The emergence of ideas: the interplay between sources of inspiration and emerging design concepts

The development of new ideas is an essential concern for many design projects. There are, however, few in-depth studies of how such ideas emerge within these contexts. In this article we offer an analysis of the emergence of ideas from specific sources of inspiration, as they arise through negotiation and transformation, and are mediated by design artefacts during an Inspiration Card Workshop, a collaborative event in which findings from domain studies are combined with technological sources of inspiration, in order to generate design concepts. We present a micro-analytic study of the interwoven social and artefact-mediated interactions in the workshop, and identify essential phenomena that structure and create momentum in the development of new design concepts, namely (1) the manifest properties of Inspiration Cards and Concept Posters as physical props for encouraging and supporting design moves, (2) the semantic dimensions of the cards and posters as catalysts for discussion, derivation and ideation, and (3) ad hoc external sources of inspiration as means of supplementing and developing design concepts. The analysed design situation is characterised as being socially distributed, artefactually mediated, adaptive and emergent.