# Designing Designers must consider several principles including the function, life-cycle, purpose, materiality, sustainability, beauty, and social impacts of a piece. As a student designer, these projects are early experiments in communicating your values in the built environment. What's more important the look of a piece or where/what the material is? Is form or durability more critical? Skill or speed? By working through these questions and understanding what you value, your individual design voice will begin to emerge. Although the stages explained below are written sequentially, it is important to be aware that the design process is not a linear exercise as all elements of the process are to be considered and reconsidered, tested and reevaluated over and over. ## Product Design ![Figure 1. Alki, Form Us With Love. Alki. 2020.](/files/-MAd3Z0MAHRtwxUy5SPa) Product design is the process of identifying a market opportunity, clearly defining the problem, developing a solution through the process of imagining, creating and iterating products and validating the solution with end-users. This may be for your own personal use, ie. requiring a work desk for your home to suit personal work needs and spacial restrictions etc. Or recognising a specific need in the market and developing a new product to resolve problems for people by using both empathy and knowledge of the prospective customers’ habits, behaviours, frustrations, needs, and wants. Design thinking is a reflection of the past, the present and the future. Many different opinions and schools of thought exist and, as a result, a range of design philosophies have developed over time. #### Please continue reading to obtain a greater understanding of how these design elements will impact your design making process at the MSD Workshop and ultimately your final product. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://ms-kb.msd.unimelb.edu.au/machine-workshop/making/step-by-step/designing.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.