This page was originally set up to be used in conjunction with a big piece of butcher paper that was left hanging for several months on the wall at (the old) ID. In preparation for the 1997 ID student show, a small group of students worked on this page (and that piece of paper) to develop a framework for presenting and explaining to visitors the methods and processes that are taught and used at ID. During the show, we intended to display examples of those methods in action (in the form of behavioral prototypes, concept sketches, observational videotapes, etc.).

Now this page serves as a partial archive of that project. If you have any comments or contributions (especially contributions to the list of ID methods), you can e-mail them to me at jaym@id.iit.edu.

We started with an informal inventory of the design methods, tools, and techniques that are most commonly used at the Institute of Design. Then we padded that list quite generously with other methods that we thought were significant.

We also had several frameworks available to help us start to make sense of the list of methods we had gathered. We decided we wanted somehow to use the matrix below, which was developed by Chuck Owen and which both Vijay Sivasankaran and Rick Robinson have played around with.

analytic abstract synthetic real

For our purposes, the most valuable/meaningful thing in this diagram was the idea of an iterative cycle of analysis and synthesis: 1) observation 2) description 3) creation/generation 4) realization (making)

The end result of this project was a poster that charted or mapped the most common ID design methods onto a very schematic representation of design processes. If you are interested, you can read the text from the Design Methods poster, and copies of it are available below in pdf format.

If you want to view the poster on screen, here is the full-page view (12" x 48") : desmeths.pdf (112K) If you would rather print it out, this pdf file is broken down into six 8.5" x 11" pages for easy printing. Print with Larger Print Area or reduce to 95% if you want the cropmarks and registration marks: desmethp.pdf (143K)