I have been doing some readings to try to put together some frameworks that would teach non-designers what ‘design’ actually is. I came across the book How Designers Think by UK architect/designer Bryan Lawson, which offers a bunch of examples of how others have tried to represent the design process.
Here are my notes on his sampler of ‘design processes’. I hope to do some more posts where I can bring together more modeling of the Design Process, and link them all together into a little compendium. My hypothesis is that there are a handful of very good, but very different models of how to do design — and that a designer should know them all and use the one that is most appropriate to the challenge at hand. This instinctually makes more sense to me than having one rigid recipe that the designer should apply to every problem she tries to approach. That makes for too abstract a process, and one that the designer necessarily will cheat on & adjust — so why not model out some more specific types that the designer can choose from, and abandon the one-size-fits-all approach?
