An exposé
A zone
to ideate.
Before there is a product, a policy, a story or a cure, there is an idea. This is a place for the moment just before – and for the word that names it.
The word
- i·de·a·tion /ˌaɪdiˈeɪʃən/ noun
- 1 The capacity or process of forming ideas and concepts.
- 2 In design and innovation: the deliberate phase of generating many possible solutions before choosing one.
- 3 In clinical use: the presence and content of a person’s recurring thoughts.
Idea comes from the Greek ἰδέα – “form, look, appearance” – which in turn goes back to ἰδεῖν, “to see”. For Plato, the ideas were the true, unchanging forms behind the things we perceive. Through Latin and French the word reached English in the sixteenth century, and slowly moved from the realm of eternal forms into the human head: an idea became something a person has.
Ideation – idea plus the suffix -ation, “the process of” – appears in English in the early nineteenth century, in the philosophy and psychology of the mind. For a long time it stayed a technical term. In the second half of the twentieth century, as creativity became something organisations wanted to manage, the word found a second life: the psychologist J. P. Guilford described divergent and convergent thinking, and designers began to speak of ideation as a stage of their process, and of ideating as something a team does together.
Today the word lives in three worlds at once – in philosophy, in the clinic and in the studio. What they share is the original image: making something visible that was not visible before.
To ideate is, at root, to see.
- ἰδέαAncient Greek
- IdeeGerman
- idéeFrench
- ideaItalian · Spanish
- ideiaPortuguese
- идеяRussian
- アイデアJapanese
- 아이디어Korean
- 主意Chinese
- فكرةArabic
- विचारHindi
Across industries
The same word, different jobs. What “ideation” means depends on what happens after it.
01Design
The verb on the whiteboard
Design thinking, as taught at Stanford’s d.school, names five modes: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. That is where “to ideate” became an everyday verb. Ideation sits between understanding a problem and making something you can hold – sketches, paper models, many rough options before one good one.
Ideation here: Generating many possible solutions to a well-framed problem.
02Advertising
Where brainstorming was born
Alex F. Osborn, a partner at the agency BBDO, popularised “brainstorming” in the 1940s and set out its rules in Applied Imagination (1953): defer judgment, go for quantity, welcome wild ideas, combine and build. Agencies still pair copywriters and art directors to ideate campaigns in this spirit.
Ideation here: Producing concepts quickly, in a group, without early criticism.
03Software & startups
Ideas are cheap, tests are not
Hackathons, design sprints and “Crazy 8s” – eight sketches in eight minutes – compress ideation into hours. In software the idea is only a starting hypothesis: it is quickly turned into a prototype or a minimum viable product and measured against real use.
Ideation here: Short bursts of options, immediately turned into experiments.
04Engineering
Systematic invention
Engineers often distrust pure inspiration. TRIZ, developed by Genrich Altshuller in the Soviet Union from the 1940s onwards by studying thousands of patents, offers inventive principles for resolving technical contradictions. Morphological analysis, from the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, combines every parameter of a problem in a grid.
Ideation here: Structured search through a defined space of solutions.
05Science & pharma
Hypotheses upstream
In research, ideation means generating hypotheses and candidate targets. It is the cheapest step of a long, expensive funnel: in drug development most candidates fail in later stages, so the discipline lies in producing many ideas and letting evidence decide.
Ideation here: Formulating testable hypotheses, then filtering by evidence.
06Film, music & writing
The room and the pitch
Television writers’ rooms “break” stories together on index cards; bands jam until a riff sticks. Many creative teams borrow the improv-theatre principle of “yes, and” – accept what was offered and add to it – to keep ideas moving before anyone edits.
Ideation here: Building stories and material collaboratively, then cutting.
07Medicine & psychology
The clinical sense
In clinical language the word is older and more neutral: ideation describes the content of a person’s thoughts, as in “paranoid ideation” or “suicidal ideation”. It reminds us that, at root, ideation simply means thoughts taking shape – and that it deserves to be listened to with care.
Ideation here: The presence and content of recurring thoughts.
08Strategy & public sector
Imagining possible futures
Shell’s scenario planning in the 1970s made imagining several futures a strategic tool. Today policy labs and participatory budgeting – pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 – invite citizens themselves to propose how public money and spaces should be used.
Ideation here: Exploring alternatives before committing resources.
Across cultures
Every culture has ways of producing new ideas together – some loud, some silent, some built on hierarchy, some on the circle. A few of them:
01Japan
Affinity and small steps
The anthropologist Jiro Kawakita developed the KJ method in the 1960s: write each observation on a card, then group the cards until patterns emerge – the ancestor of every affinity wall. In factories, kaizen and suggestion systems collect small improvement ideas from everyone, continuously.
Ideation here: Patient ordering and many small improvements.
02German-speaking Europe
Silent, written, precise
Bernd Rohrbach’s Method 635 (1968) – six people, three ideas each, five minutes per round – is brainwriting: ideas are written down and passed on, not shouted out. Earlier, the Bauhaus workshops joined art, craft and industry and treated making as a way of thinking.
Ideation here: Structure and craft as the frame for creativity.
03Scandinavia
Design with, not for
Participatory design grew out of Scandinavian projects of the 1970s and 80s, such as the UTOPIA project with Nordic print workers’ unions. Its premise: the people who will live with a solution should take part in imagining it.
Ideation here: Ideating together with the people affected.
04United States
Loud, fast, plentiful
From Madison Avenue brainstorms to the Silicon Valley garage story, American ideation culture prizes volume, speed and optimism. The sticky note, launched by 3M as the Post-it in 1980, became its emblem: one idea per note, easy to move, easy to discard.
Ideation here: Quantity, speed and permission to fail.
05India
Jugaad
Jugaad is the Hindi word for an improvised, resourceful fix. In management writing it has come to stand for frugal innovation: ideation that starts from constraints – little money, scarce parts – and turns them into ingenious, affordable solutions.
Ideation here: Ingenuity born from constraint.
06China
A storm in the head
Mandarin translated brainstorming literally as 头脑风暴, tóunǎo fēngbào – “head-brain storm”, while a creative idea is 创意, chuàngyì. In manufacturing hubs such as Shenzhen, ideation often happens in the workshop itself, where a prototype can be built and changed within days.
Ideation here: Rapid iteration close to production.
07Brazil
Gambiarra
Gambiarra names the makeshift solution assembled from whatever is at hand. Long a word for a quick fix, it has also been taken up by Brazilian artists and designers as an aesthetic of inventive improvisation.
Ideation here: Improvisation as a creative stance.
08Southern Africa
Indaba
An indaba – a Zulu and Xhosa word – is a gathering to discuss matters of importance, where everyone can speak and the aim is shared understanding. The format has been adopted at international meetings, including the UN climate talks in Durban in 2011.
Ideation here: Collective deliberation towards consensus.
09Aboriginal Australia
Yarning circles
Yarning is a culturally grounded way of talking and listening in a circle, used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to share knowledge and solve problems together. Every voice is heard; stories carry the ideas.
Ideation here: Ideas carried by story and respectful listening.
The practice
Across all these traditions, one rhythm keeps returning: open up, then close down. Diverge to see what is possible, converge to decide what is worth doing.
- 1
See first
An idea starts with seeing – the problem, the people, the context. Look longer than feels necessary.
- 2
Defer judgment
Generating and evaluating are two different modes. Keep them apart.
- 3
Go for quantity
The good idea is usually not the first. Many options make the best one visible.
- 4
Build on others
“Yes, and” instead of “no, but”. Combine, borrow, recombine.
- 5
Make it tangible
Sketch it, write it, build it. A rough thing in the hand beats a perfect thought.
- 6
Then converge
Only now choose, with clear criteria – and keep the rest for another day.
Ideation & AI
Thirteen exposés on what research knows about thinking with machines – each with thesis, antithesis, synthesis and every source linked.
Tools & methods
Human in the loop
Intellectual property
Time & AI
Fifteen essays that start from Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration and ask what generative AI does to our time – at work, in society and in ideation.
Acceleration & time pressure
Desynchronisation
Availability & alienation
Organizations & AI
Fifteen essays that test classic organization theory – from Weber, Mintzberg and Luhmann to March and Weick – against current research on what generative AI does to organizations.
Structure & coordination
The three sides of organization
Control, domination, professions
Learning & reproduction
Read offline
All 13 exposés and 30 essays as an e-book
One EPUB file with all three series – Ideation & AI, Time & AI and Organizations & AI – figures and every source link – for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Tolino and most e-readers. Rebuilt with every update of the site.
ideation.zone
The zone is open.
Bring a question.