(THIS IS NOT A DESIGN PROCESS)

The Design Council's  Double Diamond diagram is an excellent model to use to learn about design processes. However in practise it is virtually impossible to follow step by step as the process of design is deeply messy and more free-flowing because many things are unpredictable when you are creating something new. . Trying to run design projects in schools in a one size fits all process can be impossibly stressful to staff and students, however the structure of a timetable and external assessment criteria results in a compromise.

The All Design interactive design process* has proved useful in the classroom when pupils are learning to understand how one activity will yield useful material to feeds into the next process, and how by attempting to do them in the order shown to appreciate how they might flow together will improve the quality of their work and the depth of their design thinking. Conversely we also teach that design work may start at any point in the double diamond, and may well move back and forth between the two as work progresses: it is perfectly appropriate to get to any stage in designing and realise that more work needs to be done on a previous stage in order to make further progress.

Outside of the classroom excellent design very rarely happens in this sequence:

• firstly designers working to tight budgets and schedules almost never have the time to do all of the processes,
• secondly the process often starts by making something first and giving it to people to observe how they interact with it.
• Lastly community-based design where designers go into a community or workplace and work to empower and guide people to develop their own solutions has been found to yield more efficient, user friendly design solutions of a much higher quality and longevity than a designer being brought into an unfamiliar situation to impose a solution.

(*Ceci n'est pas un procédé de design!")