Reading - The Design Process pp. 1-16

Tonight’s reading of The Design Process by Karl Aspelund consisted of pages 1 - 16, reading through the Introduction, Perspective, and Exercises. This is a great book to be learning from, Aspelund is really good at letting the reader know what to expect, what train of thought to be in, how to be prepared when working on projects. One thing that I found enlightening that Aspelund talks about in the Introduction is what he had to say about the relationship between the Designer and the idea. The connection between the Designer and the idea is much like a relationship. At the beginning you are so happy you want to take your idea all over town, you want to talk about it all the time, but when it comes time to being committed and see the idea all the way through that’s when you pull back and start to think it about all over again. As a designer you need to take your idea through the 7 stages of inspiration, conceptualization, exploration/refinement, definition/modeling, communication, and production. If anything new comes up at the end then something was not fulfilled in the previous stages.

“Designers should be creating interesting, revolutionary…environments for everyone” (12). As designers we have to design for a purpose, we need to identify the problem and determine what it is that we are being asked to do. On the Exercises pages Aspelund talks about “reverse-designing”, taking an existing design and take it through the designing stages 7 - 1. By doing this we gain a new perspective on others points of views to see how they got to the place of the existing design.