Functional Design I

I couple the use of design layers with an approach to design process that I call functional design (Gibbons, DESRIST 2009, see http://prezi.com/58265/edit/ ). Functional design is based on the principle that a designer can make design decisions in any number of orders. It supplies the designer with a guideline for determining the order that follows the best strategic sequence for the particular project.

Most designers recognize that design problems come to the designer with diminished degrees of freedom—with constraints imposed by goals, resources, client desires, and time. It is generally recognized that fixed-process models are not sensitive to this fact of life and that there are generally no guidelines for adapting the generic process to a specific project. Further complicating things is the fact that different projects place different value on full-featured models due to time, staff, or client interest restrictions.   

To deal with this, functional design removes order constraints from decision-making during design. Design decisions can be made in any order. However, functional design also incorporates the principle that each decision, firm or tentative, imposes constraints on future decisions—creating some new decisions while cutting off others. This leads designers to hold decisions tentative where possible until correlation has been made across all areas of the design to ensure coherence and unity in the whole design.