. In this, the workshop is inspired by creative thinking and making in the applied arts. Says Frank Gehry, the American architect and designer: 'I always start from the understanding that architecture is art and was always considered an art. Everyone became architects after being painters. El Greco, he became an architect. I've always thought that, but it gets pretentious and pompous to talk about it that way as our culture doesn't see architecture as an art and most buildings are not art'. El Greco, howver, was far from the only renaissance artist cum architect. Brunelleschi, for example, was a master goldsmith and sculptor before he turned architect designing and building the cupola of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the highest and widest masonry dome ever built.

Workshop culture

The 2020/21 virus pandemic put severe restrictions on face-to-face interaction in the workplace, not least in the physical design studio. As a result, many in-person activities and engagements shifted to remote working modes, that is, working from home, or online. Post-pandemic, then, will studio culture return to its former modus operandi of mixed, or hybrid mode - analogue and digital? Signs are that the upward digital studio trend will continue. If so, what happens to a studio-based design tradition, or culture that even before the pandemic was increasingly mediated by the computer or overshadowed by digital and social media? What happens to design ideation when influenced, if not relying on the abstractness of mass-media sources rather than the hands-on concreteness of the studio? Or, what happens to the effort of first-hand experience with a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world when computing, from CAD to AI fills the gap between imagination and reality?  If so, what might we lose in the process, and does it matter?

The empty studio?

Most designers would agree that it’s often the informal, unplanned interactions that matter most in the creative work environment. So, when working from home, as is the case during the current pandemic, how much are we missing by giving the physical studio up? What is lost in terms of not being able to communicate in person with colleagues or the sense of belonging to a team? Indeed does ideation require face-to-face interaction in the studio? To try to answer such questions requires an understanding of how designers interact in the studio, how they generate and communicate ideas or how they deal with practical concerns and decision making. That is, the thinking and behaviour that establish, develop and maintain any particular studio culture, real and/or virtual.

Sketchy Gonzales

A sketch is a rapidly executed drawing and requires a certain speed. But speed is only part of sketching to demonstrate graphically an image, idea or principle. So whatever the drawing mode or instrument, analogue or digital, there's no substitute for skills and experience. For budding designers, however, this may, at first seem daunting but practice turns "poor" drawing skills into good ones: Not necessarily perfect, as a sketch is not usually intended as a finished work. Indeed the sketchiness of the sketch is what gives it character. But "good enough" to help generate, develop and communicate ideas. Also remembering that practice takes effort. Sketching, however, is only one of many ideation or conceptual tools. And arguably, in the digital age not always the primary tool. That is, digital imagery increasingly appears in the early stages of ideation based on graphics software, or video. Moreover, the freehand pen and paper ideas sketch has to compete with ever growing expectations of photo realistic renderings, and from both clients and design colleagues. Yet the ability to sketch out an idea with ease and at speed demonstrating purpose and meaning of the idea not only enhances designer confidence but can help catch and hold audience attention too.

Ideation: both global and local

The ideation workshop reflects how design works both in global and local contexts. It's neither ideate globally nor locally but both/and. Design ideas flow between countries and cultures and are developed, improved and acted upon to meet both global and local needs and conditions. For example, James Dyson, the British industrial designer, who set up his global headquarters in Singapore in 2019,  says: 'We can develop technology [in Britain], but understanding what Asians want and what works in the market - we have to be there, we have to be immersed in it'. A classic example of local/global ideation is how Japanese electronics firm Sony borrowed ideas from US  transistor manufacturers in the 1950s (under a licensing agreement), and, after improving upon the ideas achieved mass-market penetration of transistor radios selling seven million units worldwide by the mid-1960s.

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".