When The Ideal Design Process Does Not Match Reality
The Double Diamond is one of the most widely used diagrams in design — two rotated squares labeled “discover,” “define,” “explore,” and “create,” suggesting teams should diverge broadly before converging on a problem and then on a solution. It is simple, memorable, and almost entirely disconnected from how most organizations ship work.
Most companies do not begin with an open problem. A senior stakeholder decides the company needs a lunchbox, resources get allocated, and a launch date gets set. Design is handed a brief with the solution already embedded in it. Designers can either fight this process or find a way to make it work. Andy Budd has a pragmatic proposal: accept the first half of that reality, but use the post-launch phase to create the space the Double Diamond promises.
Designers who push back too hard on the “lunchbox” style of brief will usually lose. Stakeholders have already made a decision — not necessarily out of stubbornness, but because it was the only way to get any momentum inside the organization. The right move is not to stall that decision train, but to get on board and steer it once it reaches the station.
Why Designers Want To Reframe The Problem
There is a reason respectful argument — and to those inside the process, legitimate value. The safest route forward is to deliver exactly what was asked for and do it exceptionally well. But the real opportunity begins after the threshold has been crossed.
The famous example that illustrates how briefs constrain outcomes is the Blue Peter challenge Jony Ive once faced. Young viewers were asked to design a lunchbox, pencil case, and school bag in one. Ive noted that the word “box” itself closed off possibilities before anyone had begun. A better brief might have been “design a means of storing and transporting your lunch to school.”
Designers see this happen constantly in meetings. Stakeholders describe the desired output in concrete terms, and designers feel their value has been reduced to execution. The Double Diamond gives designers a conceptual language for their frustration: it teaches them to expect a discovery phase before any solution is bounded. But their business partners never received that training.
Most stakeholders already know the solution they want. In their view, a lunchbox is a perfectly reasonable answer to the question “how do kids take food to school?” They want it designed well, manufactured cost-effectively, and ready for the back-to-school season in three months. Asking for six no months of discovery to understand the role of food in the education system sounds — at best — like a waste of time.
Eliel Saarinen’s famous design principle supports the discovery instinct: “always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context.” That works beautifully in theory, but being inside an organization that needs to ship and answer to a budget constraint is a different context altogether. And so designers who wait for the ideal set of circumstances will likely wait forever.
Deliver The Brief, Then Offer A Better One
It often starts this way: a few meetings where no designer is present, some market or survey data, and a conclusion that “we need a lunchbox.” Post that, the business case is closed. The verbiage of “customer discovery” is usually just evidence gathering — finding justification for the predetermined direction rather than interrogating it.
That is the first — slightly idealized — half of a process Budd calls the reverse double diamond. The path gets more interesting after launch. Once a feature is out there, its original sponsor stops protecting it. The question changes from “can we get this built?” to “how do we extract more value from it?”
That shift of focus creates an opening in the second diamond’s natural habitat — the territory of improvement, where design has legitimate, unopposed power. Even better: it is far easier to build a business case around improving something that already exists and has user statistics than it is to advocate for research on a product that is still just an assertion.
If a feature post-launch sees low utilization — say five percent — the designer can raise a credible proposal that refinement can raise it to twenty percent. That has far more institutional pull than a proposal to undertake user research in the hope of discovering a better non-lunchbox concept.
Some organization types will separate the two halves: a feature team delivers the product, a growth team improves it. That arrangement is imperfect, and unlocking the second phase still requires the design team to have capacity and the product leader to create a convincing internal pitch. But none of this requires the organization to behave against its natural grain.
Move Slowly, And Use Evidence To Shift The Whole Process
Outside of companies like Apple or Airbnb, the Double Diamond will not happen by decree. Transitioning toward it starts with adopting the reverse pattern completely. The reward for improving post-launch features with data is the experience and evidence that helps shift where design carries the most influence.
The practical action is tracking what the changes did, being able to say that prior problems caused X amount of damage that a discovery phase would have avoided, and backing the argument with that measurement. By showing a track record of fixes that succeeded, it becomes possible to argue for more time upstream — and the conversation about switching from reverse to classic double diamond finally holds weight.
Change is slow — Budd specifies several consecutive quarters of this behavior — but the outcome is an organization that sees the value of the classic problem-finding diamond: one that no longer asks for lunchboxes, but for “the optimal container through which to carry lunch.”
Why the Double Diamond Describes a World That Mostly Doesn't Exist
The Double Diamond is a useful concept, but it rarely matches how organizations actually operate. If designers set expectations against this theoretical model, disappointment is inevitable. Designers are supposed to excel at understanding how things work in practice, not just how they should work in theory.
To drive real change, designers need to ask for models that reflect how design functions inside their organizations and focus effort where it has the most impact. That likely means adopting something like a "reverse double diamond": accept that most requests will be "lunch box features" and shift attention from pre-launch solutions to post-launch improvements. Ship a solid first version quickly, then use business and communication skills to argue for and deliver measurable refinements. If that happens consistently, there is a real — if small — chance of flipping the double diamond right-side up again.
A Brief History of the Model
In 2003, the Design Council was promoting the value of design management and strategic design, but lacked a standard way to describe the underlying process. Richard Eisermann, then Director of Design and Innovation, found that incompatible with the Council's message and asked his team, "How do we describe the 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 popularize it. It was important work, but we were certainly standing on the shoulders of giants."
— Richard Eisermann
Kite- or diamond-shaped process models had appeared as early as the 1960s, but were not widely shared. The Design Council created the Double Diamond partly to fix that visibility gap. Today it is treated as a universally accessible description of the design process, an accepted part of design language, and is used worldwide.
Further Reading
- "Should You Create An MVP Before Creating An App?," by Suzanne Scacca (Smashing Magazine)
Apps are neither a small undertaking nor cheap to build and maintain. Before moving ahead with a new mobile app or SaaS for a client, consider launching a minimum viable product (MVP) instead. An MVP offers a low-risk, lower-cost way of testing the concept on the market. - "Getting Back Into The (Right) Deliverables Business," by Rian van der Merwe (Smashing Magazine)
"Get out of the deliverables business" has become a mantra in lean startup and UX circles. There is much to love in that sentiment — for every wireframe, you're not shipping code to customers. But like the MVP concept, this advice may have been taken to an extreme that hurts good product creation. - "Design Thinking & Minimum Viable Product: Is This the Right Approach?," by Masha Panchenko (Eleken Blog)
Design thinking has become wildly popular over the last forty years, used in IT, business, education, and design. It is also a strong approach when it comes to building an MVP. - Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
A book about building — designing — a life you can thrive in at any age or stage. The authors show how design thinking can help create a meaningful, fulfilling life, regardless of who you are or what you do.
(Editor's Note: This book was recommended to me by Joshua Mauldin a while ago, and I can't recommend it enough. A fantastic, very useful read. — M.B.) - "Using the Problem Reframing Method," by Sebastian Straube (product management & discovery coach at Accenture Business Agility)
Avoid jumping into solution thinking without empathizing with the problem itself. Looking at a problem from different angles helps build more innovative, sustainable solutions, and there is no one-size-fits-all reframing practice. - "Is UX Research About 'De-risking' Design?," by Jonathan Baker-Bates (UX architect at LBi, VP of UX at TES Global)
Is UX research centered on predicting outcomes of design interventions, or is its role to "de-risk" UX and business ideas? Research is often framed as lowering risk, but it should check whether what we said about an intervention actually tends to happen. - "Modern Double Diamond design: Rethinking a classic design process," by Victory Brown
Every design process involves back-and-forth. To get the best results quickly, you need a process that allows iteration. The Design Council brought this together in 2005 to develop a new approach to design solutions based on the Double Diamond, drawing on creative thinking, systems design, and design management. - "History of the Double Diamond"
This article describes the history of the Double Diamond concept, created by the Design Council (established in 1944 by Winston Churchill's wartime government). The group came up with a simplified description of any design and innovation process, based on four phases named Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver.
