The process of design includes play and research, understanding the influences of history and popular culture, providing the best design solution based on client need, and taking responsibility for the future effects of one's design. This personal vision seeks to address the design process from its gestation period to its marriage with community. This community can be regional, national, and global.

In our culture today, time has become a commodity, making the "singular profitable solution" dependent on obsessive efficiency, accountability, and hegemonic ideology. Time for play is questioned; however, play is essential to problem solving in the design process. Allowing for multiple solutions without the fear of failure brings forth more successful brainstorming. Happy accidents can lead a designer in a new direction. The freedom of the unconscious often expands into the distracted conscious, producing a clearer vision of the design concept that is desired. Research can spawn play or support the results of play, giving the potential solution to the design problem a foundation to build upon.

History and popular culture will usually be part of the research process, but more importantly, they can provide inspiration for original thinking. Popular culture, especially in the form of technology and mass media, influences and informs decisions. Choices designers make on how to respresent a concept visually will be based on socially constructed beliefs reinforced by popular culture and history. Informed designers must be aware and knowledge these constructed beliefs so they can provide an original solution to perhaps and overused cliche. Good design should not rely on current trends or imitation of the past, but draw on its connections to both, inspiring innovative solutions.

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