Page 197 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

190 12 Design Methodology

12.1 Introduction

Design methodology is a powerful methodology for problem-forming and
problem-solving which integrates human, business, and technological factors.
Each designer wishes to work out preferable design; however, the innovative
and practical products among the numerous products are just a rarity of the rarities.
Designers need a thinking tool to help them master demands, develop divergent
thinking, and arrange for product structure. Besides, they also need a design flow to
make the design work structuralized, achieve a stable output, and improve work
efficiency without omitting elements; they also need a work specification to accu-
mulate and ensure quality and to coordinate between different designers.
In fact, according to the design characteristics of products, different industries
have their own methodologies. For example, home furnishing design and graphic
design have the universal design methods of the industry, to support for their design
process. So does the Internet industry; during the Internet development history of
more than 20 years, various companies form their respective design methods
suitable for their respective demands.
The design methodology in this chapter summarizes the design experiences of
various successful products and is the combination of experiences and skills
extracted from multiple design works (including building design, industrial design,
software design, and game design).
It is not only a kind of design thinking but also a set of feasible design flow, a
complete and overall work specification. The design methodology guides designers
to utilize the divergent thinking of the fragmentation and the method of exhaustion,
to start from original demands, to conduct in-depth analysis on various design
elements such as target user, stakeholders, competitive products, and scenes, and
then screen, optimize, and output product functions and prototypes.
As a kind of thinking tool, the design methodology is applied to any design type
work, including game designer, software designer, UI designer, management per-
sonnel, or even administrative assistant. After the in-depth learning of methodol-
ogy, they can master user demands, use scene, user pain spots during actual works,
to work out better product or service.

12.2 The Framework of Design Methodology

Figure 12.1 depicts the framework of design methodology. Firstly, design
methodology based on original requirements, that is, there is a problem that needs
to solve. The designers will analyze the target users related to this problem (or
original demand), identify the characteristics of the target users from various
dimensions, find out the stakeholders (broadly conceived to include learners,
teachers, support personnel, and administrators) and their corresponding interests