The exchange value of ideas

What happens to an idea's innate value when replaced by exchange value? Let's start with the ideation-workshop. The workshop's defining quality, as learning outcome, is for participants to explore ideation tools of their choice in order to raise their awareness of the ideation process. In this, there is no external assessment only participants' own perception or judgement to determine the criteria for most favoured ideation tool or tools. The workshop activities, then, are driven by curiosity and the value of the tool or tools can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. That is, participants can assess the value only by individually and carefully attending to what the value the tools or tools contain and, on their own, concluding their merit. Yet the end point for the ideator, or working designer is to create a product or service for sale. That is, the idea going to market. Once the product or service enters the market, the intrinsic value of the idea behind the product or service is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, or exchange value. That is, the idea has no longer interior worth. Instead, the personal, or intrinsic value of the idea is for the market to decide. And so, the workshop is evidence of the liberating fact that ideas, and ideation have intrinsic value not be measured, or processed as market productivity, or captured as market value. Now, what happens to the idea in the digital culture where everything seems dogged by digital tracking, where any online activity is capturable by artificial intelligence and transmuted into data? In this digital scenario, the ideator is a data worker which suggests that the ideator must engage in authorly self-promotion to replace the innate value of the idea with exchange value. In other words, the ideator must monetise their ideas in order to make a living from their ideas. That is, Gen AI, as data collection technology, hollows out authenticity and authorship which means the ideator is faced with crumpling self-worth as creator. This blog was inspired by Thea Lim, The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age (2024).

ideas in things

Age-old analogue ideation tools and methods, such as sketching and physical modelling, may have taken a back seat in the digital culture when content-creating tools like ChatGPT or Copilot have become mainstream. So, what then the future of traditional ideation tools such as pen and paper? Nesta (2019) found that organisations are becoming less experimental and more risk-averse in their approach to digital technologies - they prefer to let others experiment and then adopt the ideas that work best. Arguably, then, at least at individual level, analogue tools remain useful to designers to stimulate and capture the flow of ideas. And so, the pencil could be seen as a tool performing a role similar to that of a craftsman's tool - a tool that reflects a hands-on approach to design that connects with the idea of making things. That is, applying hand and mind to ideation, as in "thinking with a pencil" reflects the concept of the thing as idea. Or in the words of the poet William Carlos Williams: 'Say it, no ideas but in things'. That is, to focus on objects rather than mere concepts, on actual things rather than abstract characteristics of things. That is, concrete rather than abstract ideas ('idea' understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete or abstract)..Considering the concept of the thing as idea, Dough Stows, author of The Wisdom of Our Hands (2022) writes: 'The mention of any object creates a visualised idea in our minds - we form an idea of the thing. Moreover, metaphors provide the basis of all human creativity, and those metaphors must of necessity be drawn from real tools, real processes, real understanding of concrete phenomenon, for the ideas that have merit are drawn from reality, from the experience of things.' This may suggest that designers overall favour concrete or visual ideas, or both over abstract ones. If so, this may resonate with a central feature of design activity where designers rely on 'generating fairly quickly a satisfactory solution rather than a prolonged analysis of the problem' (Nigel Cross, 1982)