The big idea: The design process has five stages: empathize, define the project, ideation and modelling, designing a solution, presenting a solution.
Learn each one by what it produces. A stage with no output has not been done, whatever was written about it.
Step through each stage for what you do and what comes out of it — then the last step, where every arrow also runs backwards.
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| Stage | What you do | What you hand over |
|---|---|---|
| Empathize | Watch, ask and go there — find out who the users are and what really happens | Research findings, a primary persona, a user journey with pain points |
| Define the project | Turn findings into a stated problem and into criteria a solution is judged by | A problem statement and a design specification, split essential and desirable |
| Ideation and modelling | Generate genuinely different approaches and model them far enough to compare | A range of distinct ideas, each modelled, with a reasoned choice between them |
| Designing a solution | Take the chosen direction round model, test and refine until the spec is met | A developed design, test results and detailed drawings |
| Presenting a solution | Show the need, the key features, and the evidence against each criterion | Virtual representations and a specification table with measurements |
One project, five stages: Everything in this topic follows one project: a bedside table for a hospital ward.
Its users are patients, nurses and cleaners, who want different things from the same object — which is exactly the situation the design process exists for.
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The five stages are an order of priority, not a schedule. Testing a model sends you back to ideation. A nurse saying something you did not expect sends you back to the specification. A project with no backward arrows either got very lucky or never tested anything.
What sends you backwards, and where to
A model fails a test
Back to ideation if the principle was wrong, or to designing a solution if only the detail was.
A user says something you had not heard
Back to define the project — the specification is missing a criterion, and everything judged against it needs re-checking.
Nothing you generate meets the essentials
Back to empathize. Either the problem statement is wrong or you do not yet know enough about the users to solve it.
The solution works but nobody understands it
Stay in presenting — the design is fine and the communication is not, and the fix is a drawing rather than a redesign.
How this is tested — naming the design process stages and saying what each one produces. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — multiple choice
- Identify which stage an activity belongs to.
- Pick the output a named stage produces.
Paper 2 — analysing a product
- Outline the stages a named product's redesign would go through.
- Explain why the process is iterative rather than linear.
The trap: Listing five stage names. The marks are for what happens at a stage and what it hands over, and a list of five words answers neither.
A manufacturer is redesigning the bedside table used on hospital wards. Outline what would happen at each stage of the design process.
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