978-1-6654-2742-5/21/$31.00 ©2021 European Union Creative Narration as an Ideation Technique Dimosthenis Manias School of Applied Arts and Sustainable Design Hellenic Open University Patras, Greece Dimosthenis.manias@gmail.com Irene Mavrommati School of Applied Arts and Sustainable Design Hellenic Open University Patras, Greece Mavrommati@eap.gr Ioannis Chatzigiannakis Department of Computer, Control & Management Engineering Sapienza University of Rome Rome, Italy ichatz@diag.uniroma1.it Creative Narration is a technique that has the potential to enhance the initial design process of ideation in terms of collaboration and creativity. In this case study, the technique was used in the context of a distance creative (ideation) workshop to ideate on products in the specific field of Data Ethics. An initial assessment from this process, highlighting the strong and weak points of the technique, is discussed in this paper. Keywords: creative narration, workshop, technic evaluation, ideation, design thinking I. INTRODUCTION The Fourth Industrial Revolution presupposes the seamless coexistence of man and technology, and their co-evolution in ways presently unforeseen. Engineers need to include creativity and imagination, to grasp ideas of a future that “can be made” possible, and be more flexible in the way they perceive the problem space. They need to practice broad ideation skills, thinking divergent as well as convergent, and to be able to use techniques that make them think solutions out-of-the-box. Appropriate ideation design processes should enable them to be capable to adapt to a dynamic and evolving world, to leave room for people to express themselves, to be structured, understandable and effective. Current innovation processes are not completely reliable in terms of innovation production (Kumar, 2012). In the last two decades, the market has shifted from price-based competition to knowledge-based competition (Nyholm, & Langkilde, (2003)). For innovation to produce better results, the products that are created should meet the needs of consumers. At Avouris, et al (2018) the engineer students tend to deal with technologies they feel familiar. The produced scenarios didn’t imply any innovation, they didn’t solve the problems in a new way and they didn’t cover the gaps. Namely, the thought was “inside the box” because it failed to create non- functional-requirements or bigger questions. The methodology that’s been suggested in this research is trying to improve the creating scenarios processes by giving great possibilities for changes in the world and the main characters of the scenarios, and by helping the designers to follow those initial assumptions during the whole scenario creation process. It binds them to find a solution to a problem of imagination in an intelligible way. A. Current situation The design process is a creative process that borrows several techniques from the Arts, including literature, theater, visual arts, cinematic arts, etc. During the design process, various disciplines participate and contribute to the functional and non-functional specifications of the designed product, το be implemented by the engineers. Innovation and creativity are some of the teams’ concerns. Modern design processes aim to discover the user needs, explore the context of use, determine the interactions between all involved actors, and visualize the future (Nyholm, & Langkilde, 2003)). B. Creativity There are two theories in Western culture about creativity. The idealistic theory, which supports that ideas are created spontaneously by the subject's subconscious, and the theory of action claiming that creation is the result of a process (Sawyer, 2011). Scientists have proved that the theory of action is more close to reality. Innovation can be achieved through a defined procedure, following several phases. “Balloon” is the most simple model for creativity and it has two stages In the first stage, many ideas are created through "divergent thinking" and in the second stage they all end up in one through "convergent thinking" (Sawyer, 2011). Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is considered as an established method for identifying a problem or a challenge and then deal with it imaginatively and innovatively. It helps redefine the problems and opportunities coming up with new, innovative answers in order to solve them, and then take action (Osborn, 2012). C. Design Thinking Design Thinking started from the business sector as a process destined for the development of new products. The term refers to techniques that provide practical solutions to problems that require creativity. Such problems are the ones that are