Designing the process design process

Abstract

We suggest that designing design processes is an ill-posed problem which must be tackled with great care and in an evolutionary fashion. We argue it is an important activity, however, as companies today use a small percentage of the intellectual capital they own when designing, suggesting there is room for significant improvement. We discuss who in industry and academia are currently involved with designing design processes. Based on empirical studies we and others have carried out, we have based our approach to study and support design processes on managing the information they generate and use. We are learning how to carry out studies more effectively with industrial partners, what features we need for managing information to study and improve design processes. We are even learning some general observations about the effect of different behavior of the group on its success at designing.