Ideation fitness

Ideation is certainly about imagination but also a state of mind, of curiosity, play and innovation. And as such ideation is a vital intellectual exercise making the best of achieving the aims of a design brief. In this pursuit, ideation is a kind of exercise, or workout to make the proposed idea a fitting response to the brief. And similar to a purposeful, physical activity to keeping fit, say, jogging or swimming, so ideation has a fitness function of measuring or assessing when the goal of the brief is met. In this sense, the ideation workshop, as part of design practice, can be seen as a  fitness class for designers. Indeed design fitness through ideation.

Upbeat ideation

The workshop encourages and facilitates the participants to rethink, reinvent, or reconfigure whatever they wish. And so sky’s the limit, the world is your oyster, everything starts in your imagination. There’s not boundary (except of your own making) to what you can dream up and manifest. The workshop, then, asks for change, growth, transformation, progress. Where to begin? Reflect, daydream, doodle… make some ideas come to life in your imagination ... write them down, visualise them and decide how to make your new insight and inspiration lead to the next move towards reality. Precious stuff - you can do anything in the realm of ideation!

Imaginative practice

The ideation workshop promotes curiosity, inventiveness and playfulness through bridging imagination and hands-on practical activity in an open source environment. In this, the workshop encourages the explorative use of ideation tools, both analogue and digital (broadly defined). The exploration does not exclude the role of theory or hypothesis in the ideation process (applying new and diverse methodologies and critical theories to design) but rather reflects how practical problem solving and theory can work hand in hand. The workshop approach, moreover, is inspired by pedagogical and formative thinkers in educational psychology, such as John Dewey, and Leo Vygotsky. For example, Dewey, in his focus on means in education, sees experience as helping to form thinking, whereas Vygotsky, in his cultural historical theory, places culture as the raw material of thinking. Source, on the latter: Glassman, M. (2001). Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, Experience, and Inquiry in Educational Practice. Educational Researcher, 30(4), 3-14.

AI as ideation partner

Design ideation may conjure up the Aha! moment, the sketch on the back of an envelope or the lone creative genius. Everyday ideation in creative industries, however, suggests that successful ideas are the result of many minds and hands working collaboratively. Indeed Mark Twain, the American author, in emphasising the combinatorial nature of creativity, held that substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. But drawing on very large outside sources, and across domains is what generative AI does well. And so, while designers will never stop coming up with great ideas, AI can augment that creativity. That is, when designers only have vague initial ideas, generative AI can help to crystalise ithem. In fact, using generative AI such as ChatGPT designers no longer have to "waste" their time coming up with already existing ideas. Instead they can apply their creative energy towards iterating, assembling, and combining to create new ideas that they would not have been able to do without the help of AI. However, generative AI might tempt designers to start the design process through prompt engineering (describing a task that an AI should perform) rather than, say, idea sketching using pen and paper. That is, generative AI, as an ideation tool, may sideline or bypass traditional ways of getting the design process started. But if going straight to AI, what impact will AI have on reflective design principles while designing? Or, as held by Umberto Eco, the philosopher and writer, 'Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think'.

Workshop in the age of AI

The impact of artificial intelligence, AI on the design process is accelerating, from the early days of CAD streamlining a wide array of mundane steps associated with manual design (drafting) to becoming a tool and medium for complex design expressions (ideation). Ultimately, the merging of CAD and prompt-engineered Large learning models, LLMs, would take care of the design process end-to-end, or result in fully integrated Building information models, BIMs, from first idea to final materialisation. But if AI someday becomes able to perform actions currently carried out by designers and engineers it also raises concerns related to employment in the field. Indeed, AI is prompting questions on the future of work and human creativity. In one recent example of generative AI’s achievements, as reported in Scientific American, AI programs (GPT-4) outscored the average human in tasks requiring originality, as judged by human reviewers. But while it is natural and historical that humans are apprehensive of new technology, the cognitive associations of generative AI and humans differ. That is, human sensemaking is generated through personal interests, memories, feelings and lived experiences whereas AI is rather imitating or simulating what people can do. Moreover, the ethical, cultural and societal values and judgements underlying and supporting design proposals need to be made transparent for which humans, not machines should be accountable. Overall, then, this suggests that the ideation workshop, in encouraging the participants to trying out a wide range of conceptual tools, both analogue and digital, in order to better engage with, and therefore better understand design thinking and making, remains relevant and meanigful in the age of AI. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-anxiety-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-to-manage-it/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb

Adhocism

The ideation workshop resonates with the notion of adhocism dealing with an existing situation through trial-and-error, adjustment and readjustment to address a problem quickly and efficiently. It is an approach to creative design that relies on our ability to everyday improvisation particularly in using resources already at hand. A purpose immediately fulfilled is the ideal of adhocism; it cuts through the usual delays caused by planning, bureaucracy and hierarchical organisation. Indeed the man-made environment is built up of fragments from the past and most creations, and therefore ideas are initially ad hoc combinations of past elements or subsystems. Moreover, adhocism is satisfyingly familiar in that it is what people do all the time in dealing with the unexpected - tacit kinds of knowing but unexamined or unexpressed, a basis of most human behavior, as in 'you work with what you have'. What signifies successful adhocism is creative activity that shows in the novel adjustment to the situation, the clever new use of resources (including skills). Good adhocers, then, deal well with uncertainty. They experiment, try something new, take a small step to discover what works. They show skills in adapting the available resources to the situation, or in adapting themselves to the circumstances. Source: Jenkins, C and Silver, N (1972) Adhocism: The Case for Impovisation. MA: MIT Press.

Idea prompting

Ideas seem to appear anytime and everywhere, slowly emerging or popping up seemingly from nowhere. From a blank piece of paper to the proverbial "Aha!" moment. But what human ingenuity is needed to generate ideas in the age of artifical intelligence, AI? When prompt engineering for a text-to-text model, or a text-to-image model can help produce the desired idea (output). Idea prompting, then, is becoming increasingly a useful ideation tool for designers because large language models, LLMs, have the ability to understand prompts, also called "in-context learning". Prompting skills, which involves specifying or adjusting the AI prompt, moreover, help designers better understand the capabilities and limitations of LLMs. That is, knowing how to write concise, clear prompts will ensure that any AI prompt will produce a strong response.The iterative process of prompting, then, enables designers to generate, revise and refine ideas producing in-depth creative content.