All in Ideation
This article presents an idea that has high influenced my way of thinking about design. The article is centered on ideation and focuses primarily on how to do it well. It introduces the concept of design space, design exploration, and the trade off curve.
Submit a short essay to the BYU Design Review and compete for cash prizes! If you’ve ever used a product (very likely) and wanted to make it better in some way, you already have an idea for your essay to write! Submit by March 30th, 2024.
In engineering we frequently have questions to which we’d like practical answers to keep us moving forward. If a simple prototype will do, don’t forget to look in your pocket, your home, your lab, your hobbies, or just down the street.
It sounded like I was trying to find sources for plagiarizing answers. But I was genuinely concerned—if the internet is just some depository of mediocre thinking, where on earth was I supposed to go to find good ideas? She looked startled that I asked the question, but one millisecond later she gave me an answer that changed my life…
I hope to show in a Ratatouille fashion that “anyone can [create]” given practice and the right environment.
Engineers, scientists, and designers all gather data and then try to make sense of it later. We have equations and models to help us simulate this data. But we also have a problem – these tools were designed for numerical data, and not all data is solely quantitative. Affinity mapping is an abductive reasoning process that enables people to make sense of large amounts of subjective, qualitative, or observational data.
Objective brainstorming feedback is hard to find. Most people will accept whatever ideas get thrown up and move on. But not us! We are intelligent citizens of the design community who want to get better at brainstorming! What resources are out there to help us improve our ideation practice?
Customer feedback at the time would have dictated that Henry Ford should just breed stronger and faster horses since no one had even thought of the automobile and the motor engine. However, we now know what is used in regard to travel and farm work nowadays, and it does not like carrots as a snack.
Ideation techniques are processes used to develop a variety of ideas that have the potential to be a solution to a problem or scenario. The purpose of these techniques are to determine the best solution that meets most, if not all, the required criteria. Brainstorming is probably the most common ideation technique and you have likely used it at least once even if you didn't know it.
Graham Wallas proposed one of the first formal models of the creative process. Simple and insightful, this model has continued to inspire creative people throughout the world. This article reduces Wallas’s description of that process to just a few paragraphs designed to introduce you to this model.
Conceptual design is the early part of the design process, which is often envisioned with post-it covered walls, smart interdisciplinary teams, and concept sketching. Conceptual design is full of energy and optimism. Until it is not. In this article I give a few tips – centered on the ancient philosophy of yin and yang – that help me keep conceptual design full of energy and optimizing the whole time.
If you think your design will be “right/good/complete/perfect” after just one cycle of creation, you’ll be disappointed and frustrated. It won’t be right, it probably won’t even be good. If you accept that iteration is a normal, healthy, and expected part of the design process, your love for, and competency in, designing things will skyrocket.
There are an infinite number of possible designs. How can designers choose the right combination of materials, geometries, and processes to achieve the best outcome?
Wildly different ideas, like those coming from Vermont (in the form of Senator Sanders), can be beneficial in designing anything from policies to products even if none of those ideas are ever implemented.
