This book is not finished. We’ve been developing it over the past few years. It began as a manilla folder with copies of different process models. We completed the first “book” version as part of a project undertaken for Elaine Coleman and Sun’s Virtual Center for Innovation. We present this version for educational purposes only. We have obtained no permissions to reproduce any of the models. Copyrights remain with their owners.
If you know of any models which are not featured in this book, please feel free to share them with us.
Everyone designs. The teacher arranging desks for a discussion. The entrepreneur planning a business. The team building a rocket.
Their results differ. So do their goals. So do the scales of their projects and the media they use. Even their actions appear quite different. What’s similar is that they are designing. What’s similar are the processes they follow.
Our processes determine the quality of our products. If we wish to improve our products, we must improve our processes; we must continually redesign not just our products but also the way we design. That’s why we study the design process. To know what we do and how we do it. To understand it and improve it. To become better designers.
In this book, I have collected over one-hundred descriptions of design and development processes, from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, quality management, and software development. They range from short mnemonic devices, such as the 4Ds (define, design, develop, deploy), to elaborate schemes, such as Archer’s 9-phase, 229-step “systematic method for designers.” Some are synonyms for the same process; others represent differing approaches to design.
By presenting these examples, I hope to foster debate about design and development processes.
How do we design? Why do we do it that way?
How do we describe what we do? Why do we talk about it that way?
How do we do better?
Asking these questions has practical goals:
- reducing risk (increasing the probability of success)
- setting expectations (reducing uncertainty and fear)
- increasing repeatability (enabling improvement)
Examining processes may not benefit everyone. For an individual designer—imagine someone working alone on a poster—focusing on process may hinder more than it helps. But teaching new designers or working with teams on large projects requires us to reflect on our process. Success depends on:
- defining roles and processes in advance
- documenting what we actually did
- identifying and fixing broken processes
Ad hoc development processes are not efficient and not repeatable. They constantly must be reinvented making improvement nearly impossible. At a small scale, the costs may not matter, but large organizations cannot sustain them.
From this discussion, more subtle questions also arise:
How do we minimize risk while also maximizing creativity?
When must we use a heavy-weight process? And when will a light-weight process suffice?
What is the place of interaction design within the larger software development process?
What is the place of the software development process within the larger business formation processes?
What does it mean to conceive of business formation as a design process?
10 Comments
Dean Meyers
Dec 5, 2008
5:46 am
This is a tour-de-force, wiht great (and, halleluia, consistent) diagramming to accompany clean clear text on designing as a process.
carlnunes
Dec 7, 2008
5:12 am
trial and error
BrianSJ
Dec 9, 2008
3:18 am
Thank you so much. It is wonderful to see great work, such as Chris Jones’, being brought to a new audience.
Nick Marsh
Dec 10, 2008
1:43 am
Thank you so much for putting this together - Its a super inspiring (and excitingly daunting!) piece of work. I’ve posted it on my blog to share with the service design community. http://www.choosenick.com/?action=view&url=how-do-you-design Also, we have a process description on our website that you may wish to incorporate: http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/our_process
Christopher Fahey
Dec 12, 2008
5:11 pm
What a fantastic collection!
My favorite of all time, however, is still this one:
Michael Beirut on his design process: “When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?” (http://www.designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=17485)
sascha
Dec 14, 2008
8:01 am
Locative media and the city: from BLVD-urbanism towards MySpace urbanism by Martijn de Waal
“Great cities are not like towns, only larger”, urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs observed almost half a century ago. But what then is it that makes a city into a city? Now that telecom operators, handset builders, and media companies are churning out new media technologies that promise to drastically alter our sense of place, this question has once again become very urgent. Whether we call them locative media, contextual media, or placed-based media, these technologies promise to change the way we interact with our surroundings. Let me call this new way of experiencing the city “MySpace urbanism”.
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/locative-media-and-the-city
Jure Cuhalev » Blog Archive » How do you design? - Free E-Book
Dec 18, 2008
3:34 pm
[...] I’ve always been a bit of methodology junkie, so imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this great Beta E-book on design methodologies. Author Hugh Dubberly walks us over 100 different processes and methodologies in his book How do you design? [...]
Adam Richardson
Dec 30, 2008
11:38 pm
Thanks for bringing this together, it’s a great collection. I look forward to absorbing it in more detail. I actually did a bit of consulting for Sun on their new product development process, but for SMCC rather than SunSoft, so it was interesting to see their process - actually quite different.
There is a great quote in Ralph Caplan’s classic book By Design from Charles Eames about the process that he and Eero Saarinen used in one of their early collaborations. It’s lengthy so I won’t quote it here, but I have it in an old blog post: http://www.richardsona.com/main/2006/2/22/the-difficult-things-are-easy-its-the-simple-things-which-are-difficult.html
Would be fun to see this one broken down as a graphic!
Christian Drehkopf
Mar 25, 2009
7:33 am
You probably should have a look at our diploma. We developed a “Design-Process” for designers who want successfully design business. The process could be used for service design as for business-model and brand design also. For instance it is written in German but will be translated into near future.
http://process-design.org/bilder.html
Cheers Christian
Waikit Chung
Apr 22, 2009
11:01 pm
Thank you for the very nice free PDF book, which is very interesting to read. I have shared it with my readers, who are mostly industrial designers:
http://www.productdesignhub.com/articles/35-design-insights/55-how-do-you-design