 Hi, everybody. I'm Simon Cook. I'm the commercial director of Pragmatic. I've been a designer for over 20 years and I previously ran a creative agency with my co-founder, which we started back in 2003 and it merged with Pragmatic just over two years ago. But nowadays I use my creative skills to help the company promote itself and win business. I still practice design and you can see some of my work at this address here on alone. But to give you an insight to the sort of person I am, I'm the kind of guy that has moments like this regularly, where ideas pop into your head and for me it's pretty much the most exciting thing of my job. There's really no better feeling and it's this feeling that's inspired me to try and tackle what makes a great idea and find out where they come from. So let's kick off with a quote. This is from a famous creative mind, Mr Bob Dylan. Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you can find it. The interesting thing about this is Bob seems to be referring to inspiration almost as a physical thing when he describes you have to find it. It's like it's hidden somewhere. You have to go looking for it, except nobody really knows where it is. So the question is where does inspiration come from? Where do ideas come from? I think to answer that we have to look at the notion of finding something and finding something implies direction and location. It suggests that we need guidance, like a map perhaps. But before I go any further, I'm just going to give you a random fact that stick with me is relevant. The ancient Greeks believed that creativity and inspiration didn't come from the human beings. They believed it was like a divine spirit called Daemon. And likewise, the Romans believed that a creative spirit followed each individual right through our lives from death to birth. Interestingly, they called it your genius. But really modern thinking is that the genius lies within, so the path to creativity is kind of an inward facing one, like a map of the mind, which leads me neatly on to mind mapping. What you see here is a mind map created in a bit of software called Mindly. It should be animating, but basically what this will show is a piece of software shows a walkthrough of this talk. It's the closest thing that I could come up with to show the actual origins of design inspiration. The mind map that I created illustrates how design theories fit in. It talks about tools and processing of ideation. So to get started, where I started with this talk was looking at design theories. Now, there are many design theories around today. Only yesterday John Mayder was talking about deep design. That was something I hadn't heard that phrase before. Theories change over time. There are many new theories coming out. There are ones that have been around for decades. What's true of most of these theories is that they evolve over time with the onslaught of technology, especially when we think about AI and machine learning, for example. It pushes the boundaries of these theories and forces us all to think about new ways, new directions. But generally speaking, with most design theories or methods, there's always a common place for ideation. There's always a place where ideas have to surface to the top. For us, pragmatic, we use a design method called design thinking. Many of you may already know of design thinking. It came from the 1980s and has itself evolved over time. But what we know today about design thinking is largely attributed to David Kelly, who's the founder of the Stanford University's D-School, and also IDO. Design thinking generally is split into five sections. I said before, some of you may know this, some of you may not. I'll whip through them quickly. I won't dwell too much because it's the ideation stage that we're really interested in. Firstly, empathy. Empathise. This is the process of creating a deep understanding of the user's needs and understanding the context of the problem. This is like the research and data collection stage. It comes before definition or define. Define is about clearly articulating a problem, setting boundaries and creating the brief so your design team can carry on and develop down a single direction. Next is prototyping. Prototyping is really about creating low-fi versions of the assets to quickly sense-check. Notice I've skipped the idea. We'll come back to that. But it's about sense-checking your ideas, seeing them as quickly as possible to see if they really work. Lastly, testing. That's about testing those prototypes, getting feedback and starting into an infinite loop of iteration. Meaning that you might test something and your theory wasn't quite right and you can loop back to definition, redefine that theory, come up with some new ideas and re-prototype. That's around until you successfully achieve what you're looking for. Ideate. This is the bit we're really interested in. This is the bit I'm focusing on today. Ideation is the process of idea generation. The first point to discuss about ideation is tools. Some of the tools we're going to look at today, many of those you're probably familiar with and I'm not going to teach you how to use these tools but I'm going to use them. It's really about the tools in the context of the ideation process, where they come, how they're useful. Let's start with sketching. Often the first point for any designer, a place that I would immediately turn to for any kind of creative challenge. Sketching, for me, interesting really because I see sketching as a kind of an output exercise. It's about taking thoughts from the mind and rapidly transforming them onto paper. Think of it as output. If you ask yourself, is sketching where inspiration comes from? I'll probably say no, not really. It's a tool for recording it. Likewise, there's a tool here, Adobe Comp, which takes sketching into digital. Again, I don't think it's the point of ideation. I think it's a great tool for speeding up that process but not really where inspiration comes from. Mind mapping, saw this before, mind mapping. Much like sketching, mind mapping for me again is the process of taking thoughts from the mind, getting it down onto paper or in this case digital, it's actually interactive. But the good news is there are some tools that can provide inspiration. Up here, these icons represent, you might recognise these, Adobe Capture, Mewsley, Panda and Colours or Coolers if you choose to pronounce it. The two on the end are used for creating colour palettes, brilliant tools to create complementary colour palettes for your design. The two in the middle, they represent tools that can provide content. These tools, these digital tools, can actually give you inspiration. They can give you input. So let's have a deeper look at one of them. Mewsley, I don't know anybody who uses this. I started using this about six months ago and I think it's an amazing tool. It's a Chrome browser extension and the way that Mewsley works is every time you open a new window in Chrome before you've typed in your URL or search query, Mewsley will load a bunch of creative content that comes from various sources, including dribble, product hunt, tech crunch, behance, et cetera. You can see how unlike sketching and mind mapping, this is input, brainstorming, another ideation technique, often the first point when a team would get together, it's the first exercise we do. So interestingly, brainstorming provides both input and output. So if you think about it, I mean, when you get together, members of the team will come with ideas, we'll pull together, we'll discuss those ideas and there's some form of output. But there are some who believe that brainstorming has limited value for ideation. This notion is backed up by this quote here from Tim Shiner. He's the principal designer at Salesforce. This quote was published in the Design Thinking Handbook by Design Better. Tim says, I don't believe the value of brainstorming is the ideas generated. He goes on to say, the experience of brainstorming creates a group of people with a shared perspective. And that is where the value lies. So I think I'd agree with that. There is value in a shared perspective, a lot of value in a shared perspective. Being in a design team and having been focused on the same direction is incredibly productive. But I also think that brainstorming is a point of inspiration, a point of ideation. And I think probably everybody here has experienced at some point when you're in a brainstorming session an original idea happened there and then right in front of you. So to sum up, there are hundreds of tools available to help you with ideation. We haven't even touched upon social media, for example visual tools like Pinterest and Instagram. But remember that different tools, there may be equal in the value to design, but some tools provide more inspiration than others. So the second point of discussion in ideation is the process, how this kind of happens. And this for me is where it gets really interesting. If we think about how we work as individuals, we're all different as creative thinkers, your designers, developers, however you choose to kind of express your creativity, we'll all do it in a different way. So the way to think about kind of process, we start with our habits, we all have our own kind of different habits. These things that you do throughout your working day. So a friend of mine, I've known for a number of years, Joe Gifford has recently published her very first book called The Brilliant Signition. And it's about unlocking your creative potential. And in the book, Joe offers guidance on optimising these daily habits. She calls them daily adventures. I love that term really. She talks about how you can kind of tweak your daily adventures. Let's say you every day you go to the same coffee shop and you order the same drink and, you know, try going somewhere else, drink something different. Perhaps you read the same blog every morning because it comes to you in your email and it's easy just to click on that link and read it. Maybe explore, click on another link, follow. Talk to a colleague, what do they read? Explore a little further. Kind of making room in your life for these little tweaks and listening to your colleagues and your community around you is extremely valuable. I'd say that changing these habits alone, the very act of variety will enrich your life and kind of increase your capacity to be inspired. Rhythm. Rhythm or flow is a state of mind that most kind of creative thinkers would recognise. This is when you're in your most productive mode, when you kind of, maybe you're sat at your desk or you're painting or whatever you're doing, but it's all going perfect. Everything you touch kind of looks amazing. It all turns to gold. Rhythm is associated with timing, of course. So, in my research for this talk, I spoke to a lot of creatives and asked designers when they felt most productive. So, the vast majority of kind of feedback kind of was the same. Some folks were slightly different. There is this peak in the morning, roughly 7am to 11am and it dips around lunchtime. We will get a bit sleepy after lunch. And then it peaks again around about from 4pm till 9pm. So, a little tip for designers and team leaders, perhaps if you've got to set yourself an ideation meeting, maybe don't do it at 2 o'clock. It's probably not the best time of the day. In his book titled, Daniel H. Pink explores this kind of very similar notion. I mean, he really starts off thinking about mood swings. And it's a very similar looking chart of rise in the morning, dip in the afternoon around lunchtime and a rise again in the evening. So far, we're kind of aligned. But Pink did a lot more research than I did. And he concluded that this kind of curve is sort of split in two. It's very sort of gets really interesting. So, the morning spike is where we're in a hyper-focus state of mind, which is roughly about now. Does anyone feel hyper-focused? I'll try standing up here. So, in that hyper-focus state of mind, our brain is better suited for cognitive tasks like mathematical problems, organising things, rifling through emails and replying to people. And it turns out that from his research, most kind of aha moments, most moments of inspiration happen in the second peak between 4 and 9 pm. And it seems that our creative minds, they kind of need a bit of time to relax, a bit of time to chill out. And it seems like having slightly less pressure on ourselves in those time zones, what we're able to do is our brain starts to think a bit wider and they start to kind of think about things that might have influenced us a few days before. And we start to connect the dots of what's in front of us now, what happened a week ago, what happened yesterday. And that's really those connecting of dots is what sparks ideas. So, I might be generalising, of course. I mean, we're all different. But I'd say the kind of tip here is knowing one's own creative rhythm can really help you develop as a designer. So discover what this curve looks like for you. So the last point of ideation that I'd like to discuss is influence. And I'd base the rest of this talk on kind of one notion, one equation. So let's hope I'm right. And that is that influence is equal to inspiration. Very much like energy transformation, what goes in one side comes out the other, transformed but in equal quantity. So in other words, the more influence, the more inspiration. So to help this explain this further, I've kind of broken this down into three areas of influence. How our digital environment influences us, how the physical world influences us, and how our community influences our creativity. First up, the digital environment. So this is a screenshot from my phone, roughly taken over about two days. What you can see here is a whole load of creative, visual and written content. And it's fair to say that this content is influencing my work in life. I don't consider this content intrusion. I welcome it and I'll be lost without it. So what you're looking at here is really the bedrock of my digital environment. But of course there are other forms of digital content that influence this. Blog posts, we all read blog posts. I picked this one out, this is from Sarah McHugh, who's the director of Shillington in the UK. This post was on Creative Boom, which in itself is a great source of inspiration. But as the title suggests, 50 of the best graphic design blogs for inspiration. And on that list, there's some big brands like Create by Adobe and Design Week. There's also some lesser well-known blogs. Like this one caught my eye. I think it was just the cool name and logo, HTTP stuff. Does anyone know this one? Maybe that's just the point, that by reading a post, clicking on it and taking one step further, I've managed to find some new inspiring content. And there are thousands of these around. Also on the list, WOGD. This is Women of Graphic Design. And it highlights the plight of women in what's, let's face it still, a gender-biased industry. But the point is that this post represents high quality content. And I wouldn't have found it if I didn't change my daily habits a little bit. If I didn't go on a daily adventure. Ordiobooks and podcasts. So let me tell you a little story. I work roughly two miles away from the office. And every evening, I walk home. It takes me about 40 minutes to walk home. And I do this for the kind of exercise and head space. But about two years ago, I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts. Now, the interesting thing about this is the timing. My walk home is at 5.30 or 6 o'clock, which is right at the peak of that second creative spike. And I can vouch for the fact that it really works for me when I'm in a kind of really kind of state where I can absorb creative content as I walk home. I find myself sort of stopping in the street and frantically typing notes in my phone. And when I get home, I jot a few more notes down and I put them aside and I can relax for the evening. What I do is process those notes in the morning when I'm in my hyper focus state. So top tip, if you don't already do it, if you have a commute early in the morning for me, it's the walk home, listen to podcasts and audiobooks. It's an incredibly valuable source of inspiration. Next up is the physical world. And creative environments have become a bit of a cliché these days. Does anyone have a slide in their office? Anyone? This is LEGO HQ in Denmark. Another random creative office space, a creative agency called Quirk in South Africa. It's probably not dissimilar to the pragmatic offices. What about this? I don't know if people kind of recognise this or do you associate this. But my point is that the physical world is important. It's important because we should feel comfortable in our working space. But really this is about being in a state of mind. When you think about it, the physical world can't really compete with the volume of inspirational content that you receive in the digital environment. There just simply aren't enough spaces on the wall for cool typography posters or inspirational quotes. But of course the working space isn't everything. The physical world is your home environment when you're out shopping cafes, restaurants, conferences. You've only got to walk around this place. There's some insane typography going on on the numbers of the rooms, etc. in this place. So my advice is really experience as much of that physical world as possible and allow it to influence your creativity. Lastly and most importantly for me is community. By community I mean people of course. Your work colleagues, your friends outside of work, your family, clients, suppliers even. All these people form your personal community. These are some of the great people at Pragmatic that I work with. Not all of them. This was taken at World Camp Paris, World Camp EU in Paris last year. And these people they influence my working day and they influence my kind of creativity and inspire me in a very positive way. So when you think about people, relationships and influence it's kind of obvious that the more people you connect with the more opportunity you have for design inspiration. So to recap, tools. Find the ones that work for you. Don't forget that some tools can provide you with input, others with output and some tools can do both. Process. Enjoy a few daily adventures. Change your habits a little but importantly find your creative rhythm and remember influence is equal to inspiration. So I'd like to leave you with a challenge and ideally you'd kind of complete this weekend. Many of you probably have done this already. I'd like you to talk to a friend, someone you know or perhaps someone you don't know. Maybe you've met them this weekend. See if you can share some creative ideas about perhaps something you're working on right now. Maybe it's a concept for a brand or some designs you're working on. Maybe you've got them on your phone in your pocket or on your laptop. See if you can provide somebody else with inspiration and see if you can find inspiration from them and make sure your visit to WordCamp is worthwhile. Thank you. Thank you very much Simon. I'm inspired and influenced I think already. I'm sure lots of other people will be as well. If we have questions on the floor, just a reminder our two mic spots are down here. So if you'd like to pop down and give a question. But there's no one there right now so that's a great opportunity because I did have a question I wanted to follow up with. Everybody here is engaged with WordPress in some way or another and it's probably fair to say that we all acknowledge that WordPress is an opinionated system and it does have constraints within it. I have heard people dealing with constraints as part of the creative process but how do you see them? There are upsides and downsides. How do you make the most out of that? I'd say constraints or restrictions. I mean they're good and they're evil aren't they? There are some that are really not required so let's say you receive a design brief. For example if I was required to put a presentation together under the branding of WordCamp Europe and I could only use their fonts and their colours it would probably be an unnecessary restraint on me. It would probably limit the creativity. On the other hand restraints can be extremely valuable so when you think about that design thinking process that tends to come in the definition stage so you've got your research at the beginning and you start to define and those restraints can be extremely helpful it helps define the problem it helps pull a team together and put them in the right direction so sometimes they're extremely valuable. You've just reminded me of a few weeks back I was talking to a designer on the drive home from London and the guy said to me and we were talking about restraints and he said to me imagine that you're given a brief and you were limited and the client said I don't want to see a horizontal nav or a vertical one for that exam I don't want to see a burger menu on mobile it feels really horrible restraint but the outcome of that might be that you're forced to be a little bit more creative about the navigation so you can spin that and turn it into a good thing. Embrace it, run with it, focus with it. I still get to ask more questions this is really cool. One thing I've been interested in you're talking about getting yourself into different spaces and you talked about the physical space in terms of your office environment or your home office and the places where you meet with other people do you do other events other particular sorts of events alongside word camps that you find a particularly good for inspiration? Recently the pragmatic company has moved offices and during that time we were forced to go and work at a co-working space and that turned out to be incredibly valuable it was a place in Brighton and it was full of a lot of different creative companies but just being in that space and mixing with other people was really valuable. I work at a co-working space myself and I've got a lot more out of it than I thought I would I thought I'd get a desk and free coffee although the desk and free coffee is a good thing Yes we have questions from the floor I just wanted to say to the audience we have a pretty full house so I've distributed mics along the back so you don't have to come all the way down forward so if you have a question just raise your hand and one of the people on a red shirt will come and bring your mic. There is a mic just there for you sir if you'd like to come to the mic just there that's right that's the one Oh and over there, there we go comes in a rush now, yes Thanks Simon, first, second I'm coming from the radio broadcasting world in my past life and in that world they say that all is invented Do you think that inspiration is a form for rebuild things? For rebuilding things Yeah, I heard So yesterday John May has said about a user cooking analogy and I've often used this in the past that with any, especially in the design industry there is only a kind of infinite amount of colour palettes or fonts you can use or styles of photography so I see kind of creative design as like cooking you kind of split it down into the elements so ultimately we're reusing the same elements we are kind of regurgitating what's kind of already there but that is design I hope that answers the question Thanks very much and a question over here at the front, yes? Hi Simon Long time ago I was the great graphic designer now I'm very terrible It's very simple We're surrounded with horrifying design and the clients too so we can't educate the clients Do you have any tips? How can we make some approach to explain our clients that is design it's very important and what is the good design That's a tough one Yeah it is a tough question So you're talking about the situation where you first meet a client who doesn't seem to value design and before you are able to close that project or even win that work you want to get that person onside you want them to value what you do and that is incredibly difficult In the real world let's say when you're selling your services as designers it often comes back to value and this is with my commercial hat on If you can prove to a potential client that the value of design actually has a kind of monetary value to it then you're properly on a winner if you can show how the value of branding and designing and creative work and the quality of creative work can actually return in terms of achieving their objectives perhaps they want to hit a certain number of hits on the site and so on So there are plenty of case studies out there about design value so if you haven't got the time to maybe create that yourself it wouldn't be a bad thing to refer that client to various case studies on the net which prove the value of creativity I'm going to chip in with another question myself You touched on a few stages earlier around there and into ideation as well and it was interesting to see you started off with an empathise stage So cat... defining that research process as an empathic thing We see the term empathy used increasingly as part of the process of creativity and design as well Could you talk a little bit more about what you mean by empathy? I think it's a weighted term and I think I'm particularly thinking of things that referenced Indi Young from Adaptive Path and her sort of practical empathy work she did there which is a whole design techniques I don't know that particular example but I can tell you for us for any designer I think this is where one of the fundamental differences between creative design and what might be considered purely artistic work is that design has a purpose you're trying to solve a problem So unless you know what that problem is you don't really stand the chance of solving it and the problem might not be clear so empathy is the way of understanding what those issues are and it's not an easy thing to achieve to just put yourselves in the shoes of your users just go there you go, I'm in their shoes I know what they're thinking it's done through research a lot of interviews or questionnaires that type of thing and the trick is to interact with perhaps people you wouldn't normally interact with and make sure these surveys and questionnaires and interviews go out to the real users and don't presume for one second that you can just step into their shoes and be empathised with their problems it just doesn't work like that Okay, is it possible to get inspiration from that space as well? Definitely, you'll discover so much about people and you'll definitely get those moments that didn't realise that that was the problem Okay, cool If we are good for questions we have up at the back there Yes, hello Is it working now? I have a very practical question When you have a lot of creative thoughts flowing and you're getting distracted a lot because you have things going on throughout the day I tend to just take whatever is near me and write it down or organise it and it's really not very efficient Do you have a favourite system for tracking and organising your creative thoughts? That's a really good question Firstly, I'd probably like to refer you to There's a book by Scott Bellsky who is the founder of Behance called Making Ideas Happen and it addresses that very point It's about when, as a creative mind you're flooded with ideas and you just can't cope with too many of them What do you do with them? Like most people I have a sketchbook full of ideas and some make it and some don't The trick is to record all those ideas One of the best things I like about that book is it refers to community which is something that I spoke about in this talk Scott talks about how community can validate your ideas By simply letting people know about your ideas your colleagues, your friends the more people you talk to and if they're honest with you and feedback you'll realise that some of them just fall by the wayside they're not that good, people aren't interested Other ideas, people want to be part of it and that's a great way of filtering out what's necessarily an idea that doesn't really have much fidelity to it or an idea that's really going to make it The trick is to share, share early and validate with friends, family, colleagues and so on Share early, share often I'm getting into a habit of it as well If there are more, is that one more about that? You are around I'm assuming We'll be over at the happiness bar later on That's a good place to catch up I should have checked, I brought it with me There is, it might just be starting I could creative tribes meet up as well in Andromeda, so that could be a good place to catch up and continue this conversation I really enjoy this, it's been an excellent counterpoint to John Miders talk yesterday exploring further the challenges and the techniques around design Thank you very much indeed Simon and thank you for all of this and thank you for the questions as well