Working it out

Recognised chiefly for his modern designs of steel and glass, and for smooth exterior contours and open, naturally-lit interiors, Norman Foster (b. 1935), a British architect, says, 'travel and the lessons from studying buildings and cities are as important to me now as they were when I was at architecture school. In that sense I am still a student.' And so, among his mentors are Buckminster Fuller, Paul Rudolph, Serge Chermayeff and Vincent Scully as well as the Bauhaus and Ulm schools of design. A motivating force in Foster's design practice is his eagerness to know and to learn: 'I was always curious about how something works, in the case of the windmill the inner workings, the cogs, how the wind power was transmitted eventually to the stones that would grind the grain. I think that that comes round to how do you find a basis for design. It’s not just how the materials work but – whether it’s a museum or a corporate entity – what are the values, what makes it tick below the surface. How can that be reflected in the architecture? How can the architecture enable it to work better?' He continues: 'And to give insights into the creative processes beneath the surface – to show that something that looks very simple has come out of studying many options.' While there is accumulated extensive knowledge of famous architects' advice for young designers, Foster's insightful and thoughful words are bound to be both inspirational and useful to a wide range of creatives. Source: Interview in The Guardian July 9, 2023.

Flash workshop

The notion that ideas appear in "a flash" may also suggest "flash ideation workshop". That is, the workshop works on the premise of improvisation or ad hoc, or has a pop-up or intermittent quality to it which situates ideation not just in the studio. Using social media, and artificial intelligence, in addition to analogue or traditional ideation tools, may also encourage finding a balance between physical and remote work. Flash workshopping, then, and whether doing so virtually or in person may not result only in new ideas and innovative insights but also stimulate and support collaboration to solve a specific problem. In both scenarios, the workshop seeks to generate ideas for actionable change based on a given task.

GPT for ideation

GPT-4 is is a multimodal large language model created by OpenAI and the fourth in its GPT series. It was relased in March this year only a few months after the previous version reflecting the speed at which AI technology is developing. GPT-4 can accept a prompt of text and images, which—parallel to the text-only setting—lets the user specify any vision or language task. Like previous GPT models, the GPT-4 base model was trained to predict the next word in a document, and was trained using publicly available data (such as internet data) as well as licensed data. Although less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, the model exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, for example, simulating exams that were originally designed for humans resulted in a 90 per cent score in law exams, and art history. Despite its capabilities, however, GPT-4 has similar limitations as earlier GPT models. Most importantly, it still is not fully reliable, for example, it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors. Also, the model can have various biases in its outputs. So when prompted with a question, the base model can respond in a wide variety of ways that might be far from a user’s intent. Such responses may, or may not trigger new ideas. The language model, however, points to creative futures when AI will help turn designing into a seamless process from idea to realisation, from first thought to production and manufacturing. Indeed, the design process, including ideation is already largely driven by language (verbal and visual).

Designers on autopilot?

As AI technology is trained on more diverse and larger datasets including images as well as text the possibilities of what can be created seem endless. OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, for example, has 1 trillion parameters, or variables that the model learns from data. Yet, so far idea generation through AI has limitations because AI only does what it is told (data input). As a data driven system, then, AI cannot fully replace real-life experiences or personal interaction associated with idea generation such as improvisation, reflecting and daydreaming. However, generative software frees up time to designers providing them with a tool that afford novel ways of ideating. This suggests that the relationship between designers and AI is collaborative and that the most successful ideas won’t necessarily come from bright thinkers alone but from those best at using AI to assist ideation. A relationship perhaps similar to that between aircraft pilots and autopilot tech. That is, autopilots assist aviators along the flight path but do not replace the pilots. Moreover, pilots love to fly and they will fly. And designers love to design ... 

Ideate independently, or in group?

Brainstorming, as a group creative technique to encourage new ideas and solutions for simplified and specific problems was popularised by Alex Osbon (1888-1966), a US advertising executive. The method has since gone through many iterations also inspiring creative alternatives. The ideation-workshop, which is multi-tool and not just word-based, is not a group brainstorming activity. This is because the workshop lets the participants generate ideas independently before sharing the ideas in group. In other words, let ideators work alone first. There is good reason for this approach because there is little evidence for the idea that brainstorming produces more or better ideas than the same number of individuals would produce working independently. This argument is also advanced by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist, and further based on a meta-analytic review of over 800 teams indicated that individuals are more likely to generate a higher number of original ideas when they don’t interact with others*. Accordingly, brainstorming is particularly likely to harm productivity in large teams, when teams are closely supervised, and when performance is oral rather than written. Another problem is that teams tend to give up when they notice that their efforts aren’t producing very much. But why doesn’t brainstorming work? There are, according to the review, four explanations:1. Social loafing: There’s a tendency – also known as free riding – for people to make less of an effort when they are working in teams than alone. 2. Social anxiety: People worry about other team members’ views of their ideas. This is also referred to as evaluation apprehension. This is especially problematic for introverted and less confident individuals.3. Regression to the mean: This is the process of downward adjustment whereby the most talented group members end up matching the performance of their less talented counterparts (Osborn envisaged groups including both experts and novices). This effect is well known in sports – if you practice with someone less competent than you, your competence level declines and you sink to the mediocrity of your opponent. 4. Production blocking: Individuals can only express a single idea at one time if they want other group members to hear them. Studies have found that the number of suggestions plateaus with more than six or seven group members, and that the number of ideas per person declines as group size increases (Osborn envisioned groups of around 12 participants). Given brainstorming’s flaws, why is the practice so widely adopted? Well, concludes Chamorro-Premuzic, brainstorming continues to be used because it feels intuitively right to do so - but just don’t expect it to accomplish much, other than making your team feel good. * https://hbr.org/2015/03/why-group-brainstorming-is-a-waste-of-time

Prompts for ideas

There are many ways to get ideation started using conceptual tools, from words and sketching to modelling and computing, and where analogue and digital are intertwined. As to using words (natural language), development in artificial intelligence, AI, has advanced the early prompt tools such as Google Images, which allows users to search the web for images (since 2001) or reverse image search (since 2011). Here, users can simply click on the camera icon to upload an image and get started. But technology is advancing fast. With the emergence of generative text-to-image systems, such as Dall-e-2 or Stable Diffusion, written prompts, that is, short text descriptions are used to generate an image. In contrast, Chat GPT is a language-focused application of AI, and so doesn’t have the ability to create images with AI. Ideation tools, then, including AI, when there is fluidity between analogue and digital, between words and images, where pen and paper sketching mingles with computing, help elicit creativity and provide  inspiration in both familiar and novel ways. 

Situated ideation

Although the ideation workshop suggests a physical space, typically the studio, for generating and communicating ideas, the participants are free to roam for ideas because ideation is not only situated in the studio, but in many "other places". Interestingly, research involving professional writers and physicists, found that ideas generating during episodes of "mind wandering" were more likely to be associated with overcoming an impasse on a problem, compared with ideas generated while on task (i). However, mind wandering happens in studio enviroments too although perhaps more likely to be referred to as daydreaming also known in research terms as “positive constructive daydreaming (PCD),” where the mind is cast forward and imagine future possibilities in a creative way. But daydreaming has also been associated with a lapse of concentration, or "poor attention control", that is, where a person struggles to focus on a particular thought or task, particularly troublesome for those with attention deficits. Yet ideation suggests focused attention on the task at hand. Where, then, does this leave daydreaming as attributed to the stimulation of creativity, and the generating of ideas towards problem solving? Well, says cognitive psychologist Stefan Van der Stigchel: 'The next time you need a [brain] reset, go outside and let your mind wander. Who knows what might happen in your stream of consciousness.'(ii) - (i) Psychological Science, Volume 30 Issue 3, March 2019, pp 396-404; (ii) https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/daydreaming-and-concentration-what-the-science-says/