Practise thinking in space and time. An alternative to Powers of 10 that encourages you to look at a situation in space and time. Helpful for getting a new perspective. The easiest way I know is to literally draw the boxes. Start with what you’re dealing with in the centre then start filling the rest out. Another tool from the TRIZ toolkit.

9 Windows

A rapid design approach based on doing the minimum you can to create a testable prototype fast. Testing. Learning. Iterating. Rather than, say, taking longer and trying to design it all right first time.

Express - Test - Cycle

My favourite, and I think most helpful, version of the design process. I was introduced to it in the Needfinding course at Stanford taught by Dev Patnaik and Michael Barry. Based on an original framework from Chuck Owen at IIT. The, somewhat simplistic, user’s manual is to start with real observations of who you’re designing for, take time to analyse what you see and pull out some insights, put forward some principles to guide your design and, returning back to the concrete, develop some solutions. Then iterate. In reality it is never quite as simple as you may imagine.

Sketchplanations tagged with design-process