Ideation tool for what?

While there may be an element of artistic self-expression in the designer's use of ideation tools, the strength of the tool chosen (words, sketches, models, or computing, or combinations thereof) in practice-based or practice-led creative environments, lies in the way it helps the designer formulate the problem in hand in what then becomes a solution-driven process. Throughout this process of identifying the problem, of generating, developing and communicating the idea, the choice of ideation tool(s) can be crucial in persuading interested parties to help realise the idea.

What ideation tool?

Designers use a range of ideation tools, broadly grouped into four: Words, Sketches, Models and Computing. But while the choice, and use of ideation tools by an individual designer is largely subjective, there are many influential factors. Some influences are direct, for example, design teachers, who, particularly in designers formative years may act as role models, while other influences are based on professional skills, knowledge or beliefs. Moreover, some designers are acutely aware of what ideation tools influence their work and may openly discuss the influence, and either at the generative or communicative phase of the ideation process, while others might be reluctant to acknowledge what influences are at play. However, open or hidden, the influence of ideation tools on designers' ideation processes may be worth further investigation, particularly in the digital age with complimentary ideation tools such as virtual reality, VR, or augmented reality, AR. How does choice of tool manifest itself? How can it's impact be demonstrated. When is it significant? 

Uber tool

Does the ubiquitous networked info-media environment encourage designers to look for and source ideas from the web rather than creating ideas through independent thinking and doing? Or feeding the creative process with online ready-made images through easy, speedy clicks rather than using more fiddly and time-consuming ideation tools such as freehand drawing and sketch modelling? But as the web and engineered digital environments, such as virtual reality games, gain design importance, is there a risk that the power of computing becomes an Uber tool for shaping and communicating ideas but with reduced human reflection or deliberation? Or, when algorithms produce solutions, is critical thinking or the human hand just getting in the way?

Physical ideation

While the written design brief encourages responses using words (written and spoken), words alone are insufficient to express visual ideas. And so it is good ideation practice to remind oneself of the material aspects of design by using physical ideation tools such as pencils, card, modelling clay and scalpels for making drawings, collages or sketch models. That is, a reminder that ideation is also a physical hands-on activity, not just a verbal experience.

Ideas probe

As designers become more and more engaged in interactive and collaborative big data environments of great social and cultural diversity so the cultural probe can prove useful in the ideation process. The probe can take many forms, such as diaries and visual journals, and both in analog and digital formats, and can be seen as an ideation tool for gathering data about people's thoughts and feelings and their interactions and experiences to stimulate designers' creativity.

Creative ABC

Design ideation involves many ways of thinking and doing and communicating. As such ideation can be seen as a variety of creative processes which can be broken into many small stages, including iterations, to explore all the possibilities for an idea. Some of these processes may be described in the form of a simple ABC: A for Assemblage, or for translating 2D abstract drawings into 3D forms using techniques such as sketch modelling for new things and spaces; B for Bricolage, or for improvising in a DIY mode using a range of materials transforming intuitive responses into physical things, and; C for Collage, or for combining interesting images to create new compositions using means such as story boarding that evoke a mood or illustrate a vision for new products or places.

Computational design

Rather than using software to draw and analyse a designer’s vision, as typically happens with CAD programs, computational design tools such as Autodesk wants to use that computing power to generate the idea itself—by running through a nearly infinite number of ways to build the same product.

According to Autodesk, here’s how it works. You type in a set of constraints for the product, say a chair. Then an algorithm will go through a nearly infinite set of results and head towards ones that are going to satisfy the designer. The program might start off with 1,000 ways to make the same chair, and then intermix what it sees as the most effective components of those 1,000 chairs to make 1,000 new options.

As a computer isn't constrained by preconceived notions of what a chair should look like, it goes through a million iterations of the same chair in the time that it would take the designer to describe just one. It's a process that can be applied to everything that involves drawing things including buildings, cars and consumer products. But it isn’t aimed at replacing human insight: people are still better at making more subjective selections over issues such as aesthetics. Yet algorithm-based design does serve up a panoply of options helping designers generate and develop ideas.