OUGD504 - Brief 01 - Design Process

The Studio Brief:

During this week you will design and produce a folded leaflet entitled "The Design Process" that describes your understanding of the design process and specifically how this is applied to design problems. This assignment will allow you to explore the nature of design at an increasingly commercial level while also exploring creative approaches to leaflet design and folding.

This brief is only one week long and therefore will be very intensive. You will be given support by your tutors in the form of crits and tutorials while studio tasks will focus on aspects related to constructing and designing leaflets. You will be expected to explore and experiment with paper and card stock: folding techniques and styles; and graphic concepts and communication. Your progress, developments and creative decisions should be documented in your studio blog.

At the end of the week you will present your final leaflet design and plan for print to the rest of the group. You will receive feedback and points to consider during this final crit.

You are graphic designers; everything you produce should be designed, considered and effective. You need to be in complete control, even if it's carefully arranged to look casual! Don't ignore your knowledge of layout but expand upon it!

Leaflets are ubiquitous! They are a favoured medium for many businesses and organisations for delivering information to customers and clients. Most commercial printers will offer at least some leaflet printing/folding services while others will offer more complex and sophisticated folding and printing packages. Therefore it is important to consider not only the potential of leaflet design but also the financial and practical limitations.

The design process: In developing your understanding of the design process at an increasingly professional level you will show that you have considered the financial, practical and time-based concerns in regards to leaflet design.

The broad conceptual over view of how design goes through a process from brief to final result.  What leads up to a series of events that result in a final realised concept? The process of folding the stock is in itself a design process.

What is the generic design process that works and can be applied to a wide range of real life design situations?

How do I display this information? Info-graphics, flowcharts, bullet points, questions and answers, yes/no answers, chatter box, series of Q&A’s, photography and image, type and image or pure type?

Other's interpretations of what ‘The Design Process’ can mean:

The Design Process
1. Identify a Need.	Identify a Need or Purpose in a given situation.
2. Design Brief.	Produce a short Design Brief.
3. Tasks Schedule.	List all major areas of work and allocate times and deadlines.
4. Analysis of Brief.	Look at the Brief and produce a list of research questions.
5. Research.	Identify and collate information only relevant to the Analysis of Brief.
6. Specification.	Produce a list of design requirements found from research relevant to the Brief.
7. Generate Ideas.	Generate a range of different possible solutions satisfying the Specification.
8. Choose Solution.	Produce a solution to the Brief using the Specification and your Generated Ideas.
9. Develop Solution.	Generate details necessary to make the solution.
10. Make Solution.	Produce the solution.
11. Test Solution.	Test your solution against the Brief and Specification.
12. Modify Solution.	List modifications to improve the solution's effectiveness.
13. Evaluation.	Evaluate the project against the Brief and Specification, giving recommendations.

We all require food and shelter at the basic level, but after that we want different things because we all have different life styles. People use manufactured products so that they can do things. As people get older they want different things. It is the role of the Designer to find out what people want and produce solutions to their problems. It is said that a large manufacturer designed and made a range of eggcups for the Asian market. If they had done their research they would have found out that Asian eggs would not fit. The Designer must also establish where this need exists.

People complain that the product they have just purchased does not do what they wanted it to do. The need of the consumer is not being met by the product. This is the starting point of many "new" designs. Manufacturers spend fortunes asking customers about their own and competitors products to see if they can alter an existing product by adding new features to boost flagging sales.

NEED: What the consumer wants. This need may be real or it may be dreamt up by marketing department.

DESIGN PROCESS IN SEVEN STAGES:

·        DEFINE

·        RESEARCH

·        IDEATE

·        PROTOTYPE

·        SELECT

·        IMPLEMENT

·        LEARN

For me, this very simplified design process makes the most sense for me. I tend to work pretty quickly and abstractly. I didn't really consider myself to have a specific or regimented 'design process' as such before receiving this brief, but after doing some initial research and mind mapping I realised of course that I do have a unique design process. 

I thought it would be a good idea to find some info-graphic images which illustrate other people's ways of interpreting what a design process is and can be. This secondary research was used to inform the study task which I did in the afternoon session.

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-methods-step-1-discover