Ideation workshop facilitates design thinking

The designed life is about possibilities: What if? And so, new ideas are born out of curiosity. Design ideation, then, captures creative energy and fuels optimism about what is possible: Change! Ideation, moreover, inspires collaboration and nurtures healthy competition. From first thought, the great idea develops through questioning, experimentation, and trial and error. Ideation acknowledges human intuition and common sense and rejects reducing complex problem-solving to a computational process. Ideation invites reflection and encourages designers to spend more time thinking, to focus on improving quality in their ideas. Indeed more digital devices leave less time to concentrate and to think without interruptions. And while digital communications technologies, AI included can substantially speed up the design process, they are also squeezing out individual thinking time. To meet this challenge, the ideation workshop, a liminal space encourages lateral thinking, that is, participants move from one known idea to creating new ideas using both quantifiable (fixed or universal) data and qualitative (descriptive or conceptual) data.

Human-centred ideation

Distinction between the conceptual and manual aspects of design production emerged in the modern period when growing professionalisation resulted in the separation of science from art, of engineering from architecture and of the designer as "thinker" (direction) from that of "maker" (execution). In the digital age, however, the old distinction is less accurate or relevant as the design process, as a collaborative activity sits at the intersection between conception and execution, and facilitated by digital tools. That is to say, conception is enhanced by generative artificial intelligence (AI), and execution optimised by computer-aided-design (CAD), computer-aided-engineering (CAE) and computer-aided-manufacturing (CAM). Indeed the design process is, for all practical purposes supported if not driven by computer soft- and hardware, such as Building Information Modelling, BIM. It is against this development that the ideation workshop faces a challenge - learning how to ideate in ways that do not lose the human perspective and user influence on the design process. For this reason, the workshop is built around participatory, hands-on studio activity recognising that while AI and digital tools are effective they cannot fully resemble complex human cognition.