Basics Design: Design Thinking

Information gathering

Diagram techniques

Diagrams can provide an excellent means of organising the relationships

between different pieces of information and ideas. By creating diagrams, a

design team can quickly obtain an understanding of how a target group is

structured and what some of the key relationships within that group may be.

Diagrams also provide a means to help communicate the results of the

research stage. They might be used, for example, to present the design

team’s understanding of the composition of the market to the client.

Various diagrammatic methods can be used to express the different kinds of

relationships that will inform the ideate stage. These include sample scatter

plots (opposite above) and Venn diagrams (opposite below).

Venn diagrams are a common diagrammatic technique for presenting

information about a group. Venn diagrams were created by John Venn in

1880 to show the logical relations between a defined group of sets. The

entire population of each set is represented by a circle and the relationship

between sets, and the populations they contain, is shown by how the

circles interact or overlap with each other.

These interactions show all the possible logical relations between the sets and

allow the viewer to visualise the relationships between them. For example, the

entire population of men is a subset of the entire population of humans. Pictured

here are basic two-set Venn diagrams, showing various relationships between

two finite groups.

Using diagrams

Diagrams are used to show the results of quantitative or qualitative information

in a readily accessible, visual way to aid comprehension and understanding.

A range of different diagrams with increasing levels of complexity have been

developed to be able to present detailed information in such a way that key

trends or elements of interest can be identified. The diagrammatic methods

used need to be appropriate for the data set under investigation and several

methods that present other related data are often used in order to construct

a model of the subject being analysed.

Design Thinking

Research

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