What I want to do is talk through three different reasons why I get you to do bad ideas. So, you've had a go at bad ideas yourself as an exercise, and I've talked you through some of these. Now, you're probably already getting an idea as to why I pose this as an exercise. So, the first reason is *training*. So, the examples that I gave were all silly examples.
Well, they're all supposed to be silly, but they weren't directed towards a brief. So, in other settings I might say I want a bad idea – well, we talked about one before, about notifications in an e-learning system. You know – how do we do notifications well? We might want to have bad ideas for a website, for a car designer or something like that.
So, you might have direct bad ideas. The ones I gave you were not; they were just random ones. And I did this more as a random exercise. Now, the reason for doing that is about *mind training*. It's about learning to think differently about stuff. Now, you notice – you've probably been in brainstorming sessions, and everybody says, 'There's going to be no judgement here. You know – just say your idea and we'll just...' Ugh... yeah – do you really believe that? Actually, you sort of know – you know – okay, they're supposed to be anything you think of... *so long as they're not too bad*.
So, *it's very difficult to actually have good ideas without feeling judged* if the other people don't feel they're good enough, if they don't spark enough interest from other people. Also, when you've had a good idea, it's really *hard to critique it yourself* or even to *hear somebody else critique it*. So, you've been in brainstorming sessions, you've thrown out your idea, and people tear to pieces.
And it's *your* good idea!!! Yeah, it's not (inaudible) good – but very hard yourself, when you've got something you know is a good idea. Now, you know most of your ideas will have problems with them. You want to be able to take your wonderful design for something and to be able to tear it apart, to be able to see where its weaknesses are. That's very hard when it's your baby. So, training – learning how to do that is a good thing.
The thing with bad ideas is it's much easier to do these. First of all, you don't have this issue of judgment, particularly in a group situation. If you're going to have bad ideas, you know they're bad ideas. How can anybody say your bad idea is a bad bad idea? They're *all* bad ideas. They're silly; that's good – the more bad they are. I mean the worst they can say is, 'That's a good idea.' And are you really going to be so upset if they say it's a good idea? No. All right. So, judgment almost disappears. It doesn't entirely; we're human.
But it really makes it a lot easier, especially in a group session, to throw out things if you say, 'We are going to deliberately throw out some really silly ideas.' Crucially, also, when it's a bad idea, you have a *low personal commitment* to it. You're expecting it to be bad – that's *why* you've put it out there, so you can critique it in a way that is really hard to do when it's your good idea. So, you can learn how to critique things, how to do; those prompts are about trying to tear them apart.
And I said remembering the good as well as the bad, but taking things apart. So, if it's your good idea, you can't do it. Interestingly enough, when it's something you know isn't working well – say it's that bit of software you really hate using; it's quite difficult to say, 'Ah, and there's this good thing about it.' Right? Now, you want to be able to do that, because if you want to design a better one of them, it's a good idea to know what's working in the old one in order to make sure you don't lose it in a new one.
You know – a classic way in which we make mistakes in design is *we fix one problem and in doing it create half a dozen new ones*. So, you want to be able to do that but it's quite hard to. Again, with bad ideas, you can easily critique them because you knew they were bad to start with. And it's quite fun when you find the good things about them as well. So, that's about mind training; it's about giving yourself those tools because those prompts – that's what's good, what's bad – I mean, they're very simple, but that's what you want to be doing to everything, whether it's the thing you want to fix
because you know it's bad and not working, or whether it's the new thing you want to create; you want to be able to do that critique, and it's a way of helping train yourself to do it. So, another thing we can do with bad ideas is actually *use them as a design tool*. So, when you want a good idea, it tends to encourage a level of conservatism, which we talked about in the brainstorm; you tend to – you know – so if you want a
good idea for a new kind of car, it'll probably have four wheels on, it'll probably have doors, it'll probably have a roof or maybe not if you're used to sports cars without. But it's going to have most things. The engine mostly is in the front, unless you've done a VW and you're used to one in the back. It's quite hard to not do just that ant-type creativity. Sometimes it's a good thing to do, but it's hard to actually make the larger leaps.
So, in fact, if you imagine – and I'm a mathematician originally, so I'm afraid the world lives as Venn diagrams as a mathematician. So, the blue area here – the little blue area is the set of all possible ideas, design ideas. And the green blobs are design ideas that are good ones. So, say you've got – it's transport options – there are some things that – so, they're a bit like islands here; that's why they're green, sort of islands in this ocean of ideas.
And a lot of ideas – the blue ones there – are not good. But there are good ideas, and related to one good idea there are usually others. So, if you look at your cars, most of them look vaguely the same, but there's also motorbikes, and motorbikes are quite different to cars. And there's very few half-in-between things between them. So, there are often gulfs between one set of good ideas which work and another set of good ideas. And it's very hard to bridge. So, if you are used to one way of thinking about stuff, it's very hard to jump
to a completely different part of the design space. So, you end up stuck, and actually often you have to end up in a bad space before you can find the next good space. So, good ideas, what happens is you wiggle around but you basically get stuck within one island of good ideas and never visit the rest. I mean, that can be sufficient. Sometimes that's all you need. But that doesn't help you make those radical jumps.
With bad ideas, it helps you to do the jumps because when you think of a bad idea you don't just do a little thing – actually because it'd be good if you did that – so, you think of something really silly. So, like, I'm going to have a car that's got two wheels, but they're both at the front, not two wheels one behind the other like a motorbike, but two and they're just at the front. You know that's a bad idea. So, you've allowed yourself to say, 'Or I'll have a car with no wheels at all.' – you know –
'I'll have a car with no... doors.' Yeah, I'm still being a bit incremental in terms of my small changes, you know. But – you know – a car that's like a donut you run; (inaud.) but they're – it's easier to jump way out of your comfort zone of good ideas when you've got a bad idea, when you know you've got to go into a bad idea. So, we're leaping into the ocean of ideas in idea space
off our little island which we felt comfortable in. What you notice with it analytically – by sort of questioning this, we were able to then pull ourselves back down. So, at the end part of that where we said, 'Can we turn it into a good idea?' – now for the training bit, I mean, it's fun to do but it's not necessary to do – but if you actually want to use this to generate ideas, so you can use in two ways – for training, but to actually generate ideas – then you want to pull it back and make it into a good idea again.
But as we do that because we're trying to retain the good things that were there because it was bad, often those are good things. So, like the melt with the chocolate teapot – you know – ordinary teapots do not taste good. So, if you want to retain the tasting goodness of the chocolate teapot, then we can't just fall back into our familiar teapot world. We end up somewhere different. So, as you pull it back and make it good, the likelihood is we're more likely to end up in a radically new island of good ideas
amongst the sea of bad ideas. Once we're there, we can then start to incrementally modify it and do things. So, but we've *allowed ourselves to make that big jump* and then we could do a bit of ant creativity over there to perhaps tidy up some of the gaps at the end – you know. Ways we can sort of fix problems and do that sort of incremental 'ant' fixing. But what we've done is we've explored *a whole new part of the design space*. The third thing – and possibly the most important – is about *understanding*.
As you critique the bad ideas, you start to understand the nature of the design space you're working in. So, as you try to say, 'Well, why is this bad?', you start to dig yourself into talking about the critical dimensions and criteria that describe your problem space. There are various things when we talk about design; there are *dimensions*, so you might talk about
– you know – well, we're talking about the meltiness, the amount of meltiness; you know – how melty is something? So, we've got a dimension there. *Criteria* – spilling the teapot; if it melts, it spills; so, a criteria is whether it spills or not and whether that's bad or not, which might vary on the context. *Properties of things* – you know – it's like whether, the breakiness of a hammer, and by understanding the properties of the glass, we might think of times either when it's good to have glass or a different (inaud.) or – that might actually just make us think about
materials and hammers *in general*. So, as we analyze these things, we *start to build a vocabulary* to talk about the space of designs we're working in. So, it forces us into this meta-level discussion. And one thing I've found is it's often hard to articulate some of these abstract qualities, but by analyzing something – now, it doesn't have to be a bad idea; it could be a good idea,
but if it is a good idea, you have some of these barriers – but by articulating those, you suddenly end up with an understanding of the design space. Now, from that understanding, you might then throw away all of the work you've done so far, but now you have a way – you're thinking about your design in a *radically different way*. But it's more like – if you've done this analysis, it's not like that unguided jump; it's more like you're doing a *guided move* and you've got a map of the terrain. And then, if you've got a map of the terrain, you don't have to just jump into the sea and then try
and find a piece of land, which is what the making-the-bad-idea-good bit was; you actually start to understand where all those pockets of land are, and you can move into them in a way which is intelligent, which is reasoned, but also radical and often very creative.