At the moment, the most interesting topic to me is the Design Process.
The design process that designers go through, from the beginning to end.
How do designers get to their outcome? How do they choose the efficient way to progress? How do they communicate their message? What do the audience respond and many more questions.
I would like to explore the topic by doing some case studies about the project done by design company. Also interviewing the designers, I would like to know and document their process and methods etc. On the other hand I will interview design students on how they are dealing with their projects, and I want to compare and contrast the process done by design company and students. The report will target on design students who will graduate soon.
Janice
I like the idea of a comparison between design students process and design companies process. There are some very obvious differentiating factors at play such as time and money, real clients etc. BUT there may well be some universal design approaches that stay the same. It will be interesting for you to investigate this.
ReplyDeleteFinding design companies who are willing to take additional time to document their processes and explain it to you may be difficult. You should aim for companies who already have that as part of their process so it will be less time-consuming for them to participate. Any thoughts? Perhaps tapping into the alumni of the FdA might be a good place to start? Darren's Facebook page has links to lots of people...
There was an interesting thing in Creative Review a couple of year's ago where they followed Michael C Place from Build for 1 month and asked him to document his design life. CR, August 2007. Have a look for inspiration.
Lucienne Roberts & Rebecca Wright (ex-LCC tutor) are currently co-writing a book on Design Process and have looked at about 20 international case studies of well-known design agencies working on single projects (inc. Sagmeister/Airside...). They used interviews and asked the designers to visually document the progress of projects. Perhaps you could interview them as part of your research? I think they have already written the entire book and are now waiting for it to be published (it comes out next year) so am sure they would be happy to talk to you about their findings for 30mins or so. Let me know if you want their details.
Steve Lloyd who teaches with us and works at ico design is really big on design process. His email address is ste.lloyd@me.com - maybe he could spare you some time. Also Zoe Stanton who did some teaching with us and her company Uscreates are into their process - zoe@uscreates.com
ReplyDeleteLots of designers are now documenting their process on blogs - have a scout round for these.