The Art of Ideation
When the eureka moment finally hit you, you can’t help but to understand the famous ancient Greek scholar Archimedes’ eagerness to share the discovery. This newly found intuitive knowledge formulated by the conscious and subconscious mind requires a journey that will take your idea to the next step. This process from birth of idea to moment of start is called ‘The Art of Ideation’; an effective approach that produces a formation of ideas or concepts.
Great example of ideation and also a tool that can help with ideation is Paper by FiftyThree. FiftyThree was founded by a group of intrepreneurs at Microsoft Research veterans that worked on the secretive Courier produced the hit app Paper to help anyone communicate their ideas effectively and beautifully. FiftyThree believes that blank canvases all too often freeze creativity rather than inspire it; so they aim to lower the barrier for entry to help with creative ideation and show that any idea can be worth expressing pictorially. Paper is there to help people create; the core value of FiftyThree’s Paper. George Petschnigg and Andrew Allen, FiftyThree’s co-founders, said:
Technology is there to help people create. That became a such a focusing point. Anything that doesn’t help you create, get rid of it. Clock? Battery meter indicator? You don’t need it. What do you need to get you going? You need a beautiful tool that just works. Beauty gives you meaning while you create. We think that beauty is important to ideas. You have to elevates your idea. If when you are trying to capture the idea but the tool looks bad, it just set off on the wrong turn and can kill this fragile idea. The art of ideation comes in the forms of five personas.
- Coordinator to help with a formation of ideations
- Agent to help gather up intelligent information
- Incubator to help to think outside the box
- Differentiator to reflect on existing ideas in the wild
- Mechanic to understand the co-related yet critical entities
This is how the ideation process works. Yon don’t know what elements will be required to take a simple eureka moment into a shape or to shift into a seed that will evolve into core principles for your product or service. You will need to hang on to it just a little more while you go through the ideation process to avoid drowning in the sea of mediocracy. Next, we’ll explore each personas in depth.