Audiovisual – Motion Graphics
Editorial
Photography
The design
process
Design Thinking reinterpreted
Design has been widely defined in literature as a noun that refers to the end product – the designs – and as a verb that refers to the process of designing – the activity. According to the International Council of Design (2023), the design process involves a structured methodology that can be applied and adapted across all sorts of contexts. This has resulted in developing and theorising not one but many different models of design processes.
One of the most influential in the last two decades is the Design Thinking methodology, popularised by IDEO and Stanford University’s d.school. It has been highly cited due to its problem-solving qualities and human-centred focus, attracting great numbers of innovators in different fields, including education. It is typically represented as a cyclical model, placing strong emphasis on understanding users’ needs by framing questions and developing empathy with the people designers are creating for. Insights gathered during this initial phase are then analysed and clearly defined, allowing the ideation phase to begin. Through brainstorming and the expansion of creative possibilities, ideas are generated, refined, and selected based on their relevance to what the project intends to do. These ideas will then be materialised through rapid prototypes, that will in turn be tested and corrected multiple times until the final design is implemented and shared.
Design Thinking is not only an innovative methodology for product and interaction designers, to be used iteratively in every project, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for us, design educators. However, it is neither the only existing model nor a rigid framework, as it can and should be adapted depending on the context. For instance, in 2025, IDEO revisited the process in a way that could work more effectively with our students, reframing stages such as “empathise” and “define” into “frame a question”, “gather inspiration” and “synthetise for action”, making it suddenly more adaptable to our learners’ reality.
In 1995, Johnsey collected many other models of design processes, which most concur around four broad phases: investigation, ideation, implementation and lastly evaluation. These phases were taught to me when I studied design, later informing my practice as visual communication designer, and it is only when I started to teach that I began looking for ways to turn the design process and its phases more easily accessible and understandable for students. My aim was for them to see it as a flexible guideline to implement in their current projects and future professional life.
Through reflective practice, I came to observe that the design process often comes as tacit knowledge – an intuitive, repetitive mode of thinking that is embedded in a routine difficult to uncover. It required me to consider students as “users” of the design process, observing how they engage with each stage over the course of a two-months project, to re-adjust my diagrams. Since 2022, we have implemented a hexagonal model in our Foundation course. I chose not to rely on Design Thinking to avoid excluding the storytellers from disciplines such as Film, Photography, Animation, Fine Art and Illustration, where their starting point is not user-centred.
Therefore, the hexagonal diagram seemed more appropriate for our context, not only because of its cyclical rather than lineal structure, but also because it uses keywords that students have learned to appropriate, such as “brief”, “research” or “experiment”. Even if it comes closer to our students’ reality, it is not always evident to theorise such a guideline because of its openness. For example, even during the design phase, one continues doing research to gather inspiration, and even new ideas may come to mind. It is important to emphasise that this model works as a guideline rather than a prescriptive framework, supporting students in their project’s phases without constraining them, as if they couldn’t go back to a previous phase only because their outcome was already advanced in its development. Over time, I have observed that the most complex challenge for students is synthetising the different puzzle pieces of their work, when connecting research, stories and experiments to a central topic, and later, to a meaningful idea. It obviously needs practice, but also an openness to critical thinking, creativity and curiosity for a student to make such coherent and conceptually strong connections. Otherwise, as a colleague would note, they would just see “something cool on Pinterest” and work a project out of it.
The project
wheel
A time management activity
Students are not the only ones to feel confused with the steps of a design project, whether experimentation starts once research is done or whether they continue hand in hand and complement each other; whether the final outcome is one last experiment in a series of works or it is a more special one and needs weeks to be achieved properly. Although the design process is not always linear and predictable in a step-by-step journey as it varies from one person to another and from one project to another, I tried to generalise it in the following board game to allow students to understand broadly the main steps, where they are in the wheel and where they should be according to the project deadline.
The activity was designed in two parts for groups of three or four students. First, they were given the board and a series of cards with case studies examples, in which fictitious students tell their relation to their own creative project. In April 2021, my students had to read the information and guess where the fictitious student thinks he or she might be in the process, where the tutor of that student thinks he or she actually is according to their experience, and where the student should be according to the time spent working and the time left to hand in the outcome. My students started to talk to each other for a couple of minutes and they had to explain and justify where the pawn could be in the board. For some of them, the activity looked like an IELTS exam as certain reading skills were required to understand the cards. Then, based on the experience of an invented character, a fictitious student, the second part of the activity consisted in asking them to reflect on their own experience with their final major project and to write down what they were going to do in the six weeks left, being as precise as possible to see if their expectations could match with their reality. However, it is always difficult to ask someone what to do next when they don’t know what they are doing at the moment. Students had to plan and write down their tasks and, once fixed, I would verify them and suggest some changes if necessary.
This time management activity aimed to remind students that there are objective steps to follow to make a successful project and that they have to be very attentive with the time given to organise themselves, merging ambitions and realities. As facilitator, I would say it was more than essential to remind students that they were in the fifth week and that they only had six weeks to finish their project, as they immediately felt under pressure. There wasn’t much time to waste.