The Double Diamond – Design Council
A universally accepted depiction of the design process. The Double Diamond by the Design Council is licensed under a CC
A universally accepted depiction of the design process.
The Double Diamond by the Design Council is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Discover
The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
Define
The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you to define the challenge in a different way.
Develop
The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
Deliver
Delivery involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.
Tim Browne, Co-Chair at IDEO
In 2003, the Design Council was promoting the positive impact of adopting a strategic approach to design and the value of ‘design management’ as a practice. However, they had no standard way of describing the supporting process.
Richard Eisermann, Design Council’s then Director of Design and Innovation, thought that this was incompatible with their broader message, so he asked his team, “How do we describe design process?”
“The team put in the work trying to define design, process, methods, etc. What we did with the Double Diamond was codify it, rename the steps and popularise it. It was important work, but we were certainly standing on the shoulders of giants.” Richard Eisermann
READ THE FULL HISTORY
Many of the organisations we support learn something more about the underlying problems which can send them back to the beginning of their diamond work. Making and testing very early stage ideas can be part of discovery. And in an ever-changing and digital world, no idea is ever ‘finished’.
So we incorporated those into an expanded Double Diamond with the framework for innovation.
DISCOVER THE FRAMEWORK