04 Feb 02

Re: Generative Idea

Hi Patrick, hi all,

I’m sorry this response is a little delayed.

This topic is close to my heart and research interests, so I’ve allowed
myself to draw some threads together from the various postings. Indeed
I feel that there is a link between the postings related to “Generative
Idea” and a post from the “Love at First Sight” thread.
My response reflects my experience as an industrial designer and as a
teacher of design students. As my research interests are concerned with
the latter, this response will focus mainly on how to help students
when dealing with generative ideas.

With regard to the example of the Sydney Opera House, Patrick wrote:

------------------
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 09:46:1
 From Patrick Janssen

Subject - Generative Idea

Jan
For example, if we think about the Sydney Opera house: very early on in
the design process Utzon probably had a idea of a building with a
particular type of form (wings of a bird? sails of boats? I don’t
actually know)…
…Of course, this building is highly symbolic, and the generating idea
very
visual…
... For instance, was the idea to cut the Sydney Opera House shells out
of a sphere also a generating idea?
------------------

I’m fairly certain the inspiration for Utzon was an orange and the
layering of various segments of the peel – quarters, halves etc.
When I read your mail Patrick, I couldn’t help wondering why it was
that you had the associations of bird, sails of boats. I have a hunch
that you have given yourself part of the answer that you are looking
for.
But as to whether Utzon’s generative idea was a constructional one or a
visual one I don’t know. Maybe he was intrigued with the possibilities
of combining the two, of experimenting with his imagination? Maybe the
orange peel helped him organize his thoughts?

Back to your birds and boat sails. Could it be that you had those
associations, because the building is in a harbour environment and that
the photos of the building are often from the air? You can now see the
finished result and try and run Utzon’s film backwards. But your own
world of association will play in and to quote your own words from the
same mail as above:
… (and indirectly also more general social and cultural values and
beliefs).
This social nature of recall (Bartlett 1995) is a point I would like to
get back to in a moment.

This question, regarding your associations to the Sydney Opera House
might seem ludicrous, but I do genuinely believe that many generative
ideas are intuitive responses to a given design task. It is seldom, in
my experience at least, that a designer has an idea and then tries to
find a design task to fit it.
At the outset of any task, our minds often have great difficulty in
first getting hold of and then framing the task. So our subconscious
throws up clues that can act as pointers, as to where to go. The
initial idea comes from within, but is in direct response to the
extrinsic demands. Arthur Koestler (Koestler1989) has some very good
examples of breakthrough ideas and the imagery that went before them.

Making qualified choices:
Using words such as intuition and creativity can be very provocative
for some, and appear too vague. Sometimes one lacks other definitions,
when discussing design processes in general terms, but often, these
terms are used too loosely and tend to reflect a lack of real
understanding as to what precisely, is going on.
One of the core areas of my current research is to try and understand
these processes from the point of view of a designer, in particular
design students and find ways of introducing the issues of idea
generation, and its relationship to a student’s personal working
process. My experience is that it is possible for the students to get
hold of a detailed understanding of this so-called “fuzzy area”.
It seems to be very beneficial to the students, to be given tasks that
encourage them to be very specific as to why they use certain ideas,
how they then deal with a personal dialogue with those ideas, how they
are thinking at a given moment and why they make certain choices
throughout the design process. The students reach a clearer insight
into their own intuitive, creative and associative processes and as a
result seem to make a remarkable transformative leap (Moon 2000) in
their learning and understanding. The quality of their work thereafter,
is plain to see.

A meta-understanding of personal resources:
This process of self-awareness or meta-understanding also seems help
the students with the problem of getting stuck or as it is otherwise
known, the way the students experience “functional fixedness” (Purcell
and Gero1996). Purcell and Gero discuss the problem as partly one of
the students making premature decisions.
To my mind the underlying problem is the design students’ inability to
make choices. They are often unclear as to what they are trying to
decide on and why and the premature decisions often occur more as a
kind of stab in the dark or guess at a way to move forward rather than
a clear cut understanding of the issues in the design task or their own
working process. The resultant emotional anxiety, frustration and
stress are enough to stop the best of us in our tracks.
The temptation is sometimes to give the students prescriptive methods
rather than encourage them to understand and find their own working
process.

The interesting question is how can one as a designer work with one’s
intuition and association resources, without disappearing into a
“mysterious black box”! To my mind the work of a designer means finding
a balance between developing one’s personal resources and inspiration,
when driving a design process forward and engaging those resources in a
collaborative design environment. How was Utzon dealing with his own
dialogue with his generative idea of the orange peel and how could
Utzon engage others in his inspiration around the orange peel? Or was
the orange peel purely a personal inspiration that was an associative
code to enable him to start the designing process, an associative code
or symbol that others could not share?

I think that these aspects of personal design work can and should be
brought into the collaborative arena. One has to find ways of
reinterpreting an intuitive response to a design task, into a means of
communication that others can relate to. This is particularly useful to
the students, as it gives them a means of being more articulate in
their personal dialogue with their work and a means of learning to
communicate their ideas clearly, when involved in the collaborative
side of a design task.

Ken Friedman wrote:

------------------
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 06:29:27

Subject: Generative ideas and preconceptions

…Since most design involves solving problems external to the designer,
however, generating ideas is as much a process of response as it is
generating from purely internal origination.
The way in which we generate responsive ideas often requires some past
experience or some foundation in different forms of personal knowledge.
It
is here that we inevitably engage some forms of preconceived ideas.
This is
not necessarily bad: the challenge is understanding when preconception
is
appropriate and when we must let go…
------------------

There are two points that Ken made here that I think are very important.
Firstly, I’d like to add, that the way we utilize past experiences is
also conditioned in direct relationship to our social and cultural past
and current context. (Bartlett 1995).
This does not mean that we can’t rise above this, and work with it. We
have to just be aware of what is going on. In other words understand
our intuitive and associative processes when dealing with a given
design task.

Anthony Petruzzi (Petruzzi 1998) in a brilliant paper on education,
(dealing with the thoughts of John Dewey and Paulo Freire) describes
this response to and use of our past experience in relationship to
generating new understandings as:
“Rather it is a transaction “taking place” between one who experiences
the continuity of looking backward and projecting forward what I would
call the “anticipatory retrospection” of the hermeneutic circle of
understanding”.

Secondly, do designers only generate one lead idea or is this initial
idea a means of generating further versions of this lead? Is the
generative idea acting as a form of guide when first exploring and
establishing the design space. (Goel1995), (Heape 2002), a form of coat
rack that one can then hang bookmarks of ideas and inspiration on, as
one proceeds in the iterative design process.

As Jan Coker wrote:

-------------------
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 17:51:44
Jan Coker

Subject - Generative Idea

Certainly what you describe is one thing that can happen when designers
design.
Sometimes they may have many generating concepts that frame and take
the design possibilities in many directions at once…
------------------------

Several generative ideas can kick off a design process and many
sub-ideas are generated along the way. When to let go of an idea or
“preconception” is a significant event in any design process and a
problem for many design students and I suspect, for some practicing
designers as well. What reasons does one have for choosing to let go or
retain an idea or lead? Should one hold onto “love at first sight” or
“kill your darling”?

Social Recall:
With regard to Patrick’s question, the choice and in particular the
focus of choice of a generative idea or rather the way in which one
engages an idea or not, will play a significant role in its further
development or its being got rid of, in an iterative design process.
The impetus and reason for working with one generative idea or another
has to be resolved with the extrinsic demands of the design task in
combination with the personal motivation involved.

Patrick, you mentioned “general social and cultural values and beliefs”
and M. Schmidt wrote:

------------------
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 15:09:
[log in to unmask]

Subject - Generative Idea

Paulo Freire writes of generative themes in Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. Broadly speaking, generative themes refer to initial
biases, experiences, and opinions that must, ultimately, be
reconciled with knowledge from outside the self. This is part of his
dialectics as teaching method...
------------------

Some imply that creativity and in particular intrinsic motivation can
be hampered when faced with extrinsic demands (Amabile 1996). I feel
that it is a designer’s experienced response to just these extrinsic
demands that enables the generative ideas to come to the surface.
I think that it is precisely Freire’s “reconciliation with knowledge
from outside the self” that demands high level creative and innovative
thinking, when the designer is in intense dialogue with a generative
idea, the design task and the consequences of choices on that design
task and process.

This dialogue with a generative idea is a driver in the personal and
collaborative negotiation process involved in a design task. The
designer generates ideas that thematize and generate new inquiry, in
the expanding and growing circle of understanding.

As Donald Schön (Schön 1979) explains as a generative metaphor:
“In this second sense , “metaphor” refers both to a certain kind of
product – a perspective or frame, a way of looking at things – and to
a certain kind of process – a process by which new perspectives on the
world come into existence”.


The generative idea and priming:
There are no precise answers here. What are the correct generative
ideas for a given design task? It’ll be up to the individual designer
and collaborative design team and their personal makeup, attitudes and
context.
One has to be aware of the images, thoughts, signs, associations and
metaphors, that get presented in this ongoing iterative process and
their relation to the purpose or task in hand (Lakhoff and Johnson
1980).
These signs and indicators are there for a reason, for one to work out.
One works with the understanding that one gains.
Arthur Koestler (Koestler1979 - p118) gives a very good account of the
images that Friedrich August von Kekulé, Professor of Chemistry in
Ghent had in 1865, prior to his understanding of the benzene ring.

An important factor when dealing with the concept of generative ideas
is priming. (Koestler1967), (Boden 1990). It is not without reason that
particular ideas arise. The priming of the imagination and the focus of
heuristic and intuitive search into one’s world of association is quite
simply a mental and emotional condition needed, to allow certain ideas
to surface. This doesn’t mean that the idea necessarily jumps up the
minute that one needs it. It often surfaces under completely different
conditions and I think that if this function is not fully understood,
it can seem that ideas just pop up from nowhere like a lightning bolt
from the blue.

I find that my students are very quick at identifying when and where
they have these aha experiences, when trying to solve any task, not
necessarily a design task. They can be just waking up or going to
sleep, washing up or watching the tv. Having a discussion etc. As I
point out to them, there are other ways of generating ideas “in the
office / studio “ when dealing with a design task, than going off to do
the dishes!
And this is my point – give the students and designers for that matter
a thorough understanding of their own intutive, creative and
associative process,
then they can work with a lot more ease, be less stressed and be able
to work with several generative ideas at the same time, dealing with
them in turn in their minds.
I had a student explain the other day, how it helps him to physically
change his work space (notes, key words, visual references, 2d/3d
sketches) when swapping from one theme or idea to another, within the
same task.

In my experience, just to be able to get the students to think more
clearly, on their own terms, around this process that is often
considered to be mysterious, releases a transformative change that is
genuinely liberating for them. The quality of their results is plain to
see. They gain a marked confidence in the choices they make and can
argue their case as to why something should have a particular
interaction, interface, shape or use. A kind of meta-cognitive /
meta-understanding of their own process.
They find a way in, identify with the task and generate a motivation
for their solutions to the task.

As Schön (Schön 1987 - p.181) indicates, in “Educating the Reflective
Practitioner”, that an encouragement of a student’s own identification
of possible solutions, that have meaning for him/her, is often the key
to successful solutions.

“ Like the architectural studio master Dani, who asked his student
Michal, “What do you want the field school to be like?”,
Rosemary asked her student,
“How do you want these themes to sound?”
In both cases, the coaches made it legitimate for the student to like
or dislike something and in both, they invited the student to reflect
on the qualities liked or disliked. Then these descriptions were taken
as the materials of a problem: how to produce what was liked?…

As in priming, the motivational factor of a generative idea should not
be overlooked. The really good ideas provide a link between the
personal motivation and the extrinsic demands of the task and having
several generative ideas or themes, allows one the choice to experiment
with various avenues and personal approaches to a given design task.

Generative ideas as guides between the known and the unknown:
Why is it that several generative solutions often surface?
Designing is, on many levels, an emotional business. A conscious use of
generative ideas can also provide ourselves with ways of tackling
potentially chaotic situations and ways of dealing with the uncertainty
and risk that are a characteristic of any design process.

Many experienced designers are very adept at teasing the task, by
cultivating risk taking and experimentation. By that I mean, they
intuitively sense how a task can be tackled, but will deliberately find
a generative idea that allows them (or forces them) to explore other
solutions. Generative ideas can be deliberately developed to ward off
the disturbance of clichéd or easy solutions.
Design students and less experienced designers, on the other hand, tend
to shy away from this risk taking.

Our intuition is strong indeed. Ideas and in particular generative
ideas are coaxed into the forefront of the mind of the designer for
very precise reasons, although the knowledge of this motivation is
often tacit.
Certain ideas can allow us to use aspects of our inventive mind and
soul, to explore the design space, by using the generative idea as a
legitimate guide. This can protect one from the potential conflict when
moving into the uncharted territory of the unknown. One often solves
the unknown with the known - generative ideas or metaphors can act as a
bridge or messenger between the two. Several, focused, generative ideas
can lessen the stress of potential conflict even more by acting as a
team of guides, that one can use individually to explore one part of
the design space or another. This is in many ways similar to the use of
imaginary users as a supplement to “real users”. One can use them in
one’s personal dialogue with the task.

John Dewey (Dewey 1991, p 18-19) uses the metaphor of a wayfarer who
comes to a fork in the road and has to then decide which path to follow:
...”Which road is right? And how shall perplexity be resolved? There
are but two alternatives: he must either blindly and arbitrarily take
his course, trusting to luck for the outcome, or he must discover
grounds for the conclusion that a given road is right...
...He looks for evidence that will support belief in favour of either
of the roads - for evidence that will weight down one suggestion. He
may climb a tree; he may go first in this direction, then in that,
looking, in either case, for signs, clues, indications. He wants
something in the nature of a signboard or map, and his reflection is
aimed at the discovery of facts that will serve this purpose...

Following on from Dewey’s metaphor, I think that the context of the
design task could be the landscape that wayfarers / designers find
themselves in and have to explore in order to understand. The context,
the terrain and those others that inhabit that terrain will also have
an effect on the nature of the designer’s journey.
The designer’s personal resources, both professional, social and
cultural will interact with and be effected by the landscape and the
local and cultural forces of those who live there. (Hatch and Gardner
1993).
Generative ideas could be considered as guides to help explore the
various possible routes that confront the designer or design team when
they get to the fork in the road.
But unlike Dewey’s wayfarer, designers have to give themselves more
than just two alternatives in order to come up with qualified decisions.
Alternatively, if one wants to follow the same line of thought, yet
prefers the concept of just one main generative idea, as Patrick
indicated, then one could maybe consider the context of the design task
as the country that one is in. The main generative idea is the
landscape, (in that country), that the designer explores by taking
various routes, backtracking and crisscrossing until an understanding
of the task emerges and possible solutions are chosen and acted upon.

A brief trip into an imaginative conceptual space. I agree, not a very
hardcore cognitve explanation, but in my experience, a way of using
metaphor for explaining complex concepts, that design students are very
capable of grasping. The understanding of their own process and fears
is up to them.

As Jan Coker wrote:

------------------
Thu, 23 Jan 2003 13:05:
Jan Coker

Subject - Love at first sight

There is also then the issue of risk. To venture into unknown territory
with
unclear goals runs the supposed risk of “failure”. However, that is the
very
territory where landmark design innovations have been born. So then that
becomes a question of what takes initial primacy, process or product.
But it is
a funny cart/horse question because without willingness to risk, we may
not be able to recreate an object, system or society which is circling
around in a
dysfunctional pattern.
------------------


Killing your darlings:
I know I have quoted this text out of context, but I hope this is ok
with you Jan. I think the subjects “Love at First Sight” and the sense
of insecurity and risk taking, are particularly relevant. Many design
students and some practicing designers, mistakenly think that this
first “loved” idea will bear them through. The trouble starts if it’s
the only one.
They also think that by clutching onto something familiar and possibly
even well known, they can then avoid the risks involved in the design
process, in particular the risk of failure. The resultant binding
effect can be paralyzing. How can one generate more ideas that wont
“let down “ or expose the darling idea. Or oneself!
But as Roger C. Schank (Schank 1999) explains so very well, every time
a designer fails in their process, this is the seed of possibility and
of new creative solutions.
By failing, one has to explain why that particular approach or solution
didn’t work. In the reflective explanation lies the source of the next
iteration and experiment.
Taking this in mind, if one is interested in the teaching angle, I find
students react very well to the notion that they basically can’t make
mistakes, just inappropriate solutions, for now, that they can change.
As long as they can reflect on what they have produced, its
relationship to their stated goal, experiment with possible
alternatives and then move on to the next iteration.

An account:
I would like to leave you with an account of a student’s search for
ideas, that I think indicates how the first seeds of a generative idea
can be sown.

One task I give the students, when discussing generative ideas and
their relationship to the design process is to have them create sets of
words, that are a result of a regular brainstorming session. This is
traditional stuff, but the difference is that they have to generate two
sets of two words, that linguistically would not normally be put
together. Chili-dwarf, lemon-wasp, social democrat-elephant,
sodawater-fighter jet. This exercise is to simply generate unexpected
associations and to ultimately model a 3d object, made from found
materials, that reflects the student’s stated aim. The exercise demands
real soul searching and association search.
I’m doing basically what is called for when teaching people to draw.
Concentrate on the negative space between objects and not the objects
themselves. The brain, being confronted with something unrecognizable,
is then forced to appraise the situation anew and not just leap to
clichéd symbols or usual, worn solutions.

One student was very ill at ease and felt very provoked. What he did
was very, very interesting, only he didn’t know it at the time.
He had his social democrat – elephant as his focus. He went into a
supermarket to find something he could use. Basket in hand he went
first to the sausage department to find his “social democrat”.
Reluctantly he put this into the basket, as he felt it wasn’t quite
right. He then moved to through the shelves to try out various other
options including manufactured bread and a swiss-roll. Searching at the
same time for his “elephant”, he followed the same process and finally
chose a concentrated soup cube.

He presented me with, in his words, the soup cube (heavy, compressed
weight / taste) and the swiss-roll (pampered politician), his
association to social democrat – elephant. He had avoided finding,
manipulating and realigning found materials, as the others had done.
Yet, I think he had actually gone through the process that can either
happen in a flash of a second, when we get hold of a generative idea or
repeat itself throughout the design process.
His trip to the supermarket was, to my mind anyway, a brilliant
metaphor for the focused search one makes in one’s world of
association, in relation to a given design task. One literally searches
the various shelves of one’s imagination, to choose something, maybe
put it back, until finally settling on an image or idea that triggers
one’s personal motivation and association to the task and which
sometimes, more often than not, is impossible to explain to others.
This particular student went on to be able to give a very precise
account of how he felt his own process of idea generation and use of
associations actually occured throughout his design process.

Collaborative design:
Sharing generative ideas with others in a collaborative design
environment, can present problems, as the images or metaphors are often
personally orientated and idiosyncratic. Yet I believe, that this
problem can and should be solved, particularly if students are to be
taught to function in a collaborative design process.
Donald Schön (Schön 1979) gives a very god account of a “technological
“ generative idea, where a project team is trying to come up with a new
paintbrush concept. They discover the idea of “paintbrush as pump”,
which gives impetus to understanding the problem.
These technological, generative ideas are often easier to refer to,
negotiate with and share in a collaborative design environment than
those with a more lyrical, expressive or subjective character.

I think a challenging question is, how can one translate or interpret a
more “lyrical or subjective / emotional” generative idea, like Utzon’s
orange peel, so that it can be shared with others in a collaborative
design process.

Patrick, I hope my response can help you somehow. The issue you raised
is very complex. I would like to thank you for your question, as it
gave me an opportunity to organise some of my thoughts on this.

Best regards,

Chris Heape.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------

References:
Amabile Teresa, M. 1996. Creativity in context : update to The social
psychology of creativity. Boulder, Colo. ; Oxford: Westview Press.

Bartlett, F. C. 1995. Remembering: a study in experimental and social
psychology: Cambridge U.P.

Boden, M. A. 1990. The creative mind : myths & mechanisms. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Dewey, J. 1991. How we think.
Amherst, New York.,: Prometheus books.

Goel, V. 1995. Sketches of thought. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hatch, T., Gardner, G.,. 1993. “Distributed expertise in the
classroom,” in Distributed Cognitions, 1 edition. Edited by G. Salomon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heape, C. 2002. Pre-development and sketching. JISCmail Tue, 8 Oct 2002
16:12:05.

Koestler, A. 1989. The act of creation. London: Arkana [The Penguin
Group].

Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Moon, J. 2000. Reflection in Learning and Professional Development:
Theory and Practice: Kogan.

Ortony, A. 1993. Metaphor and thought, 2nd edition. Cambridge [England]
; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Petruzzi, A. 1998. Hermeneutic Disclosure as Freedom: John Dewey and
Paulo Freire on the non-representational nature of education.

Purcell, A. T., Gero, J.S. 1996. Design and other types of fixation.
Design Studies 17:363 - 383.

Schank, R. C. 1999. Dynamic memory revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge ;
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schön Donald, A. 1979. “Generative Metaphor: A perspective on problem
setting in social policy,” in Metaphor and Thought, 2 edition. Edited
by A. Ortony. New York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner. Jossey-Bass higher
education series. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

-------------

from:

Chris Heape
Senior Researcher - Design Didactics / Design Practice
Mads Clausen Institute
University of Southern Denmark
Sønderborg
Denmark

http://www.mci.sdu.dk

Work:
tel: +45 6550 1671
e.mail: chris @mci.sdu.dk

Home:
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