Abstract:  With the success of 2023’s presentation “Designing Ideas into Concepts” at the 17th Annual Design Principles & Practices Conference, we propose building on our break through findings. In Lisbon, we shared our initial findings from our innovative idea generation approach. We found, using our approach, that one could achieve an “Idea Ratio” (Utley & Klebahn, 2022) of 376 to 1. That is, one needs 376 ideas to stand a chance that one of them will be great, displaying a greater efficiency than Stanford’s claim of 2,000 to 1 (Utley & Klebahn, 2022) .
At last year’s conference, we showed that processing large quantities of ideas (over 7,000) was made more efcient by turning to categories that allowed judges to first eliminate all the ideas that lacked insight. Then, in a second stage, judges further used the categories to rank the remaining
ideas. Where judges were mostly in alignment, there is where we foundideas that displayed insights.
That initial method involved “selling a brick.” For this conference, the team proposes a workshop with a new design challenge —Sell a Crystal Ball— and invite conference attendees to join our research to help us further solidify a more efficient Idea Ratio than we presented at last year’s
conference.
For this year’s conference, workshop participants will be invited to collaborate and agree to a new set of machine rules to define what constitutes a “lack of insight” with regards to selling a crystal ball. At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will then be encouraged to take this new design challenge back to their respective institutions and, with the participation of students (and others), generate ideas to “sell a crystal ball.” Workshop facilitators will follow up with willing conference participants to process the resulting data set of ideas in search of the “great” ones.
We expect this international collaboration will generate a robust data set, with thousands of potential ideas, and allow us to further arrive at a new discrete number for a more efficient Idea Ratio. Ultimately the goal is to more accurately answer the question that has dogged designers forever: “How many ideas need to be generated in order to stand a reasonable chance that one of those ideas will be great?”

Bio: An agent of change for many years, Dan Ligon has had the honor of working at some of the most celebrated and award-winning advertising agencies in the United States, including CP+B, AKQA, Saatchi & Saatchi, JWT and more. His passion is developing groundbreaking and thought-provoking campaigns for such brand juggernauts as American Express, The North Face, Intel, Sprint and others. In 2010, Dan helped architect the famous Small Business Saturday campaign for American Express, which encouraged U.S. consumers to support local businesses. The “Shop Small” campaign struck a nerve with Americans, so much so that President Obama publicly tweeted his support and the U.S. Senate declared it a national day.
A long-standing veteran of the advertising and independent film scene, Ligon has been recognized with numerous awards including Cannes Grand Prix, Radio Mercury Awards, Sundance Film Premiers, One Show Pencils and more. Prior to joining the CU faculty, he was Director of Experience Design at Made Movement, a local Boulder-based advertising agency, where he spearheaded the creation of the popular Sherpa app, a revolutionary on-mountain audio guide for Copper Mountain Ski Resort in Colorado.
An early pioneer of the digital space, Ligon is passionate about experience design and believes post-advertising techniques are what’s needed to prepare a new generation to tackle the demands of modern communication in an ever-changing, multi-screen world. Dan holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Brown University. Follow him on the social media of your choice @professorligon. https://www.colorado.edu/cmci/people/advertising-public-relations-and-media-design/dan-ligon