Iteration vs Ideation. Why are they important? What are they.
When you are working through a creative problem there are two major phases to working through ideas and developing them. They are usually sequential but you will often need to bounce back and forth between them. Those phases are ideation, and iteration. In short ideation is broad ideas, and iteration is refining those ideas.
Ideation
From the dictionary:
: the capacity for or the act of forming or entertaining ideas
This for me is the beginning of any creative project. All about creating a wide range of ideas and concepts you want to go far and wide. Not the time to be limited by anything. You know down the line there will be all kinds of constraints or concerns on your ideas but this stage is about putting those aside and getting as many wild ideas as possible.
The Ideation phase is the perfect time for things like mind mapping, where you start with a central idea and try to branch off as many other ideas off of it. Pushing as far as you possibly can, often into the absurd and irrational. Getting to the point where the ideas you have are clearly insane is when you know that you are really pushing yourself and the good stuff is coming.
A great example of this to me is the Segway scooter, that is a completely insane design that had a wild flurry of popularity. The people working on creating that did not limit themselves in any way; they kept pushing past the doubts to make something innovative and new. Was it a good idea? Who knows but it was groundbreaking and they had to ideatie like crazy.
Iteration
From the dictionary:
2: the action or a process of iterating or repeating: such as
a: a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result
b: the repetition of a sequence of computer instructions a specified number of times or until a condition is met compare
Iteration to me is the more serious side of the creative process. Ideation is the fun, light, and childlike side in many ways you are not limiting yourself at all. However you do need to focus your ideas into something tangible. Well you don’t need to, but at that point you are just being loose and having fun rather than a focused creative pursuit.
Iteration is about finding gems of ideas from your big lists or mind maps and making small changes and refinements on them until you end up with a gem of a solution, or product, or idea. This can take weeks, months, years depending on the project but you need to keep pushing through. THere will be a lot of hard moments and big choices to be made. Often you become attached to an idea that you want to make work but through the iteration process you come to realize it just won’t work. No matter how hard to try to refine it, issues stay.
The iteration phase is the perfect time for making lists of ideas and features. Having things laid out in black and white is good for making hard or tricky choices. During ideation it’s great to stay with bold visuals or concepts but when finalizing and clarifying more focused and clear worlds and images will help you keep things where they belong.
Ideation vs Iterations. Start your projects with wide ranging ideas, and finish them with iteration, refining and perfecting details. These two ideas in combination will give you a great framework for groundbreaking ideas.
-KW
