A Cyclical Design Process
The clock starts ticking as soon as you ask “Why?”
A design process is essential when it comes to developing a product or service that is meaningful and engaging.
The Design Clock follows a Design Thinking process but in a cyclical layered manner to ensure designs are ever evolving and non-linear. It’s very helpful in design to consider each of these stages in order to ensure you don’t miss anything but, as in any creative work, sometimes it’s better to jump around. Just make sure you’re not skipping steps because you think you know something rather than you actually knowing you know…you know?
And try to set deadlines for each stage to stay on track! Often it can be good to place this in the centre of a project board (analogue or digital) and stick post-it’s at each stage with the intended deadline.
This tool can also be used when maintaining projects. Once completed, often projects are left to fall apart until a new project is required to replace the old one. By doing a faster maintenance check, say annually, you can run through the 5 stages quickly to ensure projects are up to date and still serving their intended purpose effectively.
This guide will help you follow a design process but won’t necessarily help you with being creative. For that, please look at the Creative Compass.