Abstract
For most designers, the ability to generate creative and compelling ideas is an essential skill. Achieving creativity often requires breaking away from traditional thinking and exploring new and unconventional ideas, thinking beyond the limits of conventional thought processes. While the most unconventional and wild ideas that emerge from this exploration are often the ones that lead to innovative and creative design solutions later stage, nurturing the early seed ideas into viable design solutions requires more than just exploration. It also requires a thorough understanding of creative logical thinking principles, such as abductive reasoning and bisociation, as well as experiencing them through practice. In addition, it is also crucial to generate the early wild ideas into a reasonably acceptable design concept that may exist at the intersection between novelty and acceptability where MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) stage is located. By using forced connection with randomly selected stimuli, this paper proposes a pedagogical technique or a drill, called Random Ideation, which enables students to experience those principles and practice them through a group workshop. Its board game-like process asks participants to develop a design scenario by employing the given conditions with a user, environment, and activity. We hope this method could serve as a drill for design students to practice thinking outside the box and cultivate early ideas into plausible solutions.
Keywords
Bisociation, Outside of box thinking, MAYA stage, Group Ideation practice
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.409
Citation
Chung, W.(2023) Unlocking creative potential: idea generation training for design students, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.409
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Unlocking creative potential: idea generation training for design students
For most designers, the ability to generate creative and compelling ideas is an essential skill. Achieving creativity often requires breaking away from traditional thinking and exploring new and unconventional ideas, thinking beyond the limits of conventional thought processes. While the most unconventional and wild ideas that emerge from this exploration are often the ones that lead to innovative and creative design solutions later stage, nurturing the early seed ideas into viable design solutions requires more than just exploration. It also requires a thorough understanding of creative logical thinking principles, such as abductive reasoning and bisociation, as well as experiencing them through practice. In addition, it is also crucial to generate the early wild ideas into a reasonably acceptable design concept that may exist at the intersection between novelty and acceptability where MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) stage is located. By using forced connection with randomly selected stimuli, this paper proposes a pedagogical technique or a drill, called Random Ideation, which enables students to experience those principles and practice them through a group workshop. Its board game-like process asks participants to develop a design scenario by employing the given conditions with a user, environment, and activity. We hope this method could serve as a drill for design students to practice thinking outside the box and cultivate early ideas into plausible solutions.