Ideation

I'd like to tell you now about a technique that  I use often – a very simple technique to enhance structures. I've already got some sort of dimensional, categorical way of describing a problem and to make it richer or to explore whether you can make it richer. We often have things which *appear* to be opposites.

So, in political life you might have left wing versus right wing. In personalities, you might have an introvert versus extrovert. And whenever I'm faced with a dichotomy that says 'this or this', I ask myself, 'Can it be both?' So, we might have – in a classic user interface kit, we've been using menus as examples – you might have menus versus radio  buttons.

And they're completely different things – something is either a menu or it's a radio button. Neither both. But what about, could you have something that's *both* a menu and a radio button? So, could you have something that looks like a menu, perhaps pulls down but has radio buttons inside it? Would that work? Or neither, of course, but neither is (inaud.) – you can think of things like text. But can it be both? So, rather than saying A or B – one or the other – can you actually have something that has elements of both going on?

And sometimes the answer is no and your categories are disjoint. But often if you ask about something being both, you learn something or at the very least you learn that these really are distinct. You can do the same for  things that are – so that's true of things which are like menu versus radio button, which are categories, but also things like the left (inaudible) right button ring, which is more of a dimension. Sometimes you (inaud.) to ask if a thing is a bit of each. Can you have something that's *almost*

menu-like but also has a little bit of radio button? I'm not quite sure what that would be, but that  might be true of, say, the fiction versus versus non-fiction. So, you might say, 'These are my fiction books. These are my non-fiction books.' You know – what would it mean for something to be mostly fiction with a little bit of non-fiction? So, again, a historical novel  might fit into that category. And what you're doing then, actually,  is you're taking what appears to be  

*categorical distinction* – it's either this or this –  and actually turning it into a *dimension*. It could be totally the one thing; it could be totally  other – totally fiction, totally non-fiction, but possibly somewhere in between. So, you can both look at more rich categories, things that are both, but also *turn* what appears to be a categorical distinction into a dimensional one. And dimensions tend to be richer, partial things. They can be more problematic, but they're often richer. However, if you've got dimensions, you can do similar tricks to dimensions.

So, let's think of the classic personality trait – introvert, extrovert. And whenever I see a scale that's got something on one end, something on the other, I always want to twist it and say, 'Well, what about if it was bent in half? Can we imagine somebody who is both very introvert *and* very extrovert? Or can we imagine somebody who's very non-extrovert *and* very non-introvert? Do we have to see these as opposites? Can we actually think about combinations?

Maybe it's at different times; maybe it's at the same time. What would that mean? And we start to learn about the nature of  personality, perhaps a richer way than if you see things always in terms of polarities. So, again, it's a powerful way. Again, sometimes the answer is you do something like this and you think, 'Actually, this is meaningless. There really, really is a distinction.' But so many times, I've found that what appears to be

the sort of middle neutral point in fact can consist of both – shall we say – a more neutral something that has neither characteristics, but also something that embodies both characteristics can be placed in that middle, and they're actually more that they sit out at the top right-hand corner. In one way, so what these opposites  do is they again help you, as with many of the other techniques we've looked at, to feed your gut feelings.

So, some of the things we start off – when we start off with concrete examples, we've been taking something that's very solid. You know – I know this is a mug; I know this is a remote control, and dealing with those concrete things, and then using that to abstract, to start to have a vocabulary to talk about our problem domain. What we're doing here is taking that  vocabulary and creating more of these gut feelings that enable us to actually look at it  and think, 'Yes, I can imagine something there.'

We have moved back and forth between concrete  examples and abstractions. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that, particularly about the idea of being concrete, being very solid here. Often when we think of abstractions, that gives  you a sense of being theoretical or academic, which, depending on where you come from, might  be either a good or a bad thing; whereas when you think of design, we often think  of more concrete fixed things,

artifact-driven processes where you build something, have a look at it. And these sometimes seem quite separate approaches; however, as with a lot of these things we've been discussing in creativity, the actual real fun and the real joy is when they come together. And we often get a greater power through actually doing a combination of the two. Pólya has a wonderful book *How To Solve It* – it was written quite a lot of years ago now – which is largely about mathematics problems, but is actually a really good book about problem solving

in general, although the examples are more about mathematics, and this is sort of high-school mathematics, the heuristics that are generated are very, very useful; so, it's very worth reading. In particular, some of the heuristics are very much about this area of how you move to be more abstract and more concrete. So, one of the heuristics is if you've got something you're trying to show or trying to solve, *think of something more specific*.

So, perhaps you're trying to design a generic web design tool that will work for any kind of shop. And you're struggling with that. So, then what you think is, 'Well, instead of designing it for any kind of shop, let's just imagine I'm designing it for pet shops or designing it for tool shops or food shops.' And then you go for some much more specific example; you sketch out what kind of site you'd want for a food shop,

the kinds of information you want about each product; work out how you might try and produce that,  and then do it for some other examples, and then step back and look at the more general ones. You go more specific and then re-generalize. You might go the other direction. So, you might be trying to – perhaps you're actually working on a very specific shop design for a food shop and you're trying to think about how to lay out the different sections of the site and

– you know – perhaps you're going to have the fresh food section and you're going to have the tinned section and you're going to have the section where you put things like toilet rolls, whatever you call that section. And you're struggling with how to design this. Sometimes it might better stepping back and thinking, 'Well, actually this is about laying out lists or categories in general, and it's a bit like perhaps a library system.' And you think about more general examples, other examples of it. And by thinking more generally, sometimes it again gives you a kick

into the direction that  might help you solve the more specific problem. A specific example of this is *adding constraints*.  And we've talked about the way constraints, adding a constraint, which sounds like it makes life  more difficult, sometimes frees your mind. This is true of process. So, for instance when you have a very time-constrained process, often you end up doing quite creative solutions because  you 'can't do it properly'

because you haven't got the time, and so sometimes that works in the process, but also in the objects you're trying to construct. So, if you're trying to design something that's going to work on mobile devices in general, well, add a constraint to say, 'I'm actually only going to look at Android devices. I'm only going to look at  phones of a very particular dimension. And then I will worry with that constraint.' Or I'm going to – perhaps it might be a constraint on the kinds of people involved: 'I'm going to assume that my users have

absolutely terrible memory. Can I create a website or a system or a form of interaction that works assuming my users have awful memory?' Hopefully, it'll work better when they do. You might design a different one. You might add a different constraint saying, 'Now I'm going to assume my users have perfect memory,' and you'll design something based on that. And then you'll look at those designs and see what you've learned from them; and then hopefully then, having added those constraints, remove them again and look at the general thing and say,

'Okay, given people a bit between these, what might I do in there?' Again, another example of this is where you've  got numbers, is to try and make them either a lot bigger or a lot smaller. So, one of the examples  I think I've used already is where you've got a website that you've  been using a particular sort of format for and you suddenly discover that one of the menus gets so long it doesn't fit on the screen anymore.

And you think, 'Oh! What am I going to do?' and you might decide to perhaps make the font a little smaller, which of course works when you've got 12 items,  but then of course the next time it gets bigger, there's a limit to how small you can make the font.  So, one of the things you might do there is say, 'Okay, my struggle is that I've got 12 items and that's too many to fit on a standard screen.' What's a standard screen, of course? But let's go for that for a moment. What would happen if I had a *thousand* items in my menu? Well, now, clearly I can't just make the font smaller – it's not going to work.

I have to have a very different solution; so, I might go for a solution where the top level had perhaps – you know – things starting 'a' to 'b', things starting 'c' to 'd', that sort of alphabetic thing, a bit like going to library shelves. I might decide to classify things; so, instead of having 'a' to 'b's, it might be like the shop where you've got grocery items, paper items, whatever. But you're forced to think of very  different solutions, and you might do one of

those solutions where it scrolls incredibly  rapidly as you go off the bottom. But because you're thinking of a thousand items rather than 12, you're forced to expand your design space. Then you can go back to say, 'Well, actually it's never going to be anywhere near a thousand; it's probably going to always be... 10, 12, perhaps 20, but never huge.' However, your design space, the things you thought of, the solutions you've thought of are much wider,

and then you can look at those and say, 'Which ones actually now make sense when I've gone back to the sort of size that I was at?' In general, when we talk about being specific you might have already been thinking about prototyping. And so, we've talked about fairly concrete examples, how you might imagine these menus. Of course, you imagine something like  that; there's a big difference between imagining it and actually seeing it in action. And that's why we  like to build, as well as low-fidelity prototypes,

high-fidelity prototypes. That's partly so that you can show them to your users, you can show them to your clients, but it's also because when you look at that high-fidelity prototype, you react differently, you see things in it that you wouldn't see when things are a little bit more vague. Focusing on the physical side of that, there's  wonderful stuff you get from actually being very physical. Now, some of that's about the fact  that when you look at a physical design you learn

more about the nature of it: Does it fit into the hand well? How is the weight going to work? All sorts of things like that, but also actually the very nature of physicality – we are such visceral beings that actually we can use that as part of our  design processes and our creativity processes. The very act of playing and doing exercise, just  going out for a walk on its own, even if you're not even thinking about your design task, is itself

powerful in terms of the way it changes the chemical nature of a brain. So, actually just doing physical things can often be useful, even when it's sort of separate from what you're actually doing. However, also using it in your design process can be really powerful – creating mockups, and again remembering context, you might want to mock up the space around an interaction as well as the devices. So, again, if we're going to model this controller, you might want to model the controller. But you also might want to put it in the (inaudible) – if you haven't got the actual table

you can put it on, you might make a cardboard version of it and things like that. And I've actually seen in design studios people making whole living rooms out of corrugated cardboard in order to be able to have a sense of something working in its context. When you've got that mockup, of course you can act out what's going on. So, obviously if it's a very – if it's computationally high or intellectually high fidelity,

then you might actually be able  to do the things and they have an effect. Otherwise, you might be just more a matter  of acting through as if it was working, maybe using improvisational  techniques – you might do that on your own, just going, almost like working to a script,  or either as an individual or as a group of people together, to act through what might happen – you know. Somebody sitting down, using something; somebody walks into the room; maybe you're using a device as you're talking to somebody else,

and actually just doing a sort of  improvisational session through that. So, this is from a lot of years ago. I was with a group of masters students, and we were talking about innovative interfaces. And I was asking them as a design exercise to think of a slightly future interaction. So, not something they could necessarily do now but that was about the way ubiquitous computing

– well, Internet of Things, actually the phrase didn't exist at that point, but that kind of computation was going. And, as an example, I just want to say – you know – the kind of thing that they might want to think of. I wanted to think of an example, so I scanned around my pockets and found my Swiss Army Knife. So, we started to talk about what an internet-enabled Swiss Army Knife might be like, and how you might have like a little screen on it. And I actually made my low-fi prototype here,

because I actually stuck a bit of cardboard on. But when we first did it, we just talked about it. And then I started to act it out, and I said, 'Ah. We're going use our toothpick as a  stylus on our little tiny screen, so we can get suggestions up and it's going to say something like "Ah" – you know – "in order to fix your electric socket, what you do is you open this" – you know – maybe people have their own names, but I'm going to open a random one, a blade on it. Yeah, so you open your blade of a particular kind,

and they've probably got names for these blades, and then you read your instructions, and then you put it into the socket. And as I did this, I acted it out – I didn't actually put it in the socket; otherwise, I would have electrocuted myself, but I was acting it out. And as I went to move the knife to where I would perhaps undo the screw or something like that, I suddenly realized my thumb was over the virtual screen, the little – where we imagined the screen would be.

So, I was imagining this screen and when we talked abstractly, didn't notice. But as soon as acted out, it became absolutely obvious that your thumb blocked it. We could then think of alternatives; perhaps an audio interface with perhaps little Bluetooth earphones would probably make a lot more sense that talked you through it, rather than the little screen on it. But actually physically acting  it out was what made the difference. Let's just summarize – being concrete, it has lots of things it does for you.

First of all, it *recruits your physical intelligence*, and in two senses. There's both your – where we think about physical things, we use a lot of knowledge and a lot of background knowledge we've been building up since we were, well, basically about that big. You know – so, even as a tiny baby you're reaching out to stuff, and we've built this huge physical understanding of the world, and when we make things concrete we use that. Now, even if it's not physical, even it's like a screen design that's very fixed, you've got a lot more ability

to look at something and think, 'Ah, that doesn't look like it works.' in a way that sometimes it can be hard to with something abstract. It *exposes details*; it pushes you to detail.  Sometimes having too much detail gets in the way. But also that for other purposes, seeing those details actually kicks you to realize that's just never going to work. Now, then you can back off and go back into a more abstract discussion, so you move back and forth between the sort of very detailed and concrete and perhaps something that's more abstract;

that might be more abstract in a more discursive sense; it might be more abstract in a more sketch-like sense. I also find that *being concrete helps cut out waffle*. It's very easy to say something like, 'And we'll have a mobile version.' But then if you think, not 'What would it actually have in it?' but 'What might a mobile version look like?' So, this is not about saying 'let's design the mobile version' but to say,

'Can you at least have one example of how this kind of application would work?' And then you might discover very rapidly problems that arise, that if you just say, 'And we'll have the mobile version,' you just never notice. And the other thing is it's just *fun* – being more concrete, whether, again, it's really physically concrete, which is always a lot  of fun, but actually this is true about things which look more real in general. I often find it's just fun!