What Are Ideas?
What are ideas, really? This is a suspiciously basic inquiry, but despite the huge emphasis in the last decade on innovation, creativity, brainstorming, ideation, etc. there hasn’t been enough discussion of the fundamental nature of ideas.
The goal of this project is to look closely and deeply at how we talk about ideas as a way of helping us to work with and manage them. Part of the investigation is related to the metaphors we use to think about ideas. Is it a spatial metaphor? A generative metaphor (ideas are born, evolve, etc.)? A constructive metaphor (building ideas, shaping them, etc.)? The metaphors we use to describe ideas shape our conversations, tools, and processes.
