2.1 Ideaspaces in professional ideation

The concept of ideaspaces stems from the process by which designers evolve and expand early ideas ‘into an exploration of the boundaries and possibilities of the idea’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). Ideaspaces are collections of fragmentary ideas ‘presented not as one specific implementable solution, but as a constrained space of possible solutions’ (p. 27). The concept of ideaspaces suggests that early design ideas rather than being discrete and distinct outputs of a single session which external judges can objectively identify and evaluate, are networks or spaces with multiple paths or subcomponents formed by collective contributions. This can be compared to a two-dimensional model of creative concept formation that includes stabilisation (emergent to well-defined concepts) and representational modality (textual to enacted, embodied) (Engeström Reference Engeström, Sannino and Ellis2013). Evidence shows how new concepts can emerge over multiple sessions conducted in a period of months as participants gradually appropriate and expand the meaning of the new concept where its ‘elusive, skeletal name has begun to gather flesh and blood around it’ (p. 248) (Engeström Reference Engeström, Sannino and Ellis2013). During this process of expansive collective creation, new concepts are gradually concretised and reshaped from an abstract and emergent textual notion to a materially enacted and embodied idea that becomes sharper and more stable (Engeström Reference Engeström, Sannino and Ellis2013).

Such expansive process of concept formation suggests problems with the quantifying of the ideas generated in a single session. For example, whilst a design team can engage in eleven idea discussions in 30 min, it can also produce many more sticky notes in a session (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). However, 11 or 20 in such sessions are rather arbitrary choices as indicators of fluency given that ‘the team discusses many options for ideas related to what is written on the post-it note’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). Ideaspaces thus, shift the focus away from ideas as individual units and towards the formation of discussions around ideas, i.e., ‘looking at the 30-min ‘share back’ activity in video 21 enabled us to notice the prolonged discussion around ideas documented on post-it notes’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). Likewise, the demo derby (Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018) as well as the idea narrative (Belsky Reference Belsky2018) seem to serve as vehicles to generate discussions where the potential of ideas is continuously assessed and where feedback is sought to guide decisions to move forward. Evidence that ideation episodes occur throughout a design project (Shih Reference Shih2011; Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018; Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) further points to the importance of recurring conversations as the sites where ideas are expanded. The view emerging from professional ideation expands the scope of this theory building exercise from a narrow focus on early ideas to a more comprehensive view that includes process. Professional practice shows a crisis of normal science in empirical studies of design ideation (Kuhn Reference Kuhn1996) and shows the need for a paradigmatic shift in its theorising. This view is contrasted to practices in experimental ideation research on Table 1.

Table 1. Comparison of ideation in prominent studies and professional practice

Equipped with these insights from professional ideation, the next section presents the result of a search for candidate models of formation to explain ideation better than as an assemblage of creative essences. Accretion is examined as a growth model to rethink idea formation.

3.1 Accretion in early design ideation

Theoretical contributions can be made ‘when data are more illustrative than definitive’ (Sutton & Staw Reference Sutton and Staw1995). In this sense, we use the level 5 analysis of the segment v21 of the Design Research Thinking Symposium (DTRS11) (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) as a vehicle to develop the analogy from accretion theory to design ideation. We start by defining the scale at which the session analysed fits accretion thinking given that ideation can be modelled at different scales and accretion occurs in distinct phases, i.e., gravitational effects only have an effect once the ‘metre-size barrier’ is crossed (Kokubo & Ida Reference Kokubo and Ida2002). A primary step for ideation research thus, is to establish the scale of analysis and the dynamics at work at the phase or scale under study. This can help to structure ideation theory along a time dimension for which different ideation physics may govern: from ideas produced in a few seconds (Alexiou et al. Reference Alexiou, Zamenopoulos, Johnson and Gilbert2009; Goucher-Lambert, Moss & Cagan Reference Goucher-Lambert, Moss and Cagan2019), to several minutes (Gonçalves et al. Reference Gonçalves, Cardoso and Badke-Schaub2013), multiple hours (Viswanathan & Linsey Reference Viswanathan and Linsey2012), days or weeks (Yang Reference Yang2009), and months (Engeström Reference Engeström, Sannino and Ellis2013; Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018).

Idea formation is analysed here at the level of verbal interactions in micro-episodes (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) in group sessions. This is regarded as an appropriate scale to draw parallels with accretion to focus on collisions between fragmentary ideas as they are shared and discussed in groups where attraction forces take over and have an effect in shaping their growth. Therefore, the focus here is first on the formation of ideasimals defined as the earliest version of recognisable design ideas suitable for systematic scrutiny in micro-episodes of group ideation. Just like gravitational attraction does not have an effect at tiny scales because of low mass density (stages 1 and 2 in Figure 1), we assume that only when idea fragments start to clump into observable ideasimals, attraction drives the growth of solid ideas with sufficient structure and meaning for people to engage in conversations around them – and for researchers to systematically study them (stages 3 and onwards in Figure 1). Ideasimals are thus viewed here as early tangible ideas that serve as primary attractors of discussion in ideation, as they begin to cluster and form ideaspaces through conversations (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). This accretion architecture of early ideation is depicted graphically in Figure 3 with idea fragments scaling into ideasimals, which are collaboratively accreted into ideaspaces by the group. The guideline in professional ideation to first generate ideas individually can be considered at the scale of idea fragments, as well as the ideas generated in only a few seconds such as in neurological studies of ideation (Goucher-Lambert et al. Reference Goucher-Lambert, Moss and Cagan2019). As fragments are expressed through visual, verbal, or physical media and shared with a group, ideasimal formation takes over and during an ideation session it forms structures such as ideaspaces.

3.1.1 From idea fragments to ideasimals

The level 5 analysis of segment v21 in the DTRS11 dataset (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) illustrates early ideation accretion as a team shapes ‘a collectively generated space made up of many idea fragments’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). The DTRS11 dataset captured the work of a design team in a car company over three months, producing twenty video recordings of design meetings of between 30 and 90 min in length. Here we look at the 30-min meeting in segment v21 as analysed by Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) where they inspect the emergence of an early idea generated in one of the eleven discussions in that meeting. The two-minute conversation analysed in micro-episodes centred around the idea ‘to rent out parts of your car’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018).

In August 2018 we conducted an ideation session at CoLab in Aotearoa, New Zealand with three professional product designers as a means to reproduce the type of raw data where early ideas emerge applying the same design task as in segment v21 (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). The goal is not to replicate a study carried out with an inductive approach, but to generate new data to enable a similar type of analysis. The three participants in the CoLab study (two males, one female, average age 28 years) have an average of five years of professional experience and advance expertise in ideation as participants and facilitators. A 30-min session was planned and conducted applying all of Osborn’s guidelines and recommendations (Osborn Reference Osborn1963; Isaksen & Gaulin Reference Isaksen and Gaulin2005). The design brief to ‘Design new car accessories for the Chinese market’ was given to participants in parallel to the ideation themes of the DTRS11 study. The CoLab session was video and audio recorded, transcribed, and coded for features (who, action, object, why, when, and type of accessory) and options following the level 5 methods of Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). We examine the formation of the ideaspace ‘rent car parts’ in Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) and in the CoLab session shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Ideaspace ‘Rent car parts’ from CoLab study where the ideasimal ‘reuse car parts at home’ builds up by the collision of twelve fragments highlighted in the ideaspace.

Collisions between idea fragments are discernible across the ideaspace depicted in Figure 9 in Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) including the chain formed between ‘rent car parts’ $\rightarrow$ ‘mafia can rent trunk’ $\rightarrow$ ‘kindergarten can use the front’. In the CoLab study participants form a similar chain forms from the same idea fragment but attracting other ideas ‘rent car parts’ $\rightarrow$ ‘collective car ownership’ $\rightarrow$ ‘modular car parts’ $\rightarrow$ ‘storage at home of unused car parts’ $\rightarrow$ ‘reuse car parts at home’ as shown in the ideaspace in Figure 2. Rather than aiming to evaluate these idea fragments in isolation, the discussions where they form seem a more appropriate site for analysis, since conversations are where ideaspaces form.

Accretion regimes include orderly, runaway, and oligarchic, and the transition between these phases is stepwise. In forty-five minutes the CoLab participants generated ideas that formed five distinct ideaspaces depicted in level 3 of Figure 3: (1) ‘car accessories as jewellery’, (2) ‘car accessories for places that are difficult to reach’, (3) ‘car accessories for pets’, (4) ‘car accessories for special editions themed around famous people and sport teams’, and the introduced (5) ‘rent car parts’. The distribution of ideas across these ideaspaces is highly skewed: the longest discussion lasted 16 minutes and attracted more than twenty fragmentary ideas, whilst the shortest discussion of 5 min only addressed eight idea fragments. Five ideasimals (recognisable thematic groupings of fragmentary ideas) emerged in the ideaspace of ‘rent car parts’ depicted in level 2 of Figure 3: (1) reuse car parts and accessories at home; (2) physical and digital services; (3) design for parking; (4) a community of car owners and users; and (5) identity and customisation. Notably, all these ideasimals feed from idea fragments that appeared in other ideaspaces in the CoLab session, depicted in level 1 of Figure 3. For example, the ideasimal ‘people can design their own parts to rent’ has precedents in the idea fragments ‘3D printed car parts’ and ‘customised car parts’ shared in the ideaspaces ‘accessories for pets’ and ‘car accessories as jewellery’, respectively. Hence, ideasimals in the CoLab session form not from unitary and unique ideas, but rather from ‘awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete’ (p. 131) (Catmull Reference Catmull2014) fragments. For clarity, Figure 3 does not show the hundreds of fragmentary ideas that failed to accrete into ideasimals.

Figure 3. An accretion architecture of ideation: early ideas scale up from fragments (bottom) to ideasimals (middle) and into ideaspaces (top). Ideasimal 5.1 ‘reuse car parts at home’ emerged in the CoLab session in the ‘rent car parts’ ideaspace.

Since ideasimals can absorb smaller idea fragments from their own ideaspace and even from other ideaspaces, it could be expected that a few ideas attract a disproportionate number of conversations during a session. In effect, the ‘trunk space’ fragment is mentioned five times by three participants in Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) and ‘screen-based interfaces to connect car users’ materialises seven times in the CoLab study. It is possible that ideasimals have basic properties akin to planetesimals’ drag force, gravitational attraction, relative velocity, mass, radius, and trajectory. Such properties would shape the possible outcomes from idea encounters: ideas can collide or fly-by, or they may accrete and grow; when they collide, they may fragment and disperse. The mapping between these accretion processes and early ideation is beyond the scope of this initial exercise and deserves further attention in future studies. A glimpse into such ideation physics is given by the ideasimal ‘reuse car parts at home’ originated from the collision of twelve previous idea fragments in the CoLab session as shown in Figure 2. A follow-up idea that splintered from this was ‘to extend the house/car idea into spaces such as office, school, or arcade’. The CoLab study also provides evidence of emergent properties of ideasimals: the ‘screen-based interfaces’ fragmentary idea had appeared earlier during the session but radically changed meaning when it re-appeared in the ‘rent car parts’ ideaspace right after the ‘Airbnb of car parts’ fragment in the form of ‘dashboard as a tablet like a Tesla’ when it led participants to imagine business opportunities for a ‘provider of content for parts rented’.

Ideasimals appear in a continuous state of transformation, inasmuch as they point to the discussions around fragmentary ideas. Early ideasimals are thus expected to be of different types: some as questions to inform future steps (ask what legislation exists or what target users do), others as statements of intent (accessories must be sustainable), others to provide focus or reveal opportunities (accessories for parking), yet others as thematic or to define a strategy that can be applied to other ideas (customisable accessories). In accretion, the same idea can lead to different directions depending on how it collides with other ideas during a session: this is illustrated when comparing the idea ‘rent trunk or boot of car’ in v21 of Shroyer et al. (Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018) and in the CoLab session. In the DTRS11 data, this ideaspace included electricity as service, mafia, kindergarten, and homeless people, whilst the CoLab participants viewed it as a means ‘to increase space for special occasions’. Such nascent chain of ideas in our study led to ‘a hybrid system of purchase/rental of cars’ and to the question of ‘what may be uncommon uses for which Chinese car users need to rent car parts?’, with clear precedents in the earlier fragment ‘what may Chinese users want in terms of events, clubs, and celebrities for a themed car collection?’. Such cross-chaining between ideaspaces starts to show how ideasimals can migrate between orbits (conversations) and collide with other ideasimals.

Under an accretion lens, nascent ideas can morph or wither if they are absorbed by other ideas or are ejected from the system (ideation task). In the CoLab study, the fragmentary ideas ‘car crash’, ‘distractions’, and ‘safe driving’ were mentioned early but in the conversations covering more than one-hundred ideas across five ideaspaces, ideas on safety failed to re-appear. As the organisation of accretion disks probabilistically determines the formation of complex bodies, in ideation the way in which the design task or brief is presented to participants may indirectly shape the type of ideas formed. If the brief for this ideation session had been ‘Design new car accessories for safer cars’, then a larger number of idea fragments may coalesce into more relevant ideasimals around safe driving – a premise worth examining in future studies.

The CoLab study illustrates the key observation that ‘instead of one cohesive idea, as the post-it note representation might suggest, the discussion created a space full of possible fragments of ideas that together describe what “renting out parts of the car” might mean.’ (Shroyer et al. Reference Shroyer, Lovins, Turns, Cardella and Atman2018). However, these short ideation sessions only produced initial ideaspaces where early ideasimals form. A longitudinal view of a design project is necessary to build parallels from later accretion stages into more advanced stages of ideation (stages 3–5 in Figure 1). The next subsection examines an account of a professional design project (Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018) applying an accretion lens to look for parallels to late idea accretion stages.

3.2 Accretion throughout a design project

This section zooms out to a larger scale by examining ideation throughout a two-year design project as documented in detail by the lead keyboard designer of Project Purple at Apple (Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018). The method close reading was applied to Chapters 6 to 8 where the author recounts his experiences leading the design of the on-screen keyboard for the first iPhone from the summer of 2005 to its launch in 2007. Closeness in this method refers to the practice of studying a text by annotating, searching, and mapping concepts and moving in iterative cycles through passages gradually selecting highly specific textual evidence to reveal connections and claims (Smith Reference Smith2016). Whilst this is a primary method in literary studies to analyse narrative features, here it was applied to trace and connect all aspects related to idea formation as described by the author. The quality and credibility of this analysis is guided by strategies for reducing systematic bias including careful consideration of competing themes and explanations, triangulation, credibility of the source and analyst, and direct consultation with the author (Patton Reference Patton1999). A tentative timeline of key ideation events was developed focusing on decisions linked to the origins and the journey of the keyboard ideas that ultimately shaped the final design solution documented in patent USPTO 2007/0152980. Triangulation of sources was conducted by identifying and analysing the key ideation milestones and main inflection points of the project in a separate source, a 3-h interview (Kocienda & Williamson Reference Kocienda, Williamson, Hsu and Weber2017). The overall picture construed in this process was refined via a personal email conversation with the author in October 2018. Figure 4 presents the resulting visual summary of the ideation journey that informs our analysis. As with the DTRS11 data, the main value of this vignette is illustrative rather than conclusive (Sutton & Staw Reference Sutton and Staw1995).

Figure 4. Purple keyboard idea accretion stages, ideation outcomes, and evaluation approaches.

All quotations related to this vignette where parallels between accretion and ideation are shaped, are direct citations from Kocienda (Reference Kocienda2018) in keeping with a close reading approach. In the summer of 2005, Ken Kocienda joined the development team led by Scott Forstall with the brief ‘We are designing a cell phone built around touch’ (p. 135). By September 2005 the team of fifteen engineers were called to a ‘keyboard emergency’ meeting where they were asked to set all projects aside and work on new keyboard ideas that could support reliable typing results, given that the options designed so far were reminiscent of the failed Newton keyboard (p. 140). At the time, the BlackBerry had set the standard for reliable typing on cell phones using physical keys, so the design of a dependable touchscreen keyboard was a high-stake challenge. The team had a few weeks to conceive and build working prototypes for the Keyboard Derby where Forstall would test them and pick a winner (p. 141). The early and fragmentary keyboard ideas were highly diverse, and included ‘shrunk-down laptop keys’, ‘Morse code’, ‘piano keys’, and ‘interlocking puzzle pieces’ (p. 144) shown in stage 1 at the bottom row of Figure 4. As the team prepared their demos, they tested each other’s keyboards and provided feedback. The main accuracy problems with touchscreen typing were initially attributed to fingertip size, the lack of tactile feedback, visual obstruction of the keys when typing, and remaining screen space for content. With the realisation that these problems meant that a ‘big keys’ solution was necessary, many Derby ideas featured a few multi-letter large keys, with a range of means to choose the desired character: ‘tapping’, ‘sliding’, ‘double taps’, and ‘long presses’ (p. 145) – shown in stage 2 one row up from the bottom of Figure 4.

Kocienda built and tested five prototypes in two weeks, all of which informed his derby idea: ‘a big-key QWERTY keyboard that displayed multiple letters per key but that offloaded the decision of picking the letters to the computer’ by means of a dictionary to select ‘the most sensible word’ given the combination of keys pressed (p. 148) – depicted in stage 3 of Figure 4. At the keyboard derby, engineers presented their idea and Forstall tested them using the Wallaby, a tethered multitouch display with the touchscreen feel of the planned hardware. During these sessions, everyone spoke up and Forstall shared ‘something positive about each demo’ (p. 150). None of the keyboards met the expectations of ‘quick and accurate typing’ until he tried Kocienda’s, which he judged ‘amazing’ earning him the position of ‘direct responsible individual (DRI) for keyboards’ (p. 153).

At this stage the competing keyboards fit our definition of ideasimals as collections of multiple idea fragments in working prototypes that sustain conversations and provoke feedback. These ideasimals collided during the weeks leading to the Demo Derby as engineers built and shared their prototypes, tested each other’s’ designs, and shared feedback and recommendations for improvement. The wide use of multi-letter keys shows that the ‘big keys’ idea fragment resonated with several designers and was integrated into multiple ideasimals. Understanding that ‘most demos fail in the absolute dead-end sense of the word’ suggests the necessary ugliness to take early ideas ‘from the intangible to the tangible’ (p. 156). The demo-winning idea ‘set the course for the period of work that followed’ (p. 157) and set a breakthrough that ‘didn’t represent an end, it signalled a beginning’ (p. 163) which aligns well with accretion growth once a few design concepts start to dominate in an ideaspace. At this stage, the evaluation of early keyboard ideas was informed by cursory and largely implicit criteria of reliability and accuracy for an activity that was poorly understood at that time: on-screen typing in small screens. Whilst Kocienda’s early ideas were promising, they would later reveal multiple limitations linked to on-screen typing that were unknown at the time of the derby.

The next stage of development is characterised by an intricate journey of unsuccessful demos, new discoveries, and new understandings of typing problems which led to ‘rethink some of the decisions that led to the derby-winning design, perhaps all of them’ (p. 163). In close collaboration with other developers like Richard Williamson, the limitations behind the premises of the derby design were uncovered, a process also critically informed by feedback from all the Purple colleagues who used it ‘in their daily routine for months’ (p. 167) – a process they called ‘living on’ the design. At this stage, ideation shows properties of runaway growth in accretion, with keyboard ideas cumulatively being incorporated and tested at increasing rates as momentum builds up. Kocienda describes a collaborative culture of pervasive testing that is further illustrated by a screen game developed by Scott Hertz at the time, where team members played to tap a button on the screen in trials where its location and size changed thus providing data that revealed top accuracy for areas of fifty-seven pixels square (p. 226). Many keyboard layout options were tested at this stage, with the familiar QWERTY arrangement being chosen ‘fairly late in the progression of prototypes’ (p. 181). They eventually understood that four principles: ‘big multi-letter keys’, ‘a QWERTY layout’, ‘every gesture a tap’, and ‘a dictionary to provide active assistance’ (p. 172) made typing rather unreliable beyond common short words – such as those used to judge the derby ideas, i.e., the simple phrase ‘Scott is my name’ (p. 152). To reiterate, in a co-evolving process as early ideas started to be implemented, they informed the evaluation criteria most relevant and incrementally informed the framing of the on-screen typing problem.

By early 2006 a ‘deep-dive session’ produced two ideas that collided with the premises of the derby-winning idea: first, ‘one letter on every key’ (p. 173) and second, ‘the keyboard as a means for people to communicate their intent to the device’ (p. 174) – depicted in Figure 4 (stage 4). Kocienda describes how these two new fragmentary ideas changed his understanding of the role of the keyboard in the typing experience at this late stage, after months of work: ‘the person typing and the autocorrection code didn’t have to see the keyboard the same way’ (p. 174). This key insight led to a new idea altogether: the software implementation made the actual keys bigger whilst they visually ‘appeared smaller to the typist’ (p. 174) – or in legalese: ‘the effective contact area or strike area may be larger than the displayed icon size in at least one dimension of the display surface’ from patent USPTO 2007/0152980.

This version of the keyboard design addressed many of the shortcomings revealed at this stage, yet it also helped identify a new problem that slowed down typing by the need to pause at the end of every word to choose between the entered and the suggested words: ‘the suggestion bar bubbles were like speed bumps’ while typing (p. 177). Kocienda addressed by reversing the interaction model, i.e., the space bar enters the top dictionary suggestion whilst the typist taps the suggestion bar to select their exact typing – depicted in stage 5 of Figure 4. Kocienda refers to the testing of this keyboard as the ‘Giggly Demo’ (p. 180) due to the giddiness he and Williamson felt when testing this idea. In oligarchic accretion, growth rate decreases, and one idea dominates the process of formation, as illustrated here by Kocienda referring to the Giggly Demo as exhibiting ‘glimpses of potential’ (p. 189). In a process of several months shaped by continuous changes to the evaluation criteria, the early and sketchy ideas that made Kocienda DRI for keyboards had morphed significantly into a sharper, more definite and well-rounded protosolution. Instances of early ideas appearing late in the process are still visible, such as reversing the input method for suggested words. Importantly, the derby ideas were protected in the early stages and through trial-and-error attracted other ideas as the new practice of screen typing was increasingly understood through testing the attempted solutions, and notions of accuracy and reliability were increasingly defined to evaluate ideas.

The term convergence was used by Apple teams for the final phase of development ‘after the features had been locked down’ and the last months were dedicated to ‘fixing bugs and polishing details’ (p. 191). Nine months before convergence, the Purple keyboard was still to undergo significant changes – just like significant transformations can occur in the late stages of planetary formation. In response to unexpected flaws during demos in this late period, Kocienda incorporated two new ideas to his protosolution to increase the usefulness of autocorrect as depicted in stage 6 of Figure 4: first, better data to form the dictionary and rank word probabilities which was addressed by input from the Purple team ‘living on’ the design. Second, an entirely new design of the predictive algorithms, creatively tackled by weighing the key sequences as a ‘key-tap constellation’ (p. 202) that could then be paired to the closest-matching error-free centred pattern for each word in the dictionary, i.e., ‘the pattern skew algorithm’ (p. 203). This ‘final’ design solution was still tuned and optimised significantly over the following months to improve the typing experience (p. 207). After fifteen months of work, the Purple team was introduced to the first phone, which was announced to the public in January 2007 – stage 7 of Figure 4. In subsequent product releases, the keyboard would still undergo significant transformations – stage 8 of Figure 4 – including the first iPad keyboard, initially designed with a zoom feature to switch between two layouts (p. 28). The changes to the on-screen keyboard designs of subsequent versions of the iPhone and the early iPad models map well onto the changes that a fully formed solution can undergo, such as the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’ period that drastically shaped the present qualities of planet Earth.

When reflecting upon this journey, Kocienda emphasises that he and his collaborators were constantly forging ahead for the next iteration, always ‘starting small with some inspiration’, making demos, mixing feedback, listening to guidance from colleagues, blending in variations, improving ideas in incremental steps gradually moving step by step ‘from the spark of an idea to a finished product’ and never waiting for ‘an epiphany that would jump us directly from an early-stage concept to a complete product design’ (p. 217). To Kocienda this process feels ‘like trying to fit together a jigsaw puzzle when we weren’t sure what the final picture was supposed to look like, and the pieces kept changing shape’ (p. 244) as ‘we could rarely see the full implications of any one choice in the moment of any one demo’ (p. 245). Kocienda’s jigsaw puzzle analogy further contradicts the essentialist expectation to select jigsaw puzzle pieces of good quality at early stages. To be clear, the ideasimals in the derby-winning design did not have the creative features that the final solution did as essentialist thinking would expect, in fact one of its four premises was wrong (big multi-letter keys) and the rest underwent significant transformations in a combination of gradual and punctuated transformations.

The growth of fragmentary ideas into ideasimals and their evolution over several months enabled and informed conversations about what on-screen typing meant including fundamental design questions such as ‘What is a key?’. For this account to support essentialist thinking, all or the main advantages of the early (derby) ideas in September 2005 would need to be discernible not only to Kocienda but to external experts too. By definition, expertise in creative projects is lacking; at that stage no-one knew what an on-screen keyboard was, and how to design the experience of typing on a small touchscreen. More crucially, for Project Purple to support an essentialist view, the evaluation criteria applied to the final solution in January 2007 would have to be known twenty months in advance in order to assess the novelty, feasibility, and ease of use of early ideas.

The accretion theory of ideation formulated here shows signs of ‘good’ theory by supporting well-structured definitions and relationships (Weick Reference Weick1989). It enables a structure to designate and treat early ideas, and to distinguish between stages of formation. It provides a system of formation by collision of fragmentary ideas growing into perceptible units over time. Further, it enables ways to name and map formation stages, and ways to characterise the processes and the dynamics that govern the growth of ideas. These theoretical bases strongly adhere to descriptions of ideation in the wild summarised in Table 1. The conceptual development of an accretion theory of ideation suggests that viewing idea formation through the lens of planetary formation allows us to form sharper, stronger, more believable and more imaginative ways to reason about and study design ideation – including the ways in which early ideas are evaluated.

3.3 Evaluation regimes of ideation stages

Inspired by accretion as a model of growth to explain ideation stages, we propose three distinct regimes for the assessment of design ideas depending on their stage of growth. These regimes focus on individual and team levels, introduce a new factor or facet of measurement, and span objective and self-rating approaches (Batey Reference Batey2012). To account for the early nature of ugly ideas (‘unformed and incomplete’ (Catmull Reference Catmull2014)), we extend the 4Ps of creativity with a fifth P, idea particle. In its original formulation, the 4Ps strands are defined as: the person, their mental process, the influence of the environment (press), and ‘ideas’ (product) (Rhodes Reference Rhodes1961). The fourth P refers to ‘ideas embodied into a tangible form’ that become accessible when ‘inventions appear’ (Rhodes Reference Rhodes1961), therefore it refers to the completed design solution. Particle is thus used here to capture the early ideas in state of formation which require assessment approaches that bridge across process and product.

3.3.3 Evaluation of oligarchs

When evaluating protosolutions that have gained significant traction, practitioners evaluate ideas over time through lived experience (‘to live in’ them) rather than simply judging them early and once. Protosolutions are evaluated by their capacity to persuade, generate feedback, and reveal insights over sustained testing and tweaking. At this oligarchic stage, a few protosolutions can still interact with many ideasimals, so at late stages of a project fragmentary ideas can alter the course of a solution. Just like an asteroid can reshape a fully formed planet, so can a small idea have transformative effects on an embryonic or even a near-to-final design solution. When a protosolution becomes ‘massive enough’ to become stable and dominates over other smaller ideas, it enters a stage of ‘convergence’ (p. 191) (Kocienda Reference Kocienda2018). Full criteria of performance including feasibility then become relevant. Because the emphasis in this paper is on early ideation, the evaluation of final solutions is beyond its scope.

Table 2 summarises the evaluation regimes for ideation stages specifying the evaluation approach and criteria most relevant for process, particle, and product. Person and press dimensions are beyond the scope of this paper.

Table 2. Assessment of idea particles for three ideation stages: relation to process and product metrics

In the co-evolution of problem and solution spaces, the criteria for evaluating ideas are bound to evolve between early and late ideas. Criteria that are critical to evaluate late ideas, such as technical feasibility, are largely irrelevant to evaluate early ideas when design decisions that impact manufacturing and materials have not been made. Instead, criteria that are more relevant to assess early ideas include interest, engagement, and capacity to further inspire other ideas.

In relation to process, an accretion view suggests that a good ideation process is certainly necessary to build a high-quality final solution, but may not be sufficient. An ideation session may be enjoyable to participants, but their enthusiasm may be around ideas that turn out to be out of the scope of the task, or lead to dead ends down the line. Other examples of processes that may score high in the type of metrics inferred here and yet fail to produce creative solutions include the bias of persuasive presentations in the acceptance of new ideas (Lu et al. Reference Lu, Bartol, Venkataramani, Zheng and Liu2018), and the unexpected effects of mood in ideation (Bose, Folse & Lee-Wingate Reference Bose, Folse and Lee-Wingate2013). Viewing ideation as a complex system, in order to explain a final design solution that is ultimately evaluated as exceptionally creative, an alignment of conditions need to occur not unlike the so-called Swiss Cheese model, with good-quality ideation processes satisfying the latent conditions for creativity (Reason Reference Reason2000).