This week I learned all about how ideas formulate and change through time. In the long run, technologies such as 3-D printing and prototype development have become increasingly more and more individualized. However, even in the short term design is something that changes with location and project suites often. It’s important when innovating, to travel and to learn as much as you can about different cultures and personal ideas on what’s going on. Gaining insights is important and then It’s important to grow from there and develop something new, and then keep developing. Moving from place to place is important and having a solid foundation of a spot where you can go to ideate is crucial. We take in so much data as designers, it’s important to reconnect, process, and develop those ideas into products as much as you can.
This week we learned about a diverse set of topics revolving around ideation. In class we made prototypes. At first I felt like I wasn’t sure where to start when it came to building a model of my product. However, Harvard Business Review and the Design Thinking Bootleg helped me understand that prototyping is more about understanding the client experience in one specific aspect of your product. The aspect that I focused on was my brush. When you think about the journey of the customer and what delights them, as mentioned in the Shape of Design, it becomes a simple and fast prototype to build models and let people try it out. The Interaction of Design Foundation was very clear about getting yourself out of the “analysis paralysis” mindset, and begin building instead of thinking. This is a way to move into the flow mind-state and forget about your obsessions with perfection.
This week I learned a lot about creativity and ideation. It’s interesting because while some of the sources were based on original thinking and how to spur more innovative thoughts, the other half of the sources focused on using inspiration and idea stealing as the way to come up with new ideas. After spending time reading through the Harvard Business Review and FastCompanies’ article on Sleep, Ive come to a more rounded idea of what creativity really is. In one sense, creativity is the ability of your brain to identify patterns between things that aren’t already held in close cognitive reference. This is why, when we sleep our loose neuroplasticity is accentuated, and we can create better ideas. There are other practices, such as meditation that can help improve creativity as well. On the other hand, sometimes copying ideas is the best way to come up with something creative. Shakespeare, Beyoncé, and Bob Dylan are notorious creative copiers. Taking another person’s ideas and transforming it into something new is an appropriate and honestly successful way to innovate as well.
This week I was really saturated in the ideas of connecting oneself to the costumer or person you are designing for. Kevin Bathune talked about how his team found ways to place themselves in the customer’s jounrney through real life experience or in-depth research. Likewise the Shape of Design talked about how you must totally saturate yourself in your issue and keep moving, keep coming up with ideas no matter how different they are, they are all in route to a solution; “Design can have diversity in its solutions to problems without compromising the success of any of them.”
