Define, Design, Repeat, Refine

How can design transform crime? Can criminal actions be transformed into purposeful future products? How can designers understand users and/or abusers to design for sustainable products that promote personal safety and well-being regardless of the product category? These are questions we asked our students in the project theme focus ‘design out crime’.So, how do we teach our students to engage in problem discovery when asked to respond to a multifaceted issue that can be solved by design? The obvious response to this question is first to take a human-centred approach to bring humanity to the forefront, and second to use a design process framework to guide students through a methodical way of thinking. In our 3rd year industrial design studio, we presented four different project themes with varying degrees of complexity across five years. In the process of teaching this design studio, we constructed an alternative way to engage in the design process that we now call Define, Design, Repeat, Refine that involves three dynamic design sprints. We zoom in on one of our projects called ‘design out crime’ that industrial design students (n=12) completed within one semester to illustrate this. Students were provoked to move creatively through the design process by engaging in deep problem discovery, design, repetition, two unique concepts worthy of refinement, and a final design that embodied the entire process.Define, Design, Repeat, Refine is presented as a design process framework through ‘design out crime’ to exemplify and tease out how students engaged in this process to enhance their more traditional industrial design tools. Within this paper, we situate Define, Design, Repeat, Refine within the context of other design process frameworks, and we elaborate on the value of and critique its use. As an alternative design process that uses repetition as the primary means of engaging, Define, Design, Repeat, Refine has the potential to advance ways of knowing, and teaching and learning industrial design education for an increasingly complicated and multifaceted world.