Delft Design Guide: Design Strategies and Methods

by Annemiek van Boeijen, Jaap Daalhuizen, Jelle Zijlstra

Delft Design Guide details roughly seventy strategies, techniques, and methods taught at the Delft University Faculty of Industrial Design in a practical one-page text, illustrated for further clarification and enriched with further reading suggestions. The high quality of their research and teaching at the TU Delft is renowned, making it one of the top universities in the world.

Genres: Design, Reference, Nonfiction, Business

168 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2013

Reviews

[Nelchon Vda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tof tof

[Michael Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Delft Design Guide is a summary of product-design approaches. It inventorizes several tens of processes, methods, and techniques commonly used in teaching product design at TU Delft. Some of these tens of inventory items have been invented at TU Delft. Overall, I found this book is a waste of time and money. I am sure this book is not representative for the quality as designers or engineers of the staff and students at TU Delft.


The main positives about this book are few and far between. Perhaps most positive, there is a need for a good, systematic and concise, reader for the main approaches and methods of the field. (This book just isn't it.) 


As the main negative, this book is a very poor product. It is poorly structured and unsystematic,  lacks coherence across chapters (very little cross-reference, unsystematic treatment of the limitations of each approach), and has no running example or set of examples addressed systematically.


There's more that displeased this reader:

- the book is inconclusive about its three main questions or about any of its covered approaches,

- the coverage of each topic is at best shallow (no systematic analsyis of pros and cons, and very shallow treatment of some limitations) and at worst counter to best-practices (e.g., no understanding of the issues related to using different measurement dimensions in the same diagram, or the meaning of comparing through the visual aid provided by the Strategy Wheel),

- the presentation is poor (Denglish) and peppered with many beginner mistakes (e.g., "in order to" instead of "to", use of genderist formulation including "he or she", bombastic and categorical formulation),

- the content lacks proper use of references in text (no references to important and well known alternatives, to surveys and other methodological books in the field),

- the e-reader version is very difficult to read due to: improper design (or lack or redesign for this format) of the graphical spreads (so, about 50% of the book is almost inaccessible), not all chapters are listed in the book index (unlike a physical book, here there is no way to  "flip until you find the chaoter"), and the text seems to have been converted without re-checking the conversion (so, when the original includes a "-" at the start of the line, the automatic conversion considers it is a list item and cuts the symbol, even if it had meaning in the original text), and many others, 

etc. 

(The relentless promotion of TU Delft icons is in my view fine, and appears in every design book written by a prominent design studio, e.g., Ideo or Bjarke Ingels Group). 

[Bryan Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Delft Design Day (mind blown away day) and since it was the official first day that you could buy the book I bought it as a souvenir. But when I read it I was so impressed!!! I'm a person that likes to trim the fat of books and just read the highlights and my oh my this book is just page after page, sentence after sentence of crystalized information. I would almost say that the only thing you need is this book and putting it into practice and you can be a designer ;)

Highly recommend it to anyone that deals with design or designers!

[Nisham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommend this book to all product designers there. This book highlights almost all the design methods both modern and conventional, break down to its most practical form with good examples. This is a "no waste time, to the point" type book. Good for reference as well.

[Dirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides pretty good overview of many different tools/methods for all the different stages of a design process. It's easy to browse the pages, read a summary of the method, dig in the those that seem interesting or applicable. The full-page images are a pleasant addition.

That is also everything that's to the book. And in that sense the title felt a bit misleading to me. The user is not guided towards the best strategy for their project. There is nothing more than an overview of methods.

[Georgios Sarigiannidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, I have “read” this book once but have used it multiple times this year and will keep on using it in the future. If your job has anything to do with design, this is an excellent toolbox and source of inspiration.

[panini · Rating 2 out of 5]

very meh didn’t learn much

[Luyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to make sense as well as money, but the latter is less important. My answer to the question on the last page of the book.