Ideation Sketching

For this project I will be practicing the concept of ideation by trying to generate designs for commuting. When drawing the first ten sketches I tried to come up with various wild ideas that would further spark my creativity.

I chose my sketch number 7, which is about a radar watch that calls car for you and tracks your location. The reason is to expand the idea of wearable technologies to make people’s lives easier while commuting (see the ten sketches below). For instance, one of my designs is a watch that would unlock bikes when the owner is in a certain distance. I then labeled my sketches with words that explain the function of my drawings and numbers that order my sketches in sets for clarity.

I liked this project because I enjoy designing and sketching. However, few questions came to mind while I was sketching, “What is considered a good design sketch?” and “What should I do when I’m out of ideas?” I ran out of ideas when I reached my sixth sketch, and then I realised that I was too afraid to think out of the box. In the future, I would draw out my ideas without considering whether technologies to make my designs into reality or not exist. So, I would go for it and let the wild ideas spark my creativity.

If you strayed from the original theme, explain why you did that and why it was helpful to your creative process? While sketching I realised that I would get too focused on one idea that it prevented me from my creative thinking process or sidetracked me from the prompt. So I drew all of the things that came up to me on a piece of sketch paper and came back to them later. Being strayed away allows me to think more about the topic in all kinds of aspects and use them in another way later on.

This type of work is important because it could be applied to multiple fields not just UX design. Drawing is a way of communicating; a universal language that people share. Additionally, ideation is a way to brainstorm ideas that help you spark creativities, strengthen the clarity of your topic, and widen the aspect of looking towards the topic. For example, if your working in a design team this would really make a difference when streams of various ideas are coming out at the same time; the best way is to draw it out and develop them into more comprehensive solutions.