Built on decisions

Design is all about design decisions…at every stage you are trying to decide what will work for your designs. These decisions came very early in design – be it deciding what product you want to make to how would it look to how would it work…

At all step you are involved in taking decisions; and success of your design closely depend on these decisions.

The most important part of design decision is how many parameters are involved in that decision. The more the parameters you are using to take the decision the probability of creating a good design is more. What it means is that your designs are designed for all those parameters. It like you have to create a protective cover for an art work; so you want to make sure that the cover takes care of ALL those things/conditions that “will or may” damage that art work. The same is for design; you try to make sure you cover all aspects that are going to affect the product you are designing.

Another critical aspect of design decisions is their “interdependency”. What do I mean by that? Well I mean is all along the design process you would be taking certain decisions at say ‘stage 1’. Now when you move to ‘stage 2’ you would be taking another set of decisions. But now these decisions will be highly depended on what you decided at ‘stage 1’. Thus all along the design you would be taking decisions which you be so inter depended that if you try to change a certain decision that you took at a lower stage the whole design would fall into pieces. It’s like a pyramid build of cards. If you remove a lower card the whole pyramid falls apart. This is because of these interdependencies of the design decision.

If you take one wrong decision you land up with a wrong design…and if you realize is late – you are dead!. Thus design is one profession where you need to be very sure of what you are doing. And to add to the complexity the decisions that are involved are very “subjective”, with each path/decision having certain pros and cons. This is where the real adventure lies? Is it?

But with thorough logic, analysis and understanding you can to a large extent reduce the unknowns of design and bring in some objectivity in design decisions. Thus design is not about creativity it’s also about analysis and research…find out the problem and the solution will find you…