Define – Collect – Brainstorm & Analyze – Develop – Feedback – Improve – Repeat
Define
The designer can use prepositions to describe the context and the possibilities of the objects and verbs in the sentence. What is the preposition in the sentence? In your own words, what does it mean?
Collect
We can find prepositions that match those in the sentence, but substituting should be used also to look at other possibilities and meanings in the sentence. Substituting a preposition is likely to create a very different meaning.
Brainstorm and Analyze
This stage requires us to create solutions. How we find these solutions doesn’t matter, and trying multiple methods is important to thinking up at least three new options. After creating the solutions, we need to judge these with a rubric to determine the best choices, measuring fitness, possibility, creativity, and difference from the initial preposition. We use a scale of 0 to 4 for each phase, allowing five options and a total maximum score of 16. Then, it is good to choose three of the options to show another designer or the client.
Develop
We will improve upon the three ideas chosen and prepare them for review by others. These do not need to be completed designs, but sketched schematics. We can use plans, sections, and elevations, but perspectives work very well to combine the different drawing types.
Feedback
Bring others to comment on the designs. Use the same rubric from that in the brainstorm and analyze phase. In this way, we are able to compare and contrast the self and outside evaluations.
Improve
The feedback moves us to make one or several initial concepts better by infusing the comments into the designs to create something different and probably better than what we had before. However, having multiple choices is limiting, whereas a single option frees us to chose the best selection.
We need to run through the design process multiple times to improve the design. The design can always be improved, the intention of the process is to find the better solution.