Worst Possible Idea

What I want to do is talk through three  different reasons why I get you to do bad ideas. So, you've had a go at bad ideas yourself as an  exercise, and I've talked you through some of these. Now, you're probably already getting  an idea as to why I pose this as an exercise. So, the first reason is *training*. So, the examples  that I gave were all silly examples.

Well, they're all supposed to be silly, but they weren't directed towards a brief. So, in other settings I might say I want a bad idea – well, we talked about one before, about notifications in an e-learning system. You know – how do we do notifications well? We might want to have bad ideas for a website, for a car designer or something like that.

So, you might have direct bad ideas. The ones I gave you were not; they were just random ones. And I did this more as a random exercise. Now, the reason for doing that is about *mind training*. It's about learning to think differently  about stuff. Now, you notice – you've probably been in brainstorming sessions, and everybody says, 'There's going to be no judgement here. You know – just say your idea and we'll just...' Ugh... yeah – do you really believe that? Actually, you sort of know – you know – okay, they're supposed to be anything you think of... *so long as they're not too bad*.

So, *it's very difficult to actually have good ideas without feeling judged* if the other people don't feel they're good enough, if they don't spark enough interest from other people. Also, when you've had a good idea,  it's really *hard to critique it yourself* or even to *hear somebody else critique it*.  So, you've been in brainstorming sessions, you've thrown out your idea, and people tear to pieces.

And it's *your* good idea!!! Yeah, it's not (inaudible) good – but very hard yourself, when you've got something you know is a good idea. Now, you know most of your ideas will have problems with them. You want to be able to take your wonderful design for something and to be able to tear it apart, to be able to see where its weaknesses are. That's very hard when it's your baby. So, training – learning how to do that is a good thing.

The thing with bad ideas is it's much easier to do these. First of all, you don't have this issue of judgment, particularly in a group situation. If you're going to have bad ideas, you know they're bad ideas. How can anybody say your bad idea is a bad bad idea? They're *all* bad ideas. They're silly; that's good – the more bad they are. I mean the worst they can say is, 'That's a good idea.' And are you really going to be so upset if  they say it's a good idea? No. All right. So, judgment almost disappears. It doesn't entirely; we're human.

But it really makes it a lot easier, especially in a group session, to throw out things if you say, 'We are going to deliberately throw out some really silly ideas.' Crucially, also, when it's a bad idea, you have a *low personal commitment* to it. You're expecting it to be bad – that's *why* you've put it out there, so you can critique it in a way that is really  hard to do when it's your good idea. So, you can learn how to critique things, how to do; those prompts are about trying to tear them apart.

And I said remembering the good as well as the bad, but taking things apart. So, if it's your good idea, you can't do it. Interestingly enough, when it's something you know isn't working well – say it's that bit of software you really hate using; it's quite difficult to say, 'Ah, and there's this good thing about it.' Right? Now, you want to be able to do that, because if you want to design a better one of them, it's a good idea to know what's working in the old one in order to make sure you don't lose it in a new one.

You know – a classic way in which we make mistakes in design is *we fix one problem and in doing it create half a dozen new ones*. So, you want to be able to do that but it's quite hard to. Again, with bad ideas, you can easily critique them because you knew they were bad to start with. And it's quite fun when you find the good things about them as well. So, that's about mind training; it's about giving yourself those tools because those prompts – that's what's good, what's bad – I mean, they're very simple, but that's what you want to be doing to  everything, whether it's the thing you want to fix

because you know it's bad and not working, or whether it's the new thing you want to create; you want to be able to do that critique,  and it's a way of helping train yourself to do it. So, another thing we can do with bad ideas is actually *use them as a design tool*. So, when you want a good idea, it tends to  encourage a level of conservatism, which we talked about in the brainstorm; you tend to – you know – so if you want a

good idea for a new kind of car, it'll probably have four wheels on, it'll probably have doors, it'll probably have a roof or maybe not if you're used to sports cars without. But it's going to have most things. The engine mostly is in the front, unless you've done a VW and you're used to one in the back. It's quite hard to not do just that ant-type creativity. Sometimes it's a good thing to do, but it's hard to actually make the larger leaps.

So, in fact, if you imagine – and I'm a mathematician originally, so I'm afraid the world lives as Venn diagrams as a mathematician. So, the blue area here – the little blue area is the set of all  possible ideas, design ideas. And the green blobs are design ideas that are good ones. So, say you've got – it's transport options – there are some things that – so, they're a bit like islands here; that's why they're green, sort of islands in this ocean of ideas.

And a lot of ideas – the blue ones there – are not good. But there are good ideas, and related to one good idea there are usually others. So, if you look at your cars, most of them look vaguely the same, but there's also motorbikes, and motorbikes are quite different to cars. And there's very few half-in-between things between them. So, there are often gulfs between one set of good ideas which work and another set of good ideas. And it's very hard to bridge. So, if you are used to one way  of thinking about stuff, it's very hard to jump

to a completely different part of the design space. So, you end up stuck, and actually often you have to end up in a bad space before you can find the next good space. So, good ideas, what happens is you wiggle around but you basically get stuck within one island of good ideas and never visit the rest. I mean, that can be sufficient. Sometimes that's all you need. But that doesn't help you make those radical jumps.

With bad ideas, it helps you to do  the jumps because when you think of a bad idea you don't just do a little thing – actually because it'd be good if you did that – so, you think of something really silly. So, like, I'm going to have a car that's got two wheels, but they're both at the front, not two wheels one behind the other like a motorbike, but two and they're just at the front. You know that's a bad idea. So, you've allowed yourself to say, 'Or I'll have a car with no wheels at all.' – you know –

'I'll have a car with no... doors.' Yeah, I'm still being a bit incremental in terms of my small changes, you know. But – you know – a car that's like a donut you run; (inaud.) but they're – it's easier to jump way out of your comfort zone of good ideas when you've got a bad idea, when  you know you've got to go into a bad idea. So, we're leaping into the ocean of ideas in idea space

off our little island which we felt comfortable in. What you notice with it analytically – by sort of questioning this, we were able to then pull ourselves back down. So, at the end part of that where we said, 'Can we turn it into a good idea?' – now for the training bit, I mean, it's fun  to do but it's not necessary to do – but if you actually want to use this to generate ideas, so you can use in two ways – for training, but to actually generate ideas – then you want to  pull it back and make it into a good idea again.

But as we do that because we're trying to  retain the good things that were there because it was bad, often those are good things. So, like the melt with the chocolate teapot – you know – ordinary teapots do not taste good. So, if you want to retain  the tasting goodness of the chocolate teapot, then we can't just fall back into our familiar teapot world. We end up somewhere different. So, as you pull it back and make it good, the likelihood is we're more likely to end up in a radically new island of good ideas

amongst the sea of bad ideas. Once we're there, we can then start to incrementally modify it and do things. So, but we've *allowed ourselves to make that big jump* and then we could do a bit of ant creativity over there to perhaps tidy up some of the gaps at the end – you know. Ways we can sort of fix problems  and do that sort of incremental 'ant' fixing. But what we've done is we've explored  *a whole new part of the design space*. The third thing – and possibly the most important – is about *understanding*.

As you critique the bad ideas, you start to understand the nature of the design space you're working in. So, as you try to say, 'Well, why is this bad?', you start to dig yourself into talking about the critical dimensions and criteria that describe your problem space. There are various things when we talk about design; there are *dimensions*, so you might talk about

– you know – well, we're talking about the meltiness, the amount of meltiness; you know – how melty is something? So, we've got a dimension there. *Criteria* – spilling the teapot; if it melts, it spills; so, a criteria is whether it spills or  not and whether that's bad or not, which might vary on the context. *Properties of things* – you know – it's like whether, the breakiness of a hammer, and by understanding the properties of the glass, we might think of times either when it's good to have glass or a different (inaud.) or – that might actually just make us think about

materials and hammers *in general*. So, as we analyze these  things, we *start to build a vocabulary* to talk about the space of designs we're working in. So, it forces us into this meta-level discussion. And one thing I've found is it's often hard to articulate some of these abstract qualities, but by analyzing something – now, it doesn't have to be a bad idea; it could be a good idea,

but if it is a good idea, you have some of these barriers – but by articulating those, you suddenly end up with an understanding of the design space. Now, from that understanding, you might then throw away all of the work you've done so far, but now you have a way – you're thinking about your design in a *radically different way*. But it's more like – if you've done this analysis, it's not like that unguided jump; it's more like you're doing a *guided move* and you've got a map of the terrain. And then, if you've got a map of the terrain, you don't have to just jump into the sea and then try

and find a piece of land, which is what the  making-the-bad-idea-good bit was; you actually start to understand where all those pockets of land are, and you can move into them in a way which is intelligent, which is reasoned, but also radical and often very creative.

In this video, I'm going to give you an exercise to do. It's going to be an exercise in *bad ideas*. This is where I tip your brain towards madness. But, hopefully – the boundary between creativity and genius and total madness  is often said to be a thin one; so, by pushing you a little towards madness, I hope to also push you a little towards creativity.

And hopefully, you can control the madness that comes there. But we'll see as it goes along. So, what I want you to do is – you know  how hard it is to think of good ideas; everybody says, "Ah! Let's have a brainstorming session and have lots of ideas!" and (sound effect), right? So, if it's so hard to think of good ideas, why not think of a *bad idea*? So, what I'd like you to do as an exercise is just to think of a bad idea or a silly idea, a completely crazy idea.

Now, it might be about something that you're doing at the moment. Or it might be a particular problem you've got. And so, what would be a really bad idea... for sending notifications to people about something you want to get them engaged in? Perhaps you could send them an email every three seconds or something like that! So, it could be that kind of bad idea, or  it could be just an idea from the world.

And it could be a Heath Robinson sort of bad idea – something that's complex and arcane and that. Or perhaps – and this is probably a good one to start with – just an *oxymoron*. So, something like a chocolate teapot, so something that appears to be really crazy, really silly; a car without an engine – I remember once in a session we had this – that doesn't seem like a good idea. So, you've got your bad idea – it may be a chocolate teapot

or it may be the car with no engine or something like that. What I want you to do now is – I'm going to take you through some prompt questions. First of all, this was a bad idea – the reason you chose it was because it was a bad idea. So, what I want you to do is say to yourself, "What is bad about this idea?" So, think of the car without an engine. What's bad about a car without an engine? Well, it doesn't have an engine; it's obvious, right?

So, you start off with that. Now, you might think a bit more. But then I want you to dig and say, "Well, *why* is that a bad idea?" Well, it's not got an engine – it can't go anywhere. Then dig a bit back further; so, are there things that you can think of that are like that, that have that property? So, for instance, a car without an engine can't go anywhere. Are there things that can't go anywhere that's actually a good idea? Well...

a garden shed: a garden shed doesn't go anywhere, but that's not a bad idea. And, in fact... you might want to have something that can't be stolen; you don't want that to go anywhere. So, that's not a bad idea. So, if you can think of things that appear to share the bad thing but actually aren't bad, what's the difference? Why is not having an engine, why is not being able to go anywhere bad for the car but not bad for the garden shed?

And as you dig into this, hopefully  you start to understand better these things. You can also go the other way around. So, you *know* this is a bad idea, but maybe there's something good about it. It hasn't got an engine; it's not polluting. Wow, we've got a green car! It will be green because all the moss will grow on it because it doesn't drive anywhere, but – you know – "This is good, surely?!"

So, then you can think, "Well, okay, if this is a good thing" – you can do the same sort of thing: "Why is that a good thing?" Well, it doesn't choke you with its pollution. If you're finding this difficult – and  particularly this is true about the bad idea bit – you want to say... with the bad idea, you want to change that bad thing into a good thing; so, this is whether you want to find a good thing in the bad idea or you want to find a good use for the thing you've identified that's bad – you might try a *different context*; so...

if you take the car off the road and put it  perhaps into something where it's moved along by something else – perhaps sitting on the back of a lorry... why, you might want that – well, you might want it so you can easily move your car. You might put it onto something that's dragged along. So, you sometimes change the context and suddenly something that seemed bad suddenly is not so bad. So, the final thing you can do with  your bad idea is *turn it into a good idea*.

Now, you might have  already done this as part of that process. So, what's *good*? When you've identified something that's good about it, like the car, that it wasn't polluting, try to hold on to that – try to keep that and retain that good feature. But where you found the things and you really dug down to *why something's bad*, not just the superficial – you know – it doesn't have an engine; well, that's not bad in itself,

but the fact that means you can't drive anywhere in it; okay, that's bad. So, can you change that badness but still retain the non-pollutingness? So, perhaps we're going to have a truly green car. Perhaps we're going to have roads with sort of little wires you connect into and – you know – a bit like Scalextric cars, so you can drag the cars along so they don't have  an engine and they're being powered elsewhere. You may, I said, *change the context entirely* – so, instead of it being a car for driving around in

– well, I've already mentioned this one – stick your chickens in it and it suddenly becomes a hen coop. And I think if you go around the  the world, you'll find a lot of old cars usually actually with their engines still  sitting in them that are being used as hen coops. If you had a *complex idea* – and this is true, it could be for a simple idea, but in doing your thinking, there might be just something about it, something small;

it wasn't necessarily the whole thing. So, actually – you know – the idea of the gap in the engine; perhaps you decided that would be really good actually having the engine not there because you could put things in the front, and for whatever reason, you think it's easier to put things in the front than the back. So, perhaps that becomes your idea – that  actually, you'd quite like to be able to put your luggage in the front of the car;  you'd like more room in the car for luggage. And then perhaps you'll put an engine back in the car, but thinking about

how you actually improve access for luggage. If you've had one of those Heath Robinson complex ideas, Wallace and Gromit-like ideas, then actually you may not be trying to make the whole thing into a good idea; but within it, some little bit of that complex mechanism might be something that you've thought about; you've realized and suddenly think, "Ahh!" and do something just with that. And I'll leave you with a glass hammer!

In this video, I'm going to give you an exercise to do. It's going to be an exercise in *bad ideas*. This is where I tip your brain towards madness. But, hopefully – the boundary between creativity and genius and total madness  is often said to be a thin one; so, by pushing you a little towards madness, I hope to also push you a little towards creativity.

And hopefully, you can control the madness that comes there. But we'll see as it goes along. So, what I want you to do is – you know  how hard it is to think of good ideas; everybody says, "Ah! Let's have a brainstorming session and have lots of ideas!" and (sound effect), right? So, if it's so hard to think of good ideas, why not think of a *bad idea*? So, what I'd like you to do as an exercise is just to think of a bad idea or a silly idea, a completely crazy idea.

Now, it might be about something that you're doing at the moment. Or it might be a particular problem you've got. And so, what would be a really bad idea... for sending notifications to people about something you want to get them engaged in? Perhaps you could send them an email every three seconds or something like that! So, it could be that kind of bad idea, or  it could be just an idea from the world.

And it could be a Heath Robinson sort of bad idea – something that's complex and arcane and that. Or perhaps – and this is probably a good one to start with – just an *oxymoron*. So, something like a chocolate teapot, so something that appears to be really crazy, really silly; a car without an engine – I remember once in a session we had this – that doesn't seem like a good idea. So, you've got your bad idea – it may be a chocolate teapot

or it may be the car with no engine or something like that. What I want you to do now is – I'm going to take you through some prompt questions. First of all, this was a bad idea – the reason you chose it was because it was a bad idea. So, what I want you to do is say to yourself, "What is bad about this idea?" So, think of the car without an engine. What's bad about a car without an engine? Well, it doesn't have an engine; it's obvious, right?

So, you start off with that. Now, you might think a bit more. But then I want you to dig and say, "Well, *why* is that a bad idea?" Well, it's not got an engine – it can't go anywhere. Then dig a bit back further; so, are there things that you can think of that are like that, that have that property? So, for instance, a car without an engine can't go anywhere. Are there things that can't go anywhere that's actually a good idea? Well...

a garden shed: a garden shed doesn't go anywhere, but that's not a bad idea. And, in fact... you might want to have something that can't be stolen; you don't want that to go anywhere. So, that's not a bad idea. So, if you can think of things that appear to share the bad thing but actually aren't bad, what's the difference? Why is not having an engine, why is not being able to go anywhere bad for the car but not bad for the garden shed?

And as you dig into this, hopefully  you start to understand better these things. You can also go the other way around. So, you *know* this is a bad idea, but maybe there's something good about it. It hasn't got an engine; it's not polluting. Wow, we've got a green car! It will be green because all the moss will grow on it because it doesn't drive anywhere, but – you know – "This is good, surely?!"

So, then you can think, "Well, okay, if this is a good thing" – you can do the same sort of thing: "Why is that a good thing?" Well, it doesn't choke you with its pollution. If you're finding this difficult – and  particularly this is true about the bad idea bit – you want to say... with the bad idea, you want to change that bad thing into a good thing; so, this is whether you want to find a good thing in the bad idea or you want to find a good use for the thing you've identified that's bad – you might try a *different context*; so...

if you take the car off the road and put it  perhaps into something where it's moved along by something else – perhaps sitting on the back of a lorry... why, you might want that – well, you might want it so you can easily move your car. You might put it onto something that's dragged along. So, you sometimes change the context and suddenly something that seemed bad suddenly is not so bad. So, the final thing you can do with  your bad idea is *turn it into a good idea*.

Now, you might have  already done this as part of that process. So, what's *good*? When you've identified something that's good about it, like the car, that it wasn't polluting, try to hold on to that – try to keep that and retain that good feature. But where you found the things and you really dug down to *why something's bad*, not just the superficial – you know – it doesn't have an engine; well, that's not bad in itself,

but the fact that means you can't drive anywhere in it; okay, that's bad. So, can you change that badness but still retain the non-pollutingness? So, perhaps we're going to have a truly green car. Perhaps we're going to have roads with sort of little wires you connect into and – you know – a bit like Scalextric cars, so you can drag the cars along so they don't have  an engine and they're being powered elsewhere. You may, I said, *change the context entirely* – so, instead of it being a car for driving around in

– well, I've already mentioned this one – stick your chickens in it and it suddenly becomes a hen coop. And I think if you go around the  the world, you'll find a lot of old cars usually actually with their engines still  sitting in them that are being used as hen coops. If you had a *complex idea* – and this is true, it could be for a simple idea, but in doing your thinking, there might be just something about it, something small;

it wasn't necessarily the whole thing. So, actually – you know – the idea of the gap in the engine; perhaps you decided that would be really good actually having the engine not there because you could put things in the front, and for whatever reason, you think it's easier to put things in the front than the back. So, perhaps that becomes your idea – that  actually, you'd quite like to be able to put your luggage in the front of the car;  you'd like more room in the car for luggage. And then perhaps you'll put an engine back in the car, but thinking about

how you actually improve access for luggage. If you've had one of those Heath Robinson complex ideas, Wallace and Gromit-like ideas, then actually you may not be trying to make the whole thing into a good idea; but within it, some little bit of that complex mechanism might be something that you've thought about; you've realized and suddenly think, "Ahh!" and do something just with that. And I'll leave you with a glass hammer!

What I want to do is talk through three  different reasons why I get you to do bad ideas. So, you've had a go at bad ideas yourself as an  exercise, and I've talked you through some of these. Now, you're probably already getting  an idea as to why I pose this as an exercise. So, the first reason is *training*. So, the examples  that I gave were all silly examples.

Well, they're all supposed to be silly, but they weren't directed towards a brief. So, in other settings I might say I want a bad idea – well, we talked about one before, about notifications in an e-learning system. You know – how do we do notifications well? We might want to have bad ideas for a website, for a car designer or something like that.

So, you might have direct bad ideas. The ones I gave you were not; they were just random ones. And I did this more as a random exercise. Now, the reason for doing that is about *mind training*. It's about learning to think differently  about stuff. Now, you notice – you've probably been in brainstorming sessions, and everybody says, 'There's going to be no judgement here. You know – just say your idea and we'll just...' Ugh... yeah – do you really believe that? Actually, you sort of know – you know – okay, they're supposed to be anything you think of... *so long as they're not too bad*.

So, *it's very difficult to actually have good ideas without feeling judged* if the other people don't feel they're good enough, if they don't spark enough interest from other people. Also, when you've had a good idea,  it's really *hard to critique it yourself* or even to *hear somebody else critique it*.  So, you've been in brainstorming sessions, you've thrown out your idea, and people tear to pieces.

And it's *your* good idea!!! Yeah, it's not (inaudible) good – but very hard yourself, when you've got something you know is a good idea. Now, you know most of your ideas will have problems with them. You want to be able to take your wonderful design for something and to be able to tear it apart, to be able to see where its weaknesses are. That's very hard when it's your baby. So, training – learning how to do that is a good thing.

The thing with bad ideas is it's much easier to do these. First of all, you don't have this issue of judgment, particularly in a group situation. If you're going to have bad ideas, you know they're bad ideas. How can anybody say your bad idea is a bad bad idea? They're *all* bad ideas. They're silly; that's good – the more bad they are. I mean the worst they can say is, 'That's a good idea.' And are you really going to be so upset if  they say it's a good idea? No. All right. So, judgment almost disappears. It doesn't entirely; we're human.

But it really makes it a lot easier, especially in a group session, to throw out things if you say, 'We are going to deliberately throw out some really silly ideas.' Crucially, also, when it's a bad idea, you have a *low personal commitment* to it. You're expecting it to be bad – that's *why* you've put it out there, so you can critique it in a way that is really  hard to do when it's your good idea. So, you can learn how to critique things, how to do; those prompts are about trying to tear them apart.

And I said remembering the good as well as the bad, but taking things apart. So, if it's your good idea, you can't do it. Interestingly enough, when it's something you know isn't working well – say it's that bit of software you really hate using; it's quite difficult to say, 'Ah, and there's this good thing about it.' Right? Now, you want to be able to do that, because if you want to design a better one of them, it's a good idea to know what's working in the old one in order to make sure you don't lose it in a new one.

You know – a classic way in which we make mistakes in design is *we fix one problem and in doing it create half a dozen new ones*. So, you want to be able to do that but it's quite hard to. Again, with bad ideas, you can easily critique them because you knew they were bad to start with. And it's quite fun when you find the good things about them as well. So, that's about mind training; it's about giving yourself those tools because those prompts – that's what's good, what's bad – I mean, they're very simple, but that's what you want to be doing to  everything, whether it's the thing you want to fix

because you know it's bad and not working, or whether it's the new thing you want to create; you want to be able to do that critique,  and it's a way of helping train yourself to do it. So, another thing we can do with bad ideas is actually *use them as a design tool*. So, when you want a good idea, it tends to  encourage a level of conservatism, which we talked about in the brainstorm; you tend to – you know – so if you want a

good idea for a new kind of car, it'll probably have four wheels on, it'll probably have doors, it'll probably have a roof or maybe not if you're used to sports cars without. But it's going to have most things. The engine mostly is in the front, unless you've done a VW and you're used to one in the back. It's quite hard to not do just that ant-type creativity. Sometimes it's a good thing to do, but it's hard to actually make the larger leaps.

So, in fact, if you imagine – and I'm a mathematician originally, so I'm afraid the world lives as Venn diagrams as a mathematician. So, the blue area here – the little blue area is the set of all  possible ideas, design ideas. And the green blobs are design ideas that are good ones. So, say you've got – it's transport options – there are some things that – so, they're a bit like islands here; that's why they're green, sort of islands in this ocean of ideas.

And a lot of ideas – the blue ones there – are not good. But there are good ideas, and related to one good idea there are usually others. So, if you look at your cars, most of them look vaguely the same, but there's also motorbikes, and motorbikes are quite different to cars. And there's very few half-in-between things between them. So, there are often gulfs between one set of good ideas which work and another set of good ideas. And it's very hard to bridge. So, if you are used to one way  of thinking about stuff, it's very hard to jump

to a completely different part of the design space. So, you end up stuck, and actually often you have to end up in a bad space before you can find the next good space. So, good ideas, what happens is you wiggle around but you basically get stuck within one island of good ideas and never visit the rest. I mean, that can be sufficient. Sometimes that's all you need. But that doesn't help you make those radical jumps.

With bad ideas, it helps you to do  the jumps because when you think of a bad idea you don't just do a little thing – actually because it'd be good if you did that – so, you think of something really silly. So, like, I'm going to have a car that's got two wheels, but they're both at the front, not two wheels one behind the other like a motorbike, but two and they're just at the front. You know that's a bad idea. So, you've allowed yourself to say, 'Or I'll have a car with no wheels at all.' – you know –

'I'll have a car with no... doors.' Yeah, I'm still being a bit incremental in terms of my small changes, you know. But – you know – a car that's like a donut you run; (inaud.) but they're – it's easier to jump way out of your comfort zone of good ideas when you've got a bad idea, when  you know you've got to go into a bad idea. So, we're leaping into the ocean of ideas in idea space

off our little island which we felt comfortable in. What you notice with it analytically – by sort of questioning this, we were able to then pull ourselves back down. So, at the end part of that where we said, 'Can we turn it into a good idea?' – now for the training bit, I mean, it's fun  to do but it's not necessary to do – but if you actually want to use this to generate ideas, so you can use in two ways – for training, but to actually generate ideas – then you want to  pull it back and make it into a good idea again.

But as we do that because we're trying to  retain the good things that were there because it was bad, often those are good things. So, like the melt with the chocolate teapot – you know – ordinary teapots do not taste good. So, if you want to retain  the tasting goodness of the chocolate teapot, then we can't just fall back into our familiar teapot world. We end up somewhere different. So, as you pull it back and make it good, the likelihood is we're more likely to end up in a radically new island of good ideas

amongst the sea of bad ideas. Once we're there, we can then start to incrementally modify it and do things. So, but we've *allowed ourselves to make that big jump* and then we could do a bit of ant creativity over there to perhaps tidy up some of the gaps at the end – you know. Ways we can sort of fix problems  and do that sort of incremental 'ant' fixing. But what we've done is we've explored  *a whole new part of the design space*. The third thing – and possibly the most important – is about *understanding*.

As you critique the bad ideas, you start to understand the nature of the design space you're working in. So, as you try to say, 'Well, why is this bad?', you start to dig yourself into talking about the critical dimensions and criteria that describe your problem space. There are various things when we talk about design; there are *dimensions*, so you might talk about

– you know – well, we're talking about the meltiness, the amount of meltiness; you know – how melty is something? So, we've got a dimension there. *Criteria* – spilling the teapot; if it melts, it spills; so, a criteria is whether it spills or  not and whether that's bad or not, which might vary on the context. *Properties of things* – you know – it's like whether, the breakiness of a hammer, and by understanding the properties of the glass, we might think of times either when it's good to have glass or a different (inaud.) or – that might actually just make us think about

materials and hammers *in general*. So, as we analyze these  things, we *start to build a vocabulary* to talk about the space of designs we're working in. So, it forces us into this meta-level discussion. And one thing I've found is it's often hard to articulate some of these abstract qualities, but by analyzing something – now, it doesn't have to be a bad idea; it could be a good idea,

but if it is a good idea, you have some of these barriers – but by articulating those, you suddenly end up with an understanding of the design space. Now, from that understanding, you might then throw away all of the work you've done so far, but now you have a way – you're thinking about your design in a *radically different way*. But it's more like – if you've done this analysis, it's not like that unguided jump; it's more like you're doing a *guided move* and you've got a map of the terrain. And then, if you've got a map of the terrain, you don't have to just jump into the sea and then try

and find a piece of land, which is what the  making-the-bad-idea-good bit was; you actually start to understand where all those pockets of land are, and you can move into them in a way which is intelligent, which is reasoned, but also radical and often very creative.

In this video, I'm going to give you an exercise to do. It's going to be an exercise in *bad ideas*. This is where I tip your brain towards madness. But, hopefully – the boundary between creativity and genius and total madness  is often said to be a thin one; so, by pushing you a little towards madness, I hope to also push you a little towards creativity.

And hopefully, you can control the madness that comes there. But we'll see as it goes along. So, what I want you to do is – you know  how hard it is to think of good ideas; everybody says, "Ah! Let's have a brainstorming session and have lots of ideas!" and (sound effect), right? So, if it's so hard to think of good ideas, why not think of a *bad idea*? So, what I'd like you to do as an exercise is just to think of a bad idea or a silly idea, a completely crazy idea.

Now, it might be about something that you're doing at the moment. Or it might be a particular problem you've got. And so, what would be a really bad idea... for sending notifications to people about something you want to get them engaged in? Perhaps you could send them an email every three seconds or something like that! So, it could be that kind of bad idea, or  it could be just an idea from the world.

And it could be a Heath Robinson sort of bad idea – something that's complex and arcane and that. Or perhaps – and this is probably a good one to start with – just an *oxymoron*. So, something like a chocolate teapot, so something that appears to be really crazy, really silly; a car without an engine – I remember once in a session we had this – that doesn't seem like a good idea. So, you've got your bad idea – it may be a chocolate teapot

or it may be the car with no engine or something like that. What I want you to do now is – I'm going to take you through some prompt questions. First of all, this was a bad idea – the reason you chose it was because it was a bad idea. So, what I want you to do is say to yourself, "What is bad about this idea?" So, think of the car without an engine. What's bad about a car without an engine? Well, it doesn't have an engine; it's obvious, right?

So, you start off with that. Now, you might think a bit more. But then I want you to dig and say, "Well, *why* is that a bad idea?" Well, it's not got an engine – it can't go anywhere. Then dig a bit back further; so, are there things that you can think of that are like that, that have that property? So, for instance, a car without an engine can't go anywhere. Are there things that can't go anywhere that's actually a good idea? Well...

a garden shed: a garden shed doesn't go anywhere, but that's not a bad idea. And, in fact... you might want to have something that can't be stolen; you don't want that to go anywhere. So, that's not a bad idea. So, if you can think of things that appear to share the bad thing but actually aren't bad, what's the difference? Why is not having an engine, why is not being able to go anywhere bad for the car but not bad for the garden shed?

And as you dig into this, hopefully  you start to understand better these things. You can also go the other way around. So, you *know* this is a bad idea, but maybe there's something good about it. It hasn't got an engine; it's not polluting. Wow, we've got a green car! It will be green because all the moss will grow on it because it doesn't drive anywhere, but – you know – "This is good, surely?!"

So, then you can think, "Well, okay, if this is a good thing" – you can do the same sort of thing: "Why is that a good thing?" Well, it doesn't choke you with its pollution. If you're finding this difficult – and  particularly this is true about the bad idea bit – you want to say... with the bad idea, you want to change that bad thing into a good thing; so, this is whether you want to find a good thing in the bad idea or you want to find a good use for the thing you've identified that's bad – you might try a *different context*; so...

if you take the car off the road and put it  perhaps into something where it's moved along by something else – perhaps sitting on the back of a lorry... why, you might want that – well, you might want it so you can easily move your car. You might put it onto something that's dragged along. So, you sometimes change the context and suddenly something that seemed bad suddenly is not so bad. So, the final thing you can do with  your bad idea is *turn it into a good idea*.

Now, you might have  already done this as part of that process. So, what's *good*? When you've identified something that's good about it, like the car, that it wasn't polluting, try to hold on to that – try to keep that and retain that good feature. But where you found the things and you really dug down to *why something's bad*, not just the superficial – you know – it doesn't have an engine; well, that's not bad in itself,

but the fact that means you can't drive anywhere in it; okay, that's bad. So, can you change that badness but still retain the non-pollutingness? So, perhaps we're going to have a truly green car. Perhaps we're going to have roads with sort of little wires you connect into and – you know – a bit like Scalextric cars, so you can drag the cars along so they don't have  an engine and they're being powered elsewhere. You may, I said, *change the context entirely* – so, instead of it being a car for driving around in

– well, I've already mentioned this one – stick your chickens in it and it suddenly becomes a hen coop. And I think if you go around the  the world, you'll find a lot of old cars usually actually with their engines still  sitting in them that are being used as hen coops. If you had a *complex idea* – and this is true, it could be for a simple idea, but in doing your thinking, there might be just something about it, something small;

it wasn't necessarily the whole thing. So, actually – you know – the idea of the gap in the engine; perhaps you decided that would be really good actually having the engine not there because you could put things in the front, and for whatever reason, you think it's easier to put things in the front than the back. So, perhaps that becomes your idea – that  actually, you'd quite like to be able to put your luggage in the front of the car;  you'd like more room in the car for luggage. And then perhaps you'll put an engine back in the car, but thinking about

how you actually improve access for luggage. If you've had one of those Heath Robinson complex ideas, Wallace and Gromit-like ideas, then actually you may not be trying to make the whole thing into a good idea; but within it, some little bit of that complex mechanism might be something that you've thought about; you've realized and suddenly think, "Ahh!" and do something just with that. And I'll leave you with a glass hammer!

What I want to do is talk through three  different reasons why I get you to do bad ideas. So, you've had a go at bad ideas yourself as an  exercise, and I've talked you through some of these. Now, you're probably already getting  an idea as to why I pose this as an exercise. So, the first reason is *training*. So, the examples  that I gave were all silly examples.

Well, they're all supposed to be silly, but they weren't directed towards a brief. So, in other settings I might say I want a bad idea – well, we talked about one before, about notifications in an e-learning system. You know – how do we do notifications well? We might want to have bad ideas for a website, for a car designer or something like that.

So, you might have direct bad ideas. The ones I gave you were not; they were just random ones. And I did this more as a random exercise. Now, the reason for doing that is about *mind training*. It's about learning to think differently  about stuff. Now, you notice – you've probably been in brainstorming sessions, and everybody says, 'There's going to be no judgement here. You know – just say your idea and we'll just...' Ugh... yeah – do you really believe that? Actually, you sort of know – you know – okay, they're supposed to be anything you think of... *so long as they're not too bad*.

So, *it's very difficult to actually have good ideas without feeling judged* if the other people don't feel they're good enough, if they don't spark enough interest from other people. Also, when you've had a good idea,  it's really *hard to critique it yourself* or even to *hear somebody else critique it*.  So, you've been in brainstorming sessions, you've thrown out your idea, and people tear to pieces.

And it's *your* good idea!!! Yeah, it's not (inaudible) good – but very hard yourself, when you've got something you know is a good idea. Now, you know most of your ideas will have problems with them. You want to be able to take your wonderful design for something and to be able to tear it apart, to be able to see where its weaknesses are. That's very hard when it's your baby. So, training – learning how to do that is a good thing.

The thing with bad ideas is it's much easier to do these. First of all, you don't have this issue of judgment, particularly in a group situation. If you're going to have bad ideas, you know they're bad ideas. How can anybody say your bad idea is a bad bad idea? They're *all* bad ideas. They're silly; that's good – the more bad they are. I mean the worst they can say is, 'That's a good idea.' And are you really going to be so upset if  they say it's a good idea? No. All right. So, judgment almost disappears. It doesn't entirely; we're human.

But it really makes it a lot easier, especially in a group session, to throw out things if you say, 'We are going to deliberately throw out some really silly ideas.' Crucially, also, when it's a bad idea, you have a *low personal commitment* to it. You're expecting it to be bad – that's *why* you've put it out there, so you can critique it in a way that is really  hard to do when it's your good idea. So, you can learn how to critique things, how to do; those prompts are about trying to tear them apart.

And I said remembering the good as well as the bad, but taking things apart. So, if it's your good idea, you can't do it. Interestingly enough, when it's something you know isn't working well – say it's that bit of software you really hate using; it's quite difficult to say, 'Ah, and there's this good thing about it.' Right? Now, you want to be able to do that, because if you want to design a better one of them, it's a good idea to know what's working in the old one in order to make sure you don't lose it in a new one.

You know – a classic way in which we make mistakes in design is *we fix one problem and in doing it create half a dozen new ones*. So, you want to be able to do that but it's quite hard to. Again, with bad ideas, you can easily critique them because you knew they were bad to start with. And it's quite fun when you find the good things about them as well. So, that's about mind training; it's about giving yourself those tools because those prompts – that's what's good, what's bad – I mean, they're very simple, but that's what you want to be doing to  everything, whether it's the thing you want to fix

because you know it's bad and not working, or whether it's the new thing you want to create; you want to be able to do that critique,  and it's a way of helping train yourself to do it. So, another thing we can do with bad ideas is actually *use them as a design tool*. So, when you want a good idea, it tends to  encourage a level of conservatism, which we talked about in the brainstorm; you tend to – you know – so if you want a

good idea for a new kind of car, it'll probably have four wheels on, it'll probably have doors, it'll probably have a roof or maybe not if you're used to sports cars without. But it's going to have most things. The engine mostly is in the front, unless you've done a VW and you're used to one in the back. It's quite hard to not do just that ant-type creativity. Sometimes it's a good thing to do, but it's hard to actually make the larger leaps.

So, in fact, if you imagine – and I'm a mathematician originally, so I'm afraid the world lives as Venn diagrams as a mathematician. So, the blue area here – the little blue area is the set of all  possible ideas, design ideas. And the green blobs are design ideas that are good ones. So, say you've got – it's transport options – there are some things that – so, they're a bit like islands here; that's why they're green, sort of islands in this ocean of ideas.

And a lot of ideas – the blue ones there – are not good. But there are good ideas, and related to one good idea there are usually others. So, if you look at your cars, most of them look vaguely the same, but there's also motorbikes, and motorbikes are quite different to cars. And there's very few half-in-between things between them. So, there are often gulfs between one set of good ideas which work and another set of good ideas. And it's very hard to bridge. So, if you are used to one way  of thinking about stuff, it's very hard to jump

to a completely different part of the design space. So, you end up stuck, and actually often you have to end up in a bad space before you can find the next good space. So, good ideas, what happens is you wiggle around but you basically get stuck within one island of good ideas and never visit the rest. I mean, that can be sufficient. Sometimes that's all you need. But that doesn't help you make those radical jumps.

With bad ideas, it helps you to do  the jumps because when you think of a bad idea you don't just do a little thing – actually because it'd be good if you did that – so, you think of something really silly. So, like, I'm going to have a car that's got two wheels, but they're both at the front, not two wheels one behind the other like a motorbike, but two and they're just at the front. You know that's a bad idea. So, you've allowed yourself to say, 'Or I'll have a car with no wheels at all.' – you know –

'I'll have a car with no... doors.' Yeah, I'm still being a bit incremental in terms of my small changes, you know. But – you know – a car that's like a donut you run; (inaud.) but they're – it's easier to jump way out of your comfort zone of good ideas when you've got a bad idea, when  you know you've got to go into a bad idea. So, we're leaping into the ocean of ideas in idea space

off our little island which we felt comfortable in. What you notice with it analytically – by sort of questioning this, we were able to then pull ourselves back down. So, at the end part of that where we said, 'Can we turn it into a good idea?' – now for the training bit, I mean, it's fun  to do but it's not necessary to do – but if you actually want to use this to generate ideas, so you can use in two ways – for training, but to actually generate ideas – then you want to  pull it back and make it into a good idea again.

But as we do that because we're trying to  retain the good things that were there because it was bad, often those are good things. So, like the melt with the chocolate teapot – you know – ordinary teapots do not taste good. So, if you want to retain  the tasting goodness of the chocolate teapot, then we can't just fall back into our familiar teapot world. We end up somewhere different. So, as you pull it back and make it good, the likelihood is we're more likely to end up in a radically new island of good ideas

amongst the sea of bad ideas. Once we're there, we can then start to incrementally modify it and do things. So, but we've *allowed ourselves to make that big jump* and then we could do a bit of ant creativity over there to perhaps tidy up some of the gaps at the end – you know. Ways we can sort of fix problems  and do that sort of incremental 'ant' fixing. But what we've done is we've explored  *a whole new part of the design space*. The third thing – and possibly the most important – is about *understanding*.

As you critique the bad ideas, you start to understand the nature of the design space you're working in. So, as you try to say, 'Well, why is this bad?', you start to dig yourself into talking about the critical dimensions and criteria that describe your problem space. There are various things when we talk about design; there are *dimensions*, so you might talk about

– you know – well, we're talking about the meltiness, the amount of meltiness; you know – how melty is something? So, we've got a dimension there. *Criteria* – spilling the teapot; if it melts, it spills; so, a criteria is whether it spills or  not and whether that's bad or not, which might vary on the context. *Properties of things* – you know – it's like whether, the breakiness of a hammer, and by understanding the properties of the glass, we might think of times either when it's good to have glass or a different (inaud.) or – that might actually just make us think about

materials and hammers *in general*. So, as we analyze these  things, we *start to build a vocabulary* to talk about the space of designs we're working in. So, it forces us into this meta-level discussion. And one thing I've found is it's often hard to articulate some of these abstract qualities, but by analyzing something – now, it doesn't have to be a bad idea; it could be a good idea,

but if it is a good idea, you have some of these barriers – but by articulating those, you suddenly end up with an understanding of the design space. Now, from that understanding, you might then throw away all of the work you've done so far, but now you have a way – you're thinking about your design in a *radically different way*. But it's more like – if you've done this analysis, it's not like that unguided jump; it's more like you're doing a *guided move* and you've got a map of the terrain. And then, if you've got a map of the terrain, you don't have to just jump into the sea and then try

and find a piece of land, which is what the  making-the-bad-idea-good bit was; you actually start to understand where all those pockets of land are, and you can move into them in a way which is intelligent, which is reasoned, but also radical and often very creative.