Ideation and the Designer's Mindset – TEDTalks with Practitioner Insights
Read Time: 2 Minutes
Ideation and the Designer’s Mindset
People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, in the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity. – Robert Rauschenberg
Designers embrace curiosity, imagination, flexibility, and a user-centric perspective when designing products or services. In their quest for new concepts that embrace uniqueness, differentiation, and meaning, designers open mental spaces through thinking critically. The following TED talks challenge our views regarding mental and cultural diversity, self-awareness, and self-reflection as pillars of innovation and impact in the designer’s mind.
Design and the Elastic Mind by Paola Antonelli
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Practitioner insights:
- The design of products and services requires an elastic mind that creates common mental ground between scientists, technologists, and designers.
- The idea of collective design offers possibilities of mind-opening, mashing, and recreation in a metaphysical space much bigger than our physical space. Design collaboration creates expansion through various techniques.
- Design for Debate is a very interesting new endeavor that designers have really shaped for themselves. Some designers don't design objects, products, or things that we're going to use, but rather, they design object-based scenarios. They're still very useful. They help companies and other designers think better about the future.
Watch Time: 17 minutes
The Case for Curiosity–Driven Research by Suzie Sheehy
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Practitioner insights:
- Curiosity-driven research and experimentation are the source of novelty. But there is one condition: Do not envision an application in mind during the process, as this will unfold on its own.
- Organizations should be encouraged to invest time and energy in people that do curiosity-driven research. Modern technologies are tied to centuries-old, curiosity-driven experiments. Favoring elastic minds requires creative spaces that amplify curiosity and imagination.
- To foster curiosity in the innovation process, organizations must design safe and open spaces where assumptions are challenged, experimentation is allowed, and taking risks is part of the hypothesis testing option available.
Watch Time: 9 minutes
Your Elusive Creative Genius by Elizabeth Gilbert
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Practitioner insights:
- Are organizations afraid of not coming up with discoveries, products, or innovations? The design of products must consider their impact on the environment as materials degrade and generate linear waste.
- Design spaces must help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. Instead of the rare person “being” a genius, we all “have” a genius.
- Ideation processes do not always behave rationally. The natural anxiety around this process can be eliminated when the “genie, the genius, is released from the individual, the thinker, and the creative mind. This is known as scarcity mindset, which “is when you are so obsessed with a lack of something […] that you can’t seem to focus on anything else.”
Watch Time: 19 minutes
About the Author
Carlos M Rodriguez is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods and Director of the Center for the Study of Innovation Management, CSIM, in the College of Business, Delaware State University, USA. He is the KHUB’s Product Design and Development Tools section curator and a collaborator to the Product Development Management Association, PDMA. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, European Journal of Innovation Management, Journal of Brand Strategy, Journal of International Marketing, International Marketing Review, Management Decision, Journal of Business and Leadership, Journal of Higher Education Research & Development, Journal of Marketing and Consumer Research among others. Currently, he serves on the editorial board of several journals. His research interests are relationship marketing, branding and customer experiences, product design and innovation, and new product development teams. He recently published the book Product Design and Innovation: Analytics for Decision Making, which is centered on the design techniques and methodologies vital to the product design process. He is engaged in several international educational, research, and academic projects and international professional consulting activities.
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