OC 3 – Framework – Ideas

«Your mind is filled with new ideas.
Do not let them go to waste.»
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There is no creativity without ideas, but ideas alone are not enough. To become new and useful, they need a strong foundation and must survive contact with reality.

Creative projects also rarely depend on a single idea. A book needs not just a plot, but characters, settings, scenes, and lines. A scientific study requires decisions about methods, measures, and analysis. An app idea comes with design questions, edge cases, and technical constraints.

Ideation is therefore a continuous process, not a single event.

That process does not end with generating ideas. Ideas also have to be captured and collected. Otherwise they are forgotten, distorted, or unavailable when they are needed.1 Creating the infrastructure to capture ideas immediately and store them in a usable collection turns ideation from accident into craft. Done well, many of the ideas needed for a project are already there when realization begins.

Realization will still require further ideas and on-the-fly problem solving. In fact, it often reveals that having the initial idea was the easy part. But if the right kinds of ideas were generated, captured, and collected, realization no longer starts from nothing. It starts with material that has already taken shape.

Endnotes

  1. This is true even in more free-spirited creative domains. Some poets write down daily impressions, events, and especially feelings on index cards or in notebooks, treating these caches of experience as raw material for later work. Painters likewise collect clippings and other sources of stimulation and inspiration. Csikszentmihalyi (1996). ↩

 

 

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