The Eleven Types of Ideation: A Reference for Teacher Educators and Mentors (Part 2 of 3)

Part 2 of a three-part series for D&T teacher educators, mentors and CPD leads. Part 1 set out why ‘ideation’ has been doing too much work and introduced the three axes the eleven types sit on. This part is the reference: what each type is, where it comes from, and what it looks like in a pupil's folder. Part 3 turns the typology into ITE and mentoring practice.

Matt McLain, Liverpool John Moores University, m.n.mclain@ljmu.ac.uk

A quick recap

If you've come straight to Part 2, the short version is this. ‘Ideation’ in D&T has been used as a catch-all for any moment when pupils have ideas, and as a single line in assessment criteria as if it names one thing. It doesn't. The typology below identifies eleven different kinds of ideation, organised along three independent axes: epistemic orientation (what relationship the idea has to the brief), social orientation (who is doing the thinking), and mediational resources orientation (how the idea emerges). The axes are independent: any epistemic move can be done individually or socially, on paper or in card and modelling foam. The eleven aren't a ladder, they're a repertoire, which is the move Part 3 builds on.

The eleven types

I group them by what they mostly do.

Working inside the brief (epistemic)

1. Adaption: Modifying an existing solution so it works for a new context, user or constraint, while keeping the core logic of the original. SCAMPER lives here. Product analysis and redesign lives here. Most pupil design work in England's GCSE specifications lives here. Drawing on Kimbell's assessment research, this is the dominant mode in our coursework, and we tend to undervalue it precisely because we've placed it at the bottom of an imagined ladder.

2. Combination: Taking parts of two or more existing solutions and synthesising them into something new. The phone case that is also a wallet. Bio-inspired design that mixes a biological strategy with a mechanical one. Theoretically this is Boden's combinational creativity and Koestler's bisociation.

3. Transposition: Not the same as combination. Transposition is about lifting a relational structure from one domain and mapping it onto another. A heart valve, a bike chain, the way ants find food: the move is to identify the underlying structure and transfer it. The article grounds this in Gentner's structure-mapping theory. Biomimicry is the obvious classroom example, but so is any deliberate use of metaphor or analogy in early ideation.

Reaching beyond the brief (epistemic)

4. Abduction: Reasoning backwards from a surprising observation or user behaviour to a plausible design proposition. The pupil watches three Year 7s actually using their lockers and infers a need. The cognitive move is from effect to cause. This is what Dorst and Cross argue real designers do, and it's almost invisible in most coursework folders.

5. Generation: Producing ideas without a single direct antecedent. Originality, novelty, divergent thinking. Brainstorming, blue-sky sketching, brainwriting. This is what most teachers actually mean when they say ‘ideation,’ and it is genuinely valuable, but it is only one of the eleven.

6. Speculation: Ideas oriented toward imagined alternative futures, not present solutions. The purpose is to provoke, to open debate, or to make values visible. Speculative design, design fiction, “what if school bags refused to carry weapons.” It should be noted that speculation isn't cognitively harder than adaption; it is different in kind, doing different work, and rarely rewarded in current schemes.

Reframing the brief (epistemic)

7. Transformation: Changing the rules of the game. The pupil does not solve the problem as given; they reframe it so the solution category changes. “Design a better lunchbox” becomes “the real problem is that school lunch is rushed.” Boden's transformational creativity, Schön's problem-setting, Dorst's frame creation. Be careful here: transformation isn't simply the top of a difficulty ladder. It operates at a different logical level, on the rules of the conceptual space rather than within them.

Who's doing the thinking (social)

8. Collaboration: Joint ideation among peers where the interaction itself produces ideas that no individual would have arrived at alone. Co-design workshops, design charrettes (intensive collaborative planning or co-design), structured group methods like Six Thinking Hats. The social process is part of the ideation, not just its setting.

9. Collection: Distributed ideation across a network of actors, human and non-human, where ideas emerge from the system rather than from any bounded group. Open innovation, crowdsourcing, maker communities, ideas circulating through shared tools and platforms. The pedagogical interest here is that materials, tools and platforms are doing real cognitive work alongside the people.

10. Participation: Ideation conducted with (not for) the people who will use the design. Users have epistemic authority because they live with the problem. The article draws on Sanders and Stappers' co-design work and the Scandinavian participatory design tradition. The diagnostic question is whether the social configuration includes people whose authority comes from being affected by the outcome, not from design expertise.

How the idea emerges (mediational resources)

11. Somaticisation: Ideation that proceeds through hands and materials before there is any mental picture to externalise. Ingold's "making as growth," Sennett's craftsman, Merleau-Ponty's embodied cognition. The material resists, suggests, co-produces the idea. Sketch modelling in foam and card, haptic exploration, tinkering with unfamiliar materials. This is not a less sophisticated form of ideation than propositional or graphic ideation. It is differently sophisticated.

Using the reference

The most useful thing a teacher educator or mentor can do with this list is read it through once, then keep it to hand. Before an observation, glance down it and ask: which of the eleven did this lesson plan invite and which did it accidentally close off? In a seminar, hand it out and ask trainees to label the ideation activities in a scheme they teach. In CPD, work through one unfamiliar type at a time… not all eleven at once.

Part 3 turns this into specific moves: how to audit a scheme of work with a trainee, how to build an ITE or CPD session around an unfamiliar type, and how to change the one question you ask in a post-lesson conversation.

Reference

McLain, M. (2026). The Name You Can Say Isn't the Real Name: A Typology of Ideation for Design and Technology Education. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 31(2), 323-343. https://doi.org/10.24377/DTEIJ.article3641