The Order of Design

A design cannot be produced all at once. Designing requires: (1) knowledge of the decisions to be made, and (2) a way of prioritizing those decisions in an order appropriate to the specific design problem. A designer designs by breaking a large design problem that cannot be solved intuitively and all at once into smaller individual problems that can be. Once made, individual decisions are tested, fitted, and aligned with the rest of the design in a way that produces a coherent design, yet one whose individual members have not lost their identity and can be modified. 

A designer’s most important tasks therefore are: (1) breaking the original design problem into solvable sub-problems, (2) imaging the broadest range of suitable solutions to each sub-problem, (3) finding the possible solutions to each sub-problem that are feasible, and (4) picking the solution for each sub-problem that best aligns with prior elements of the design and best meets the criteria of the design problem.