Capturing Ideas
By: Charles L. Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology
Thursday April 24, 2008
For fun, I recently googled the aphorism, "Good ideas are a dime a dozen".
There were over 3,400 hits. This old cliche is on too many people's
minds! Most of the occurrences I looked at were fairly recent, from
business or marketing articles, and most continued on with a "but ..."
line that suggested that what is really rare and valuable is the
agency or person who can bring an idea to realization.
Clearly, there is recognition that getting a glimmer of an idea is not
enough. The implication is that any corrective effort to be put into
idea development should be weighted toward "how to do it", rather
than "what to do". Perhaps. But I have the suspicion that there is
neither an oversupply of good ideas nor an undersupply of determined
implementation. More likely, what needs attention is the way in which
ideas are captured. It's not that there are lots of good ideas.
There aren't; there are many glimmers of good ideas. The failure
of ideas to be thoroughly thought through, articulated and described
-captured- means they are destined be thought shallow and will
not be acted upon or even remembered. Ideas may be a dime a dozen,
but good ideas still aren't so common. We see them so rarely
that, when we do, we take note.
As an example, several years ago at the Institute of Design we did a
Structured Planning project for the National Parks Foundation, a
private-sector institution supporting our National Park Service.
The problem was to look ahead to the 21st century and what the Parks
would be facing - both problems and opportunities. Our system proposal
contained scores of ideas. One that seemed particularly good came
out of planning for a "Park-Net", a sort of pre-Internet that we were
envisioning. We gave the idea the title WindowWall and described
it as continuous video feed from the Parks that could be made available to
individuals and institutions on a subscription basis. When the idea was
fully articulated, its potential was stunning. The idea depended on
the fact that probably the most awe-inspiring views of nature in the U.S.
are all in the national parks. As we described it, permanently mounted
high definition video cameras would face particularly beautiful views
(think Yosemite or Yellowstone), record the view continuously (day and
night) with a wide-angle lens, beam it up to a satellite and then down
to subscribers' TV screens, anything from computer screensavers to
wall-mounted flat screens from picture-frame size to full walls.
Software at individual TV sets would allow zooming and panning within the
wide-angle picture to establish a personal favorite window - perhaps a
stream or waterfall frequented by bears and elk.
The idea as a glimmer was interesting. Articulated, it was fantastic!
Our National Park Service is chronically underfunded. Congress
continually awards NPS more parks, monuments, etc. to steward, but
never comes up with what is needed to provide the stewardship.
WindowWall all by itself could help dramatically. There are over
110 million households in the U.S - over 3.8 million of them
millionaire households! If we were able to sell nominal $100
per year subscriptions to just 4 million (less than 4%), that would
raise $400 million per year. In the U.S., there are over 7500 hospitals,
115,000 libraries, 5 million corporations and many more public and
private institutions that might very much like a full-time live "window
on the Parks" for their conference rooms, board rooms, cafeterias
and other special spaces. Assume just 1 million of them took $200
subscriptions. That would add another $200 million. The National
Park Service budget is about $2.3 billion. WindowWall could alone
raise one-fourth of the NPS budget - and the numbers are conservative.
Some History
The need for good ideas is so strong that whole businesses have
grown up around methods for stimulating idea production. One of the
best known in the U.S. is Brainstorming, the creation of advertising
executive Alex Osborn at BBDO in the 1930's. Popularized in his
book, Applied Imagination, his work inspired a continuing
evolution of more specialized brainstorming variants, including:
the Nominal Group Technique, Group Passing, Team Idea Mapping, Electronic
Brainstorming and Directed Brainstorming, among the more widely known.
Structured Planning, the process loosely underlying this series of
articles, has its own specialized version. I will talk about that
- Ends/Means Synthesis - in a later article.
In the 1940's, a group of researchers on the east coast led by William
J. J. Gordon and later, George Prince began a study of how successful
artists and inventors create. Years of inquiry led to the formulation
of a set of guidelines for creative thinking that coalesced into a
teachable process and a company called Synectics. Gordon, Prince
and their associates successfully taught the process to thousands in
industry and institutions.
Other extensive processes supporting creative thinking include TRIZ,
a process developed in Russia and brought to Europe and the west after
the cold war; USIT, a version of TRIZ modified by Ed Sickagus; Lateral
Thinking, a set of techniques developed by Edward DeBono; Goldfire
Innovator; another adaptation and extension of TRIZ; and Mind Mapping,
a technique by Tony Buzan widely popular today. All are concerned
primarily with idea generation.
Idea Capture
Good ideas are well articulated and thoroughly thought through.
Part of what makes them seem so good is the elegance with which they
solve problems, meet objectives and anticipate tests raised to
challenge their virtues.
To achieve that level of elegance, idea capture needs to focus on
articulation, not generation or transcription. Experts on creativity
too often miss this. It is important to have a means for capturing
fleeting ideas, but that is of much less value than knowing what
to capture. Any query of the Internet for how to capture ideas
will find endless discussions of the merits of computer versus paper,
pda's versus audio-recording, notecards versus notebooks, and so forth.
That misses the mark; it's not how you capture; it's what
you capture.
Capturing an idea is actually a three-part operation. First, is getting
the germ of the idea. That's where the various creativity tools play
their main role. Second, is thinking it through. Enhancement takes
place here; the idea is elaborated and matured through consideration from
many viewpoints. Third, is getting it down. Important aspects of the
idea are recorded in a format that keys attention to properties, qualities
and features; maximizes coverage; and assures retention.
Conventional thinking emphasizes (1) and (3), seeking volume through
(1) (perhaps the source of "dime a dozen" disdain) and, under (3),
prioritizing ready access to recording media to prevent the loss
of ideas. Stage two gets little or no attention, and stage three is
trivialized to issues of ease in note-taking.
A Format for Capture
Because most projects are now systems projects and require many ideas
- well-described good ones - it is worthwhile to seek a fast,
effective way to capture both essence and nuance. Ideas that will be
used to develop system concepts need to take advantage of insights
that reveal the subtlety of system organization and operations - and
the problems that surface in making operations run smoothly. To meet
these challenges, a good descriptive format must: - be easy to use. It shouldn't take much time; it shouldn't slow
the flow of ideas in a good creative session. It must quickly
focus thinking toward the kinds of information required for good idea
description.
- be standardized. Once a rule system is learned, it is much
easier to create descriptions, compare them with related concepts, and
communicate them to others. Rules shape the form; authors can
concentrate on substance.
- focus description. Entry topics must be limited. Most importantly,
they must optimize the kinds of information required so that ideas
can be described in the fewest, most encompassing categories possible.
As is the case for the issues of Defining Statements and the insights
of Design Factors (see articles earlier in this series: Goals and
Definition and Insights and Ideas), description takes place
on a form, the Solution Element document (see the figure).
 Click image to view PDF.
A Solution Element has just three important parts: Description,
Properties and Features. All are allocated space on a letter-sized
sheet of paper along with other entries for storage and retrieval
(see Insights and Ideas). An idea can be quickly and
substantively captured by giving it a memorable, evocative title
and definitive notes under the three special categories:
Description: A Description is a high-level summary of what the concept
is with a focus on purpose. The Description from the Solution Element
of the figure describes "Silent Answer" minimally with a little about
what it is and a little about what it does, just enough to sketch
out the idea; the details are in the Properties and Features. One or
two statements are usually enough for a description, and they don't
have to be sentences.
Properties: Properties are what it is. This is the static part
of the description given in bullet noun phrases because we visualize
form most easily from nouns. In this section the component parts of
the idea are listed. It is also the place where qualities of the
components that should be special can be given. If, for example,
it were thought important that the Silent Answer message have a
personalized quality, the Property might be stated: "Stored message
created personally by cell phone owner." Properties are what the
engineering department wants to know.
Features: Features are what it does. For similar linguistic
reasons, these are best written as bullet verb phrases. We tend to
think of actions (what things do) dynamically. Features, precisely
because they express what the concept does, also are usually the best
descriptors for judging the appropriateness of the idea in a particular
setting or its potential success for a given purpose. Well stated,
they help a purchaser to make a decision. They are what marketing and
sales want.
Solution Elements are easy to use. A stack of blanks can be readily
at hand in a meeting. The three categories focus questions for needed
detail and the standardized formats make ideas easy to share, compare and
integrate. In Structured Planning, they are used to organize the
synthesizing process (subject of a future article). In Structured
Planning or in any project, they may be modified or elaborated over
the life of the project to become System Element components of the final
proposal.
Charles L. Owen is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design,
one of the six academic units of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.
There, Mr. Owen conducts research and teaches semiannually in the MDes, MDM
and PhD Design graduate programs.
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