Day 1: Design Notes

It’s November again. Time to dust off my old crafting tools for generative text and PDF production and get into another NaNoGenMo book project.

Why am I documenting all this? What is the point?

As a design educator, one of the most difficult challenges I face is getting students to think critically about the way they’re researching and solving problems and how to use this critical insight to consciously improve their own process and work iteratively towards higher quality results.

Without careful and considered engagement around this, assignments and projects invariably become frustrating box-ticking exercises lacking unified themes or clear connections between process and outcome.

I could give endless lectures on design methods and processes—diverge and converge, double diamonds, frameworks for innovation, yadda yadda blah—but none of this works effectively without a grounding in the basic habits of keeping notes, justifying decisions and reflecting critically on our own working practice.

Unfortunately, there’s very few resources that show how to do this. It’s a classic how to draw an owl problem. What does the design process look like from the inside? How do we go from the excitement, speculation, confusion and dissonance of the early stages of a creative project to actually starting to build something? How do we know when to change direction? When should we lock-in decisions? What do all the design method clichés look like when put to use, away from the clean lines and abstractions of their idealised descriptions?

Most case studies are written after the fact. These can be valuable sources of inspiration and understanding but they often rearrange history to suit the needs of a portfolio or marketing narrative which means they don’t always reveal an accurate picture of how design works in-flight.

It’s hard to find unfiltered models of the sprawling detailed notetaking and reflection that is such an important part of creative and technical work. This is especially so for niche activities like procedural generation and generative writing where most of the existing material available is about techniques and algorithms rather than creativity and decisions.

I’ve become increasingly interested in documenting these messy and individualised aspects of design and engineering. Rather than try to generalise or develop clever abstractions, what I’ve started trying to do is discuss individual projects directly while in the process of doing them.

For this NaNoGenMo project specifically, writing these notes is something I would be doing anyway (perhaps not so discursively or methodically, but this is still very much what the raw material of my process looks like). Rather than throw it all on the scrap pile as I go, I’m making it all available for others to learn from, borrow from, laugh at, repudiate or synthesise into something new.

I also want to do something to offset all the material recorded around the redesign. Throughout 2021, I’ve been working on these notes as an ongoing sandbox for messing around with weird ideas in my spare time. It’s not at all an accurate reflection of how I approach most projects. I want to make sure all that is supplemented by a collection of notes that illustrates a more focused and repeatable process.

My schedule is extremely busy this month which is a concern, but if I’m honest, looking back on all my previous NaNoGenMo attempts, there isn’t much of a correlation between the results I achieved and how busy (or not) I was with work and other commitments. Nonetheless, this is an important constraint to take into account.

Rather than getting carried away spending huge blocks of time on this, I’m going to attempt a more structured ‘slow and steady’ approach by spending 1–3 hours each day on it and documenting the whole design and development process as I go.