Delft Design Guide

Design strategies and methods

Annemiek van Boeijen, Jaap Daalhuizen, Jelle Zijlstra, Roos van der Schoor

• Publisher: Management Concepts Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9789063693824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Industrial Design

The Delft Design Guide presents an overview of product design approaches and methods used in the Bachelor and Master curriculum at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft. Product design at Industrial Design Engineering in Delft is regarded as a systematic and structured activity, purposeful and goal-oriented. Due to its complexity, designing requires a structured and systematic approach, as well as moments of heightened creativity. In this guide you will find some 70 strategies, techniques and methods that are taught in Delft. Some are unique to Delft, but many are more commonly known and widely used. The methods and techniques are each described in a practical one-page text, illustrated for further clarification and enriched with further reading suggestions. The Delft Design Guide serves three goals: / Design students can use it as a reference manual in their design projects, managing their personal development in becoming a designer. / Design tutors can use it as a reference manual to support students in their learning process / Professional designers can use the design guide as a reference manual to support their design processes.

FOREWORD

Ever since its founding in the 1960s, the Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering has taken a methodical approach to design education. But the methods were never uncontroversial. The Dutch writer Godfried Bomans asserted:

“In the realm of the mind a method is comparable to a crutch; the true thinker walks freely.”

Many designers share his thoughts. Good designers seem to need no methods. They tend to attribute their successes to intuition, creativity and expertise, and not to the use of particular methods.

Now, nobody believes anymore that designers can do without intuition, creativity and expertise, as research into the problem-solving behaviour and thought processes of designers has convincingly shown how essential these capacities are. But that does not mean that methods have no role to play in design.

Despite criticism and doubt – some godfathers of the ‘design methods movement’ of the 1960s became critics of their own work – methods have not disappeared from the scene. Methods are often used as means of teaching design. The development of better methods is probably the most important driver of design research. And it is not uncommon for design consultancies to advertise themselves on the basis of their specific methodological approaches.

Since 1991, industrial design students at the Delft University of Technology have been raised with the book Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods that I wrote together with Johannes Eekels. The genesis of this book goes back to our lectures in the 1970s, but much of its content is still relevant. However, the field of design has changed greatly. Nowadays, industrial designers also design services and social and economic artefacts. In product development, the social and behavioural sciences have come to play a major

role alongside engineering. Our awareness of the limits of production and consumption has increased enormously and unprecedented technological possibilities have emerged for the development of design tools.

Such developments have led to numerous new methods. I am extremely excited that finally a new

Delft textbook that also addresses these new methods has been published. But there is more to it. Methodological textbooks usually focus on detailed descriptions of methods and barely address their application. The authors of this book have explicitly opted for the latter perspective. As good descriptions of methods are sufficiently available, they confine themselves to short characterisations of methods and refer to relevant sources for more information. How should a project plan be designed given specific objectives and available resources, when and in what situation and how should a particular method be used, and what can and cannot be expected from the use of a method? This book gives answers to these and other such questions.

Thanks to this specific focus, this book provides an important contribution to the literature on design methods. Given the success of its digital forerunner, accessible on the TU Delft OpenCourseWare website, this book has a promising future ahead.

Norbert Roozenburg

Associate Editor of the International Journal Design Studies.

First graduate at the Delft Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in 1971.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without the expertise, inspiration and skills of design researchers and design educators and the support of the faculty management team. Our special thanks go to the contributors of this book who all worked as staff members, former staff members or students in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft. The editors hope that the book will justify their dedicated work. Cheers! In References and Further Reading we refer to their work with an asterix*.

Special thanks go to Petra Badke-Schaub and Remco Timmer as advising members of the editorial board.

Arjen Jansen

Bert Deen

Carlos Coimbra Cardoso Conny Bakker

Corné Quartel

Corrie van der Lelie

Erik Roscam Abbing Frido Smulders

Froukje Sleeswijk Visser Gert Pasman

Gulia Calabretta

Ingrid de Pauw

Jan Buijs

Joost Vogtländer Koos Eissen Lilian Henze

Marc Tassoul Marcel Crul

Marielle Creusen Matthijs van Dijk Nazli Cila

Norbert Roozenburg Nynke Tromp

Paul Hekkert

Pieter Desmet

Pieter Jan Stappers Pinar Cankurtaran Renee Wever

Stefan van de Geer Stella Boess

Sylvia Mooij

Wouter van der Hoog

How To Use This Guide

The Delft Design Guide presents design methods and approaches that can be useful to you as a designer, both during your time as a student and as a practitioner. We hope you will use the guide as a source and reference. It will help you to gradually build a rich repertoire of ways to approach the design of products and services.

An important recommendation It is crucial to be aware of two issues before you start using the book. First, design methods are not recipes for success, just like strictly following a cooking recipe is not a guarantee of a good meal. Methods will help you to structure your thinking and actions. In this guidebook, we present the essential steps that will enable you to work efficiently and achieve your goals without too many detours. Furthermore, the methods will help you to communicate with your team or client. Consequently, you will not lose your way in complex design processes. You will mostly learn by experience, reflecting critically on your chosen path and methods be useful to you as a designer, both during your time as a student and as a practitioner. We hope you will use the guide as a source and reference. It will help you to gradually build a rich repertoire of ways to approach the design of products and services.

Second, there are many ways to accomplish something. Your task is to find an appropriate approach for each new situation. To perform well, you need to adapt any method to the specific situation. The selection of an appropriate approach depends on your goal or task, the circumstances, your personality, background and experiences. For every ‘designer - design problem - environment’ combination there are multiple applicable methods that all have their benefits and limitations. The more methods you have experienced, the better your knowledge of which ways of working are suitable for you in tackling design problems effectively and efficiently.

Who is the book written for? The Delft Design Guide is first and foremost intended for design students. It complements the teaching materials provided in design courses. The book also supports design tutors by serving as a reference. Furthermore, course developers can use the book to make selections and divide the methods in the curriculum. And finally the Delft Design Guide serves as a reference for design practitioners.

When might you need this book? Designing distinguishes itself from other disciplines in that it combines a number of activities, such as visualising, creative thinking, empathising with the intended users and reasoning from values via functions to forms. In essence, designing is an activity that is intended to lead to new possibilities and an embodiment of those possibilities. Designing requires you to cope with uncertainty and to play with possibilities, leading to new insights that can result in innovations. As a designer you have the difficult task of understanding the world around you while creating new products that will change your world. Questions that you may ask yourself are:

Is there a specific way a designer thinks and acts?

What questions do I need to answer? How and when?

What activities do I need to perform? When and in which order?

How do I determine the boundaries of the context I am designing for?

How can I map the ‘world’ of my intended users?

When can I stop analysing and start creating and how do I generate ideas?

How do I choose between solutions?

Design methods and tools can help you answer these and many other questions.

What is in the book? Design education at Delft University of Technology focuses on the design process. By teaching design methods we aim to train students to achieve fluent control of design processes and thereby manage and execute design projects successfully. The models, approaches, perspectives and methods and tools presented in this book are taught at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft. Much of the content has been developed at Delft. Some of the content has been adopted – and sometimes modified – from outside sources. Together they represent the three main ‘pillars’ of Delft design education: People, Business and Technology. As the field of design is continuously evolving, the guide’s contents are a snapshot of the majority of methods we currently teach. New design methods are developed continuously. Nonetheless, this collection offers you a rich variety of resources to assist you in dealing with the challenges of designing.

Staging Design Activity

Designing is a complex activity that can take many forms. Therefore, staging your project in an appropriate and timely manner is a prerequisite for developing successful design outcomes. Staging is about planning and preparing for doing the right things, before you start to do those things right. It is sometimes also about rethinking the things you are doing during your project when unexpected things happen.

When staging your project, the aim is to come up with an approach that fits your goal and ambitions, the resources that are available and the interests and expectations of your stakeholders. In the Delft Design Guide we present a large variety of methods that you will find useful, both as a student and later as a practitioner. We hope that you will use the guide as a source and reference during and after your education and that o...