Ideation: solo or collaborative act?

The participants in the workshop can either work on their own or together with another participant or participants forming a duo or small team of ideators. This is a voluntary arrangement based on personal preference but does the choice make a difference to the ideation process and if so is ideating solo, or on one's own a more selfish act than ideating in a collaborate mode. Conventionally thinkig suggests that generating ideas is an individual pursuit where imagination, creativity and talent are most fruitfully manifested where "novelty" or "originality" are key words of achievement signifying single ownership of the idea. Generating ideas in a group, on the other hand, may seem more of a social activity where the dynamics of two or more individuals collaborating may produce more inclusive ideas covering a wider perspective of the design task or problem in question where the objective or vision is shared. As there is no conclusive evidence what mode works best, and ideation is contextual too, this suggests that ideation operates in either mode, or in combinations thereof. That is, the ideation process could be staged so there are a number of acts where the solo or collaborative mode alternates. This mixed mode of ideation is evident in design practice where individuals start ideating own their own but then come together to share and discuss their ideas. If there is a convergence of ideas, this then implies co-ownership of the ideation outcome by two or more ideators.

Experiencing ideation

The workshop's objective is to offer a hands-on, studio-based experience of generating and communicating ideas for a specific purpose using a range of ideation tools, viz, words, sketching, modelling and computing. Through this multi-sensory creative engagement - where emphasis is laid not only on the appearance of surfaces but contrasting effectss of solids, voids and textures the participant ideators become author, director and producer of their own thoughts and ideas.The ideas are then presented and shared in a joint session. This is in contrast to "brainstorming", a group-thinking activity where the participants are asked to come up with as many new ideas as possible to a given problem within a short period using words only, and often on post-it notes which are then shared. In short, the ideation workshop encourages the participants to engage the full range of human senses to become experimental designers through their own experiments, rather than just "talking design".

Digital dependency

Today, design is an activity infused with a wide range of technology from CAD and the Internet to big data and social media. As a result, a series of complex interactions of people, places and data are creating, planning and building environments with the help of digital tools. Digital interactions, then, produce data that feed the creative industries and design ideation. Using digital tools have enabled designers to generate and communicate more realistically ideas and visions of possible futures. But as data is increasingly used as both tool and motive for design work, there are concerns. For example, CAD and 3D printing highlight the digital dependency on visualising and communicating ideas whereas social media question what happens to interpersonal interaction in built environments where virtual and real phenomena compete for attention. In this context, the ideation workshop offers an opportunity to gain greater awareness of the role and use of ideation tools in the digital culture.

Tool connectivity

Before the modernist movement of the 1920s, the creative process was firmly held in the designers' hands as they were the ones to translate ideas into drawings and gave them the formal expression.Then, as modernism progressed in the post-war years, and the complexity of society increased and made new demands, many other considerations beyond the formal, which also constitute the design process, were recognised resulting in a shift towards user-centred design and multidisciplinary design teams. In addition, the advancement of computer and telecommunication technologies, which brought the the micro computer into the design studios in the 1990s saw digital tools, and notably CAD becoming part and parcel of the design process, from first thoughts to final outcomes. But equally important for the ways designers work has been the expansion of the internet and social media broadening as well as speeding up the design process, including ideation. In contemporary technology and media-driven societies, where ideas, images and texts constantly interact with each other, the new digital tools, including computer modelling and 3D printing have enabled connectivity between designers and end-users on an unprecedented scale facilitating collaborative and participatory design. The new tools, moreover, help designers to expand creative boundaries, both conceptually and practically.

Workshop context

While the aim of the ideation workshop is to raise awareness of ideation tools in generating and communicating ideas, equally important is the cultural context of the workshop, that is, how the workshop relates to the concerns of design in contemporary societies. To get started, each workshop has an ideation theme agreed beforehand, themes that can relate to, say a function, object, place or narrative. But also how the individual workshop theme reflects the complexity, diversity and ambiguity of an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. But whereas design in recent decades have followed the path of playful postmodernism or been strongly influenced by economic neoliberalism and privatisation of the public sphere, the financial crisis of 2008, and the virus pandemic of 2020 suggest a renewed awareness of and interest in the greater role of design in society. That is, a role that embraces social inclusivity, sustainability issues and care for the environment as well as the possibility of a political re-engagement of design so absent from the design discourse since the 1980s. In short, the workshop addresses through its themes not just narrow personal interests in design but concerns that are affecting us all: What is design, what does it mean, what does it do?

Lofty ideas

Technology, or the science of craft, has facilitated ideation throughout history and has given rise to a broad range of ideation tools. And when aviation became widely available in the 1920s onwards, it seemed only natural that designers should take to the skies to gain a new perspective or bird's-eye view of mother earth. Or, as the French writer and pioneering aviator Saint-Exupery put it: 'The aeroplane is not an end in itself: it is a tool, like a plough'. The "top-down" tool enabled Le Corbusier, the architect and urbanist, to fly over vast stretches of South America, an experience which afforded him an aerial view which up til then had only been an imaginary view. Le Corbusier explains: 'In the plane I had my sketchbook as everything became clear to me I sketched. I expressed the ideas of modern planning.' In fact, the impact of the aerial view prompted Le Corbusier to write the Radiant City (published in 1933), a modern doctrine of urbanisation. Today, of course, aerial views are commonplace, from drones to web mapping, or geodata processing inspiring and fascilitating new ideas across design fields.

Research as an ideation tool

Research is a vital element in the design process, and although described variously in terms such as research-based design, research-driven design or research-focused design, the meaning is similar, that is, research helps designers better understand and formulate the problem towards finding a solution that meets a user's needs, wants and goals. And while there are many types of design research, there are two research methods that are particularly helpful at the early stage of the design process, or the ideation phase: Exploratory and Generative. The explorative method is useful to gain background information, where little or none is known about the problem in order to help frame the problem (what, why, how), whereas generative research, based on existing data (from sources such as the internet, books, or articles) can help generate ideas and therefore solutions, and whether new or an improvement in an existing problem.