What is conceptual design? And how to wrap your mind around ideation

Table Of Content

• LogRocket: Analytics that give you UX insights without the need for interviews
• Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximize Learning
• Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA)
• Understand your user
• To create a design language
• How to Design a Book Cover: Guide
• LogRocket generates product insights that lead to meaningful action

Creating a conceptual design needs a clear insight into the target audience, the type of issues to be fixed, the clients’ requirements, and a perfect aesthetic style. Focusing on building a superb design concept helps you finish your product creation on time. Design thinking methods and strategies belong at every level of the design process. However, design thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engineering, and business have practiced it. In the “Implement” phase, the team brings these ideas to life through prototypes. The team tests, iterates and refines these ideas based on user feedback.

'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Concept Art Reveals Scrapped Design For Michael Keaton's Vulture - Heroic Hollywood

'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Concept Art Reveals Scrapped Design For Michael Keaton's Vulture.

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LogRocket: Analytics that give you UX insights without the need for interviews

Enables personalizing ads based on user data and interactions, allowing for more relevant advertising experiences across Google services. Design Council's Double Diamond diagram depicts the divergent and convergent stages of the design process. A mindset is a characteristic mental attitude that determines how one interprets and responds to situations. Design thinking mindsets are how individuals think, feel and express themselves during design thinking activities.

Test Your Prototypes: How to Gather Feedback and Maximize Learning

Exploring analogies constitutes a technique for deriving inspiration and comprehension by dissecting and linking akin or comparable objects, processes, or ideas. Furthermore, the construction of words can serve as a catalyst for generating design attributes (for the subsequent step) that mirror the essence of the concept. Imagine a scenario where a client is a company specializing in creating laser-equipped guns for paintball events.

Head, Heart and Hand by the American Institution of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

Armed with a well-laid plan, you’re better equipped to face these obstacles head-on. Time often elapses before initial design drafts, and clients may grow impatient, believing they’re paying for idle time. It’s essential to articulate the need for preparatory work as the foundation for a solid structure. Group all the ideas and give the group a name; this will generate themes for you. An excellent next step would be to narrow them down to fewer ideas. In this method, you decide the success metrics; you can say “innovative vs. easy to build” or any other metrics you think is right for your product.

Then, break it down into sequences of phrases that precisely define the product design concept. A design concept is an early-stage idea that provides designers with in-depth and meaningful direction. Spending a good amount of time on the design concept reduces the risk of setbacks and enables everyone on the team to clearly understand the idea. Finally, verbal ideation will help you arrange related ideas into a complete phrase or sentence that describes your concept precisely. This helps you focus on your design concept throughout the UI design process.

To create a design language

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Residents react to City’s design concept for Ocean Beach Pier.

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As you’d expect, many large corporations have also adopted design thinking. IBM has adopted it at a company-wide level, training many of its nearly 400,000 employees in design thinking principles. A 12-month program focused on applying the tools of modern data science, optimization and machine learning to solve real-world business problems. Moreover, you can distribute in-built product surveys to better understand the user journey and expectations.

When designing for your client, make sure your design concept speaks their language but also shows your creativity and individuality at the same time. When you combine these two and serve a design that is useful for your user, that is when you know your design concept worked in all the right ways. That makes it important to consider your concept not as a mere mock design, but the essence of your final design that will exist for upcoming years. Given its importance, designing a concept shall be done effectively (going back to it at a later stage will cost a lot of time, effort, and resources). You can also think of your design concept as a way to communicate the spirit of what you want your product’s design to achieve. Although it should be a short, pithy description of your product idea, a design concept needs to accomplish several things.

You’ll only reuse participants in the mid-fidelity and high-fidelity stages that you used in the low-fidelity stage. In the mid-fidelity phase, design concepts are useful for crafting a good user experience and using UX testing to test and refine it. This includes usability (how well users can use it), accessibility (ensuring that everybody can access it regardless of their abilities), and a little bit of interactivity.

LogRocket generates product insights that lead to meaningful action

Like brainstorming (or verbal ideation) the goal is to come up with sketches fast so that your ideas can flow freely. You don’t want to get hung up on your first sketch or spend too much time on minute detail. Right now, you are simply visualizing possible interpretations of the concept. There’s a famous saying that nothing is original, and this is true to an extent. The practice of design—like any artistic discipline—is old, with designers building on the innovations of those who came before. Allows for content and ad personalization across Google services based on user behavior.

The last step comprises reviewing the design concepts gathered to eliminate unnecessary or repetitive data and filter it out for quality purposes. There needs to be a clear understanding of the company’s vision, the product’s goal to develop a design concept, and the problems the product aims to solve. A design concept is a compilation of sketches, photographs, and a written statement that explains the primary idea behind a product’s design. While the conceptual design is a starting point of a design process, it extends its essence into planning, constructing, and executing.

You’ll analyze your observations to define the core problems you and your team have identified up to this point. Defining the problem and problem statement must be done in a human-centered manner. Don Norman encourages designers to incorporate systems thinking in their work. Instead of looking at people and problems in isolation, designers must look at them from a systems point of view. The five-stage design thinking methodology described above is just one of several frameworks. Once the team accumulates the information, they analyze the observations and synthesize them to define the core problems.

Since the concept is essentially just an idea, designers must bridge the gap between abstract thought and visual characteristics. Design language describes using design elements purposefully to communicate and evoke meaning. Because conceptualization occurs in the mind, it can be fairly easy to overlook. But conceptual design is the foundation on which good design stands, and even technically brilliant designs can fail without a solid, backing concept.

If you're looking to pursue a creative path but not sure where to start, you’re in the right place. You’ll also connect with a remarkable network of alumni working in Los Angeles and across the country. News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Deconstructivism is one of the 20th century's most influential architecture movements. Our series profiles the buildings and work of its leading proponents – Peter Eisenman, Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi and Wolf Prix. However, the building also inadvertently highlighted the gap between the city's rich and poor.

Wicked problems demand teams to think outside the box, take action immediately, and constantly iterate—all hallmarks of design thinking. Steve Eppinger is a professor of management science and innovation at MIT Sloan. He holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a PhD from MIT in engineering. He is the faculty co-director of MIT's System Design and Management program and Integrated Design and Management program, both master’s degrees joint between the MIT Sloan and Engineering schools.