More than the issue of "how many ideas", I always end up without
adequate
prioritization mechanisms/tools by which to decide alternatives to
choose
for inclusion in the iteration process.
This is exactly what is hard about design.
Ideation can be learnt and performed somewhat mechanically (as many
d.i.y. creativity guides and methods illustrate). It is generally not
hard to teach people to create hundreds of idea seeds quickly for any
given brief.
But it is obviously impossible to prototype and user-test all of the
seeds to decide which one is the "best." Judgment is needed to decide
which ones to pursue and elaborate further.
Experienced designers perform such judgment tasks better than
novices. Part of that experience is familiarity with the design genre
and the intended use situation -- the judgment entails envisioning
the qualities of using the product that could grow from the seed.
And as Dave points out, generative and evaluative processes are not
mutually exclusive. Judging idea seeds involves adding, taking away,
modifying and combining to arrive at more articulated ideas.
The conventional route to building the experience needed for early-
phase judgment is, of course, to participate in design processes with
more experienced peers (in professional settings) or tutors (in
design school settings) -- to learn criteria and values, and to study
how ideas transition into actual use in the course of a design process.
Studying and practicing criticism is one additional way of
strengthening judgment skills; another is to study, think about and
speak systematically about the use of products/services in different
genres and specifically what the qualities are that distnguish good
use in those genres.
--------
Then there is the whole issue of how the use-oriented judgments
peculiar to interaction design tradeoff against other judgment
criteria, such as marketability and technical feasibility, but that
would take the discussion into the even fuzzier area of the
organizational politics of interaction design...
--------
Jonas Löwgren
________________________________________________________________
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list ....... [email protected]
Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe
List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines
List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
