<aside> 🚩 The large-scale structure of the design process used in this course includes three stages forming an iterative loop: studying a design problem, proposing an intervention solve the problem, and critiquing the proposed intervention.
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In educational settings, iteration - the gradual refinement of a solution over time - is well documented in the research as an important learning tool. Iteration provides students the opportunity to try new things, study and test them, discover problems with them, and revise and fix those problems.
We call this kind of iteration the Study-Propose-Critique (SPC) loop.
One learns by reflecting on one's mistakes, and improving on previous attempts. Thus, in this course, we will use iteration to help you learn how to think like a designer. You may well someday forget the facts that you memorized in this course, but you will hopefully remember the patterns of thinking that embody the activity of designing.
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. B.F. Skinner, 1904-1990
Overview of the SPC Loop.
The SPC loop is shown to the left.
The process is bootstrapped by starting the Study stage with the Design Brief as input.
Each main activity of the SPC loop (blue) produces a specific output (yellow) that becomes the input to the next activity.
One cycles through the loop until (a) all Design Issues have been resolved, or (b) enough Design Issues have been resolved to commit the Design Concept to further development (optimization, prototype & test, etc.) or (c) resources for this part of intervention development are exhausted.
The orange boxes within the main loop identify the four major documents that will capture your design work.
As the course proceeds, you will execute several passes through the SPC loop, and you will be provided with more tools and methods to apply to each stage. Thus, not only will you refine your design, but you will also refine how you design it.
In the Study stage, you analyze all the currently available information, do some background research, and use that information to determine requirements for your design.
Establishing good requirements is essential to good engineering design, because without a rational, well though out set of requirements, it's virtually impossible to design an intervention that will lead to a preferred situation.
While research is inevitably necessary to ground requirements, it is important to target your research to areas of concern most likely to be important to the project. Research that turns out to have been unnecessary is just a waste of time and resources.
During the first pass through the SPC loop, the only project information you will have is the Design Brief. In subsequent passes, the amount of information you will have to study from will be much greater, including all the Situational Knowledge Base, Requirements, Design Concepts, and Design Issues you've accumulated to that point in the process.
Read about the Study stage and about requirements on the Requirements page.
The Propose stage is where you use your current requirements to develop and refine Design Concepts. A design concept contains a number of embodiments, each of which behaves in a way that provides a required function in your intervention.
This is the stage where you can be creative and innovative.