“Remember: good ideation creates the innovation potential that the rest of the Design Thinking process makes actionable,” writes Michael Tiemann at Open Source.

When people think of design (and this is of course a generalization) they probably think of finished article not the “process” behind or the ideas that generated it. Do people consider a poem something “designed” by the poet. We don’t have to think of a poem’s visual or semantic arrangements in terms of the language of design. Roads, for example, just are: there when we leave the house. Their design, is, therefore, hidden.

Considering how an object is placed in a rock garden can be a question of design, not just “placement.” The environmental features of hypertext brings design logic to the writing, as would writing in Flash, because the author can arrange not just the narrative but also a visual arrangement of the narrative parts onto the screen, like stones in a garden, a wonderful layer of complexity that I think needs more study.

Designers of massive or small public spaces can and should study epistemology.