How do you reflect on your own design process?

1 Why reflect on your design process?

Reflection is a powerful tool for learning and growth, especially in a complex and dynamic field like industrial design. Through reflecting on your design process, you can gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a designer, and set goals for improvement. You can also comprehend how your design choices and actions impact the outcomes of your projects. Additionally, you can recognize the patterns, habits, and biases that influence your design thinking and behavior. Furthermore, reflection allows you to learn from mistakes and failures, as well as celebrate achievements and successes. Ultimately, it enables you to develop a comprehensive portfolio of your design work and process.

2 When to reflect on your design process?

Reflecting on your design process is a beneficial practice that can help you to achieve your objectives, scope, and constraints. It should be done before starting a new project to plan your approach and methods, as well as during each stage of the process to monitor progress and adjust actions. Additionally, reflecting on a project after completion can help you review performance, outcomes, and impacts, as well as document learnings and insights. Furthermore, responding to feedback, critique, or evaluation from others can help you understand their perspectives and incorporate them into your design process. Lastly, reflecting periodically on different projects, processes, and contexts can help you identify trends and themes in your design work.

3 How to reflect on your design process?

Reflecting on your design process is a great way to gain valuable insights that can help you improve your work. Writing about your design process, visualizing it with sketches or diagrams, discussing it with others, and prototyping ideas are all effective methods. Journals, blogs, reports, and case studies can be used to write about your design process, describing your actions, thoughts, and outcomes. Visualizing the stages, steps, inputs, and outputs of your design work can help you identify key insights and decisions. Conversations, interviews, and presentations can be used to discuss your design process with others and receive feedback. Prototypes, mockups, and simulations can help test and refine your design process by experimenting with different ideas and solutions.

4 What to reflect on in your design process?

Reflecting on your design process is essential and should be tailored to your focus, criteria, and purpose. When considering the most important and relevant aspects, start by examining your design problem. This includes defining, framing, and scoping the problem, researching users and context, and validating design needs. Then move on to your design solution by generating ideas, developing prototypes, and iterating concepts. Additionally, consider the impact of your design solution by measuring its usability, feasibility, and desirability. Finally, reflect on your design skills such as knowledge of tools and techniques, collaboration with others, managing time and resources, as well as dealing with uncertainty.

5 How to improve your design process based on your reflection?

Reflection is a key element of the design process, and a necessary skill for professional development. Through reflection, you can set SMART goals to track your progress and results, seek feedback from others to enhance your design process, learn from other designers and design processes, experiment with new methods and techniques, and join or create a community of practice to share and learn. Reflection is an important way to understand your design process and improve it. Not only can you improve your design outcomes and impacts, but also your design confidence and competence.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?