Workshop culture

The 2020/21 virus pandemic put severe restrictions on face-to-face interaction in the workplace, not least in the physical design studio. As a result, many in-person activities and engagements shifted to remote working modes, that is, working from home, or online. Post-pandemic, then, will studio culture return to its former modus operandi of mixed, or hybrid mode - analogue and digital? Signs are that the upward digital studio trend will continue. If so, what happens to a studio-based design tradition, or culture that even before the pandemic was increasingly mediated by the computer or overshadowed by digital and social media? What happens to design ideation when influenced, if not relying on the abstractness of mass-media sources rather than the hands-on concreteness of the studio? Or, what happens to the effort of first-hand experience with a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world when computing, from CAD to AI fills the gap between imagination and reality?  If so, what might we lose in the process, and does it matter?

The empty studio?

Most designers would agree that it’s often the informal, unplanned interactions that matter most in the creative work environment. So, when working from home, as is the case during the current pandemic, how much are we missing by giving the physical studio up? What is lost in terms of not being able to communicate in person with colleagues or the sense of belonging to a team? Indeed does ideation require face-to-face interaction in the studio? To try to answer such questions requires an understanding of how designers interact in the studio, how they generate and communicate ideas or how they deal with practical concerns and decision making. That is, the thinking and behaviour that establish, develop and maintain any particular studio culture, real and/or virtual.

Sketchy Gonzales

A sketch is a rapidly executed drawing and requires a certain speed. But speed is only part of sketching to demonstrate graphically an image, idea or principle. So whatever the drawing mode or instrument, analogue or digital, there's no substitute for skills and experience. For budding designers, however, this may, at first seem daunting but practice turns "poor" drawing skills into good ones: Not necessarily perfect, as a sketch is not usually intended as a finished work. Indeed the sketchiness of the sketch is what gives it character. But "good enough" to help generate, develop and communicate ideas. Also remembering that practice takes effort. Sketching, however, is only one of many ideation or conceptual tools. And arguably, in the digital age not always the primary tool. That is, digital imagery increasingly appears in the early stages of ideation based on graphics software, or video. Moreover, the freehand pen and paper ideas sketch has to compete with ever growing expectations of photo realistic renderings, and from both clients and design colleagues. Yet the ability to sketch out an idea with ease and at speed demonstrating purpose and meaning of the idea not only enhances designer confidence but can help catch and hold audience attention too.

Ideation: both global and local

The ideation workshop reflects how design works both in global and local contexts. It's neither ideate globally nor locally but both/and. Design ideas flow between countries and cultures and are developed, improved and acted upon to meet both global and local needs and conditions. For example, James Dyson, the British industrial designer, who set up his global headquarters in Singapore in 2019,  says: 'We can develop technology [in Britain], but understanding what Asians want and what works in the market - we have to be there, we have to be immersed in it'. A classic example of local/global ideation is how Japanese electronics firm Sony borrowed ideas from US  transistor manufacturers in the 1950s (under a licensing agreement), and, after improving upon the ideas achieved mass-market penetration of transistor radios selling seven million units worldwide by the mid-1960s.

Word-image cycle

The ideation workshop isn't a talk shop. True, words matter but so do doing and making. And so design ideation is manifested by interaction, or dialogue between visualisation (non-verbal) and language (verbal). An example of the image-word cycle is Corbusier who, in his final interview of May 1965, explained it as follows: 'As it turned out later that, not being able to build certain things, I could draw them; but not being able to explain them entirely in drawing, especially when it came to urbanism, I had to explain them, so I wrote.' In the interaction between words and images, however, words place the image in context. Moreover, the contextualised image highlights how ideation is as much process as outcome. That is, the process of visualising and verbalising the idea towards realisation, step by step. Or, idiomatically speaking, to take the idea from "talk the talk" to "walk the talk" to "walk the walk".

Intangible concepts

Design has many aspects (charactertistics) or perspectives (contexts), both tangible (the physical object) and intangible. Time, light and darkness are examples of intangible factors investigated, articulated and manifested in the design process. Take architectural space, which, like time is a convention and cannot be grasped in a handfull and therefore intangible. Or, say transparency perception which is influenced by light reflected versus light transmitted, both intangible. Indeed an architecture experienced as a spatial phenomenon without physical measurements. And so in the ideation workshop where explorations take place, discoveries are made, and where transformations occur producing tangible forms from intangible ideas. In the same vein, Isozaki, the Japanese architect, urban designer and theorist, developed and worked on the idea of "Darkness" as an architectural prototype (1960s-), holding that architectural design is the process of giving concrete form to intangible concepts. However, it should be noted that ideas can be concrete, visual or abstract.

Activity creates ideas

The trigger for the ideation workshop is that ideation is not a passive pursuit say, simply sitting waiting for ideas to pop up. On the contrary, the workshop is an active engagement with ideation tools, that is, from words and sketching to model making and computing. The activity takes many forms, for example, improvisation, or the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Or, tinkering towards innovation, that is, the practice of experimenting, testing, probing, and making incremental improvements to existing designs and processes. And a great place for tinkering is often he studio (or the ubiquitous garden shed, or garage). And so the ideation workshop, through the activity of playing around with stuff, and asking "what if" questions creates opportunity to problem solving, indeed even problem finding.