About the design process

Quite often I find that teams or clients either underestimate the need for a design process or overstate the need for a complex and strict project structure and call THAT the design process.

Which it isn’t. Actually, design is supposed to be a process in itself and well executed it covers all the angles of both analysis, creation and delivery. You can do that properly in many different ways but let’s always keep the formal process as simple as possible. I like the so called Double Diamond design process but as any model is has a couple of limitations and often needs a little bit of explanation. That's why I usually like to picture and clarify the model something like this:

I believe this model captures some essential approaches needed in almost any design project:

· The need to have an open mind and critical approach to the initial brief/problem definition.
· The need to work hard to understand and analyse as well as to create, evaluate and deliver.
· The need to be able to alternate between creating many ideas (divergent work) and refining/narrowing down the best ideas (convergent work).
· Also, I appreciate that the mindset attached to this model stresses the need to be people centered.
· The "original" Double Diamond does not clearly show the necessity of iterative work, that's why I want to include it in my model overview.

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So let’s not kill our creativity by believing that a design process should act as a constrainer. But also - let’s not jump to conclusions or just settle for on any random design we happen to like at the moment. When working with design we must acknowledge it’s a process and:

Mind the people, analyse the problem and it’s context, question the assumptions and we will arrive at great insights. From there on - let’s free our mind, work hard, test our stuff, excel at details and super-nice results will follow.