the ongoing dialogue between the problem and the solution….

We have been talking and thinking about how messy design is. It’s so easy to present it as a linear, procedural activity. But the reality is that it is backwards and forwards.

Our mentor @Jannah Aljafri kindly pointed us to the Double Diamond Process (Design Council). There’s an exploration – lots of divergent ideas – what is the problem we are trying to fix? how are we hoping to add value, before coming to shared understanding and definition of “the thing” followed by yet more exploration in the develop stage.

As the design council say “this isn’t a linear process“.

What might this look like from a L&T perspective?

Discover and Design stages with MOF in the  middle

Maybe in our context the skeleton MOF could be thought of as the definition.

In the develop stage, experience tells us that:

  • videos will be started and end up on the cutting room floor
  • technologies will be abandoned and new ones adopted
  • new requirements or stakeholders will appear
  • prerequisites will emerge….

But, what about moving back and forth between the two diamonds?

When online or blended approaches are integral we may have time to get feedback on samples of the approach, but more often than not we are up against it to develop and deliver modules – laying the tracks just in time.

Unless there is a healthy design window it can be hard in practice to return to discover/define — changing MOFs brings with it variable amounts of friction depending on what has been published and the nature of the change. Ideally we need time for exploration, experiments and feedback early on.

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