Concept Generation: The Art (and Science) of Generating Different Views

Once they have defined the problem, developed a brief, and conducted various forms of research to gain insights into related aspects of the customer and the problem, designers tend to use all of the information and insights gained to generate concepts and ideas to start to develop potential solutions. “The emphasis at this stage is on a wider, intuitive type of thinking in which lateral thinking, exploring many possibilities, rather than vertical thinking, concentrating on a single line of reasoning, is of great value” (Sowrey, 1987, p. 17). During this concept generation phase a number of alternative approaches and concepts are created and explored. Later a smaller number are prototyped (chapter five) and evaluated (chapter six) as part of a developmental cycle. We will focus in this chapter on the idea generation process from a design perspective, as there are many other works that address the topic of creativity more broadly.