One really distinctive characteristic of design is that idea of divergence and
convergence But there's another distinct development of design or distinctive
characteristic of design processes which is that they're fundamentally iterative.
You would like to believe that you could proceed sequentially from defining the
problem, Exploring an alternative, to selecting the
solution. But the reality is that as you explore
solutions, you get greater clarity about problem definition.
And as you go to select an, an alternative or select a plan, you recognize medicional
alternatives and maybe even get additional clarity around problem definition.
In fact, I'm going to show you a little data here that illustrates the, one of the
ways in which design is fundamentally iterative.
This is some data collected by Gunther, that takes the activities of a group of
designers over a two-hour period and divides them into three categories.
These categories correspond roughly into our three steps in the design process,
defining the problem or clarifying the task, exploring then, a searching for
alternatives. And lastly, fixing the solution or
selecting the plan. And what you see is that, while there is
this overarching cascading from, from clarifying the task, to exploring
alternatives, to fixing the concept or selecting the approach, you do see this
overall cascading. You also see a lot of back-and-forth, that
is it isn't the case that the team never revisits the clarification of the task
after beginning to explore for alternate, explore alternatives.
And so, design, even over a two- hour period ends up being quite iterative.
And it's a, it's a bit of a misrepresentation to suggest that those
three steps in the design process proceed strictly sequentially.
Iteration and design takes place over many different time scales.
There's a micro level iteration that takes place at the hands of an individual
designer where here, she will go back and make changes.
We'll try something else. We'll learn something and go back.
And we'll iterate over minutes, hours, days, or weeks in the scope of an, of a
single project. But there's also iteration over multiple
life cycles of an artifact that's produced by a single organization, or even over
multiple generations of a category of artifact in society as a whole.
So, let me just walk you through a little bit of the history of the ice cream scoop.
We started with a, Last time with the fictitious notion that
the first Egyptian commercial ice cream vendor, Tabia had produced this block of
wood with a, with an iron scoop on it that had resulted in the first ice cream scoop.
Now, of course it didn't happen like that. But we don't know how it, how it actually
happened back in the tenth century. But imagine that Tabia, at the very micro
level had decided that the grip wasn't very comfortable.
And had, had said, well, gee, why don't we just cut a littles scoop out of that so
that the, the grip would be more comfortable.
That's an example of iteration at the micro level, at the level of an individual
designer. The first ice cream scoop that I know
about that's commercially available is this one here.
And the basic idea here was to take this conical, metallic form, use it to mold a
scoop of ice cream or potatoes or other kinds of, of semisolid materials.
And then, there's this, this wing handle on the back that rotates a blade inside
the cone that allows the formed food to drop out.
At some point, this design emerged, which uses a, a hemispherical form to form a,
the unit, of the serving unit in the shape of a, of a half of a ball.
And then, has this thumb action, this little rock and pinion, and a little blade
that separates the half ball from the mold.
Now, in subsequent generations, like this one.