Ideation is making ideas, the stuff that thoughts are made of. These come from a variety of sources such as interests into the discipline or past experiences.

Ideas can come from a variety of sources; however I have found that ideas are often rooted in past experiences. These past experiences reveal topics that we have been interested in before, but then new or intriguing ideas can come from the intersection of different topics. We use these experiences, both physical and metaphysical to understand the world around us.

This is why visiting your site, or talking to clients and others who are familiar with similar work is critical to the design process. Gathering inspiration from multiple sources: Internet, other people with vegetated wall assemblies, buildings with vegetated walls. These past experiences will reveal the principles that are used to organize and provide guidance for projects. these experiences are rooted in interests or other that are then applied lines of inquiry to the larger profession.

Personally this translated to vegetated architecture as I have always found plants and nature as an interesting part of our lives. Then color theory was used to organize the inquiry into these plants. These then are applied to an area of architecture: the building envelope and how these interact with our experience of architecture, resulting in the study of vegetated assemblies such as green walls and roofs.