Master Planner: Fred Brooks Shows How to Design Anything
/Wired: In your experience, what’s the best process for design?
Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.
Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?
Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.
This also applies to producers, project managers and anyone making things in the digital realm.