Welcome back. In this lecture, we'll begin talking about ideation, one of the most unique and important aspects of the design process. So what is ideation? The way to think about ideation is that it's a process of creating a lot of divergent ideas with a goal of creating a large set of concepts from which a high-quality design solution can be generated. And why do we do this? Well, the main reason is that there is a large body of evidence showing that when we start with the large number of different ideas, we end up generating better final solutions than if we just start with one or two ideas and then refine those ideas over time. For example, Steven Dow, who is a computer scientist at University of California San Diego has done an extensive work showing that designers who start with multiple ideas and then develop those ideas interactively and choose among them, end up both with better solutions and with higher feeling of competence and design expertise than those who start with only one idea and refine it sequentially. Visually the way to think about this is in terms of the goal of the design process is really to come up with what we might refer to as the global maximum solution. So a solution that is best fitted to the design problem and the constraints that we're able to come up with. And those kind of solutions end up being generated much more frequently and much more consistently by starting with a divergent set of concepts than if we only start with one idea. So if we start with one idea, we might end up with the decent solution, like these little local maximum points on the graph in the picture in the slides. But if we start with multiple ideas and then choose among them and develop multiple aspects of the ideas that we're developing, you end up with something that is much more robust. There are multiple rules of ideation that make this kind of activity productive. Probably the single most important one is to make ideas as cheap as possible. And the reason for this is that you want to be able to generate a lot of ideas and throw away ideas that are no good. So by making ideas cheap, by not committing to them by making the actual process of generation as easy and as effortless as possible, we allow ourselves to throw away most of what we generate without getting attached with those ideas. So we want to generate quickly and we only want to fill in enough detail so we get the general sense of the idea, instead of trying to add at that ideal stage of ideation, provide a lot of detail for every idea. We want to be generating both variations on an idea and very different ideas. So you both want divergence in terms of what concepts you are ideating, as well as, if there seems to be a promising concept at this stage when you're doing the ideation, just creating a bunch of different versions of that concept so you have more versions of it to work with it down the line. And finally, one of the key aspects of the ideation process is to really not worry about idea quality at the time when the ideation is done, that comes later. I'll be coming back to this in a second. The reason for this is by assessing idea quality during ideation, you basically break the flow of ideation, you end up getting stuck. So to summarize, make ideas cheap so that you can create many of them. Generate both variations in idea and different versions of an idea. And don't worry about idea quality early on, that will come in the later stages of the design process. By the time we're done with ideation, what you want to end up with is dozens or even hundreds of solution ideas. And so to have a large body of material with which to work. The problem of course is that this is not easy. And I really like to think of this process as being rooted in our cognitive laziness. Part of the problem is that human beings are just cognitively lazy and like this doggy in the picture, unless we're really made to move, we're rather just be inert. In order to break through that laziness and go beyond just two three ideas that easily come to mind, we need tools. So over the years, designers have develop a number of tools to allow ideation to proceed effectively. The tool that the commonly used in interaction design are sketching and brainstorming. And we'll be coming back to those in the subsequent lectures. But there are others, mind mapping is a popular ideation technique where a concept is put in the middle of the sheet and then one connects other concepts with that in a divergent way to end up with a tree of concepts representing the general problem domain that one is working in. Timed idea generation is another really useful tool, where one gives one's self a time quota, let's say five to ten minutes and then in that time try to generate as many ideas as possible. So writing quickly, or sketching quickly to generate as much material as possible in the short amount of time. For a side of that is to give oneself a task to generate a minimum of a certain number of ideas. So, in my classes, one of the homeworks that I give to my students is to generate a set of 40 sketches about their design problem. And what they find is that they do really well with the first five or six and maybe even ten, and then they get stuck. But if they persist, after awhile they break through that cognitive laziness and they're able to generate a lot more than the 40 that we require. And there are others. In the course materials you'll see references to a list of resources that will point you to other ways of doing ideation. The other idea though is to try to ideate at each important step of the process and ideate each important aspect of the problem and every time you get stuck. So ideate early, as soon as you start getting some sense of the design problem you can start creating sketches and idea banks from which we'll work later. As your understanding of the problem evolves and you become more comfortable with what aspects of the problem are most important, you'll be coming back to sketching it, brainstorming, to work out solutions for those aspects of the problem. And then finally, as you're proceeding through the processes, and at times when you get stuck going back to the stage of ideation in order to be able to break through that stuckness with fresh ideas is another time these techniques come in really handy. In the next lecture, we'll start looking at how this is done through sketching. But overall this process is repeated throughout the design process in different forms and is something that becomes a very integral part of how designer's do their work. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
