500 Word Essay On The Design Process

The design process is how you get from start to finish when designing something. It's all of the things you need to do before you could even design something that is worth selling.

At the start of the design process is a brief, something that entails you create a final outcome for a particular purpose. Having a brief gives you something to work from and makes it easier to get started. It doesn't have to be a long brief, it could just be one word but it has to have something to start with so you can move on to step two.

Step two of the design process is research, without this you wouldn't get anywhere with your work and would find yourself going round in circles with the same pointless ideas that have nothing to do with the brief. Your research pushes any ideas you started with and makes them stronger and a whole lot easier to get any decent ones out of them.

Step three is any ideas you might have taken from your research. You need to work from any text or images you have gathered and start jotting down anything that might be interesting or is to do with the brief, even if you thing the idea might be stupid you can always work from it and turn it into something that could prove ideal. The whole way through the idea process you need to make sure you gathering more and more research to help with your work and you're developing you’re ideas so you can build them up to a final outcome.

One you have something to start with you need to do some experimental work. So if you work in textiles you could try different techniques or stitches to work with, with sculptural work you could use different materials to create different effects. With experimental work comes more research because you need to be looking into any effects or techniques you may have used so you have an idea of how its done and how to use it safely. When doing experimental work you need to make sure you constantly going back to you ideas and developing them so you can do more work which will then also develop any ideas you may have.

The next step in the design process is having a final outcome that makes sense and has derived from any research you have done. To create a final piece that will be successful in any industry you work in you need to make sure you've always gone back to research when you get stuck and have developed any ideas you wanted to do so they link back to the brief and full fill a particular need or purpose. Your final outcome could be anything thing as long as it meets all the guidelines your brief has set for you to follow.

The last step in the design process is evaluating all work you have done and recognising anywhere it could be improved. You need to break down any work you've done and jot down how well it may have gone, you also need to put any areas for improvement so you can learn from these and make any future designs better. Putting down anything that looks good or has gone well will also help because you can see how much you've learnt and how far you've come from that first idea.