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Tag: designer's paradox

  • Changing the key system to generate new ideas

    Changing the key system is a technique I teach to help people develop new ideas when their thinking has become stuck. It’s one of my techniques for ‘turning the Kalideascope’. In other words, it’s a way to find new creative connections between all the inputs we have gathered.

    What is the key system?

    Design is creating something new. If it already exists, it isn’t design: it’s shopping (for more on this see my post on the Designer’s Paradox). I usually find that the overall shape of that new thing is defined by the answer to a few key questions.

    For example, the overall shape of a city master plan might be defined by the answer to the question: how do we manage surface water. In a tall building, the key question is how do we manage lateral loads. For a song, it might be the rhyming structure or the chord progression.

    In each of these situations, the key system, then, is the flood water system, the lateral stability system, the rhyming structure or the chord sequence.

    The answer to these big questions has such a dominant effect on the solution space that, once they are set, the rest of the ideas develop within these parameters.

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  • How do I know if my ideas are any good?

    How do I know if my ideas are any good?

    It’s a simple question. When I ask people what they want to get out of a training course with me on design or creativity, a common answer is ‘greater confidence that my ideas are good’. But how do I know if my ideas are any good? In this post I provide an answer that is simple, but that has deeper consequences.

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  • What is conceptual design?

    What is conceptual design?

    This post has moved and along with my other conceptual design teaching tools is now hosted on the Constructivist website here.

  • The Designer’s Paradox – the key to unlocking the brief

    The Designer’s Paradox – the key to unlocking the brief

    For me the Designer’s Paradox is a key concept in helping people understand what the process of design is. The term was coined by my colleague at Think Up Ed McCann.

    The Designer’s Paradox states that the client doesn’t know what they want until they know what they can have

    Ed McCann – see Think Up (2018). Conceptual Design for Structural Engineers (online) – notes and resources. Available here [Accessed: January 2021].

    In this post I’ll explain why I think this observation is so useful and how we can use it.

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  • How do you know if your idea is any good?

    I regularly ask this question on my ‘How to Have Better Ideas’ workshops (the sequel to ‘How to Have Ideas’). It’s a short question that triggers a wide range of answers. But the one I am looking for is this:

    ‘A good idea is one that meets the brief’

    My aim is marrying up the brief and the idea. I want to emphasise that the two should match. If the idea doesn’t meet the brief, then we have three consequences:

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