Design strategies - EdexcelCollaboration and design fixation

It is important for a designer to use a variety of design strategies to be able to generate the most innovative and functional solution to a design problem. This will help to gather information and feedback from others to ensure the best design to fit the brief is created. Different projects might benefit from different kinds of design strategy.

Collaboration

Working with others is an excellent way of gaining feedback for designs. Many companies use groups of designers with different tastes, ideas and specialities to allow a diverse range of opinions to be acted on.

Effective collaboration between designers, manufacturers and the target audience can help to create a successful product. When a diverse team works closely together, especially during the early design stages, and revisit the designs as part of the iterative design process, it can lead to a highly innovative product.

Try using a design process called SCAMPER, which is a mnemonic for seven thinking techniques that help create solutions to problems:

• Substitute - What can be changed for something else?
• Combine - How can materials or designs be combined?
• Adapt - What can be adapted or altered?
• Modify - Could it be changed or expanded?
• Put (to another use) - Could the design have a different use?
• Eliminate - What parts of the design could be deleted or removed?
• Reverse - How could this product be reorganised?

Design fixation

The first idea a designer comes up with might not be the best one, but they might pursue it because it has worked for them before and they feel they should try it again. Alternatively, the solution to the problem they are trying to solve might already exist, and designers might find it difficult to think of anything else. As well as this, the client might be fixated on what they expect the product to be and not be open to any new ideas that are proposed.

Becoming fixated on a particular idea can become an issue when trying to develop a new solution to a design problem. This can be avoided by:

• collaboration
• feedback from user groups
• testing a product