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Recap of the Design Process

A review of the core process
August 5, 2015 by Douglas Barnes — 3 Comments

Back to: Design Fundamentals I

Tell me your goals

Have you ever been at a job, or been working on a project where you had the
feeling that no one knew what it was they were trying to do? It’s all too
common. This is the result of not having a clearly articulated goal. If no one
involved with the management of the project really understands what it is that
the project is there to do, then confusion and disappointment are almost
guaranteed.

Do you think that our societies have a goal? Societies are built around a
mythos, but if those are actually the goals of the society, we can run an
assessment on those goals. If it is to maximize happiness, how do we rate? If
it is to maximize the potential of our society’s human potential, how are we
doing? Is it to ensure everyone has their basic needs met? Is it even long-term

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 survivability?

When you look for a goal for society, you can see why, despite the progress
we have made over time, we keep running into the same sets of problems.
Stumbling along without a clear goal will generate problems.

Your plan is your how-to. Your goal is why there is a plan.

Creating your goal

Setting a goal is actually the hardest part of any project because it is often
difficult to uncover what it is you or your client really wants. Uncovering a goal
is not only a slow process, it is often a never-ending one in that refinement of
the goal is something that can be ongoing.

Generally speaking, the bigger the goal, the more ongoing the refinement
state will be. If you have a project such as designing and building a house,
that is a temporary goal. Adjustment of the goal is only possible up and until
the project is completed. If you are running an organization, reassessment of
the goal will be ongoing. Surely the process of establishing your life goal is an
ongoing one that you change from time to time.

When you set out to create a goal, you will have an idea of something that you
want to do. Don’t stop here. Just wanting to do something is not a goal. You
need to fully understand why it is you want that thing. You need to know your
own motivation behind your desire to do this.

As mentioned in the slide show, I designed my own house. I had been

designing various “dream” homes since the 1990s. I would see something I
like and make a design based on that. Designs came and designs went.
Competing styles would grab me until I grew tired of them. Excitement over

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 various building materials would come and go. Straw bale! Rammed earth!
Tire walls!, Cob! Mercifully, most of this passed before I was in a financial
position to build a house.

I was lucky enough to catch my error when I was ready to build. I took a
couple of weeks to think about what it was I really wanted to do.

The process was something like this:

Why build a house at all?

Why do you want to build using tire walls? What is it about tire walls that
attracts you?
What general principle is it that you are looking for when you are looking
at various building materials?
What layout do you want?
Why do you want that style of layout?
How could you have the same amenities with a more streamlined and
minimal layout?

You might notice that all these questions are expansions on the question
“Why?” Here is the path to take to uncover your goal:

What is it you want?

Why do you want that?
Why do you say that?
Why?
Why?

When you reach a point of exasperation, keep going. When you can’t answer
any more whys, stop for a couple days and try one more time. Do this, and
you will have a pretty good idea of what it is that you actually want.

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 Do you have any plans?

You see how hard it is to make a goal? You see the difficulty in just trying to
figure out what it is that you want for yourself? The moral is that you do not
have perfect information. And when imperfect information is not getting in your
way, reality probably is.

Let me illustrate this with a tragic true story. If you have a dream of owning an
apple orchard and you buy 20 acres of land and invest thousands of dollars in
trees, plant them, and then find out the next year that your land floods every
spring, you have just learned the hard way that the plan is wrong!

Never ever fall in love with your plan. Better to hold your own plan in suspicion
and perhaps slight contempt because I can promise you that your plan is
wrong. There are no perfect plans.

Adjust to feedback

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 Reality will give you feedback. If When you have problems occurring on a
project, you are going to need to go back to your plan and see if you need to
adjust your plan in light of the feedback.

If the plan says your house will be 40 feet long, and your foundation contractor
poured you a foundation that is 39 feet, 11 3/4 inches, you now have a house
that will be 1/4 inch shorter than you had planned.

If you have the idea to use patterned ripping on a site to encourage water
infiltration (AKA Keyline ploughing) and you find that the site has lateritic soil,
you can forget about that idea (unless you want to waste money). Reality is
king. Defer to reality.

Lesson Complete
MARK INCOMPLETE

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Design Fundamentals More on Sectors

This slideshow will take you A closer look on the technique of

through the core elements of the creating a sector map.
design process.

About Douglas Barnes

m a sustainable designer. I live in the countryside in Tweed, Ontario after calling different parts of
Ontario and Japan home.

Comments

Wen Rolland says

October 11, 2015 at 1:00 pm

Hey Douglas! Great stuff on your new site. I wanted to notify you that the first
audio segment on this page is truncated at the end. Keep on keeping on!

Wen

Reply

Douglas Barnes says

October 12, 2015 at 4:21 pm

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 Thank you, Wen. The whole file is on the server and should play, so
naturally it didn’t.

I’ve split the file in two, and it is now behaving.

Reply

Sarah ML Walker says

October 30, 2015 at 7:53 pm

Was this the section with the “pop quiz” at the end? I just wanted to let you
know that I found the quiz unexpected and it actually gave me a wee bit of
performance anxiety (ha ha, no seriously!). Did you give a heads-up at the
beginning of the section? If so, forgive me. It’s the end of the day, I’m tired,
and I somehow missed that detail. If not, you might consider it as it might help
those of us who are anxiety prone to mentally prepare ourselves. Curious to
know if the goal of the quiz was to keep us on our toes for the rest of the
course, or help us remember, or something else.

Reply

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Before We Start
Definitions

The Fundamentals of Design

Design Fundamentals
Recap of the Design Process
More on Sectors
In the Zone
See you in part II

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