The design process is an iterative process. 

Don't believe me?! What am I talking about?

Take this page/essay:
    Originally this page...the greater frames page did not exist. All that was here was a couple of directories. That contained pages describing toy concepts. These pages where designed as a direct response to a task set out by professor Finger. But look at what it is now! Now the page is an incorporation of a larger project also assigned by professor Finger to create a portfolio detailing what I learn about design. This is a result of an iterative design process.

    While the page as a whole has been subject to design and iterative review and redesign, so has this page in particular. In fact, what can be conceived as the original incarnation of this page was not even a page, but rather an essay in email format which was again a response to a particular task outlined and assigned by professor Finger.

Here is the original text as a refference:

Design is the science of creativity. Design is the interface between ideas and creations. This may be a little bit abstract but I think this is a bit of the essence of design. There is no real set way to design anything. Any time that an idea makes it into reality, it is a result of design regardless of whether this happens in an office with a lot of direction and engineering precision or off the cuff in someone’s basement, it is design.

Of course, there is potential for direction within design. And, the design processes can benefit from a certain amount of direction. Ideas that float around someone’s brain are the essential fuel for design. But without a method for developing these ideas (as lax as this method may be) there is no design.

Some of the more common, or at least easily identifiable features of a typical design process involve brainstorming, drafting, and analysis. These steps can often be considered an open loop and iterative process. The designer comes up with ideas, sketches them and gets them in a comprehensible form identifies problems with these sketches and brainstorms ways around this.

Depending on the scope of the project design can be a single person operation or a large team operation. The design process can be a complete brainchild of a single person who comes up with the original task and a way to solve the task, or it can be assigned as task to solve a problem in a current implementation of some product.

So, to reiterate the premise, design is the process by which ideas become reality.

    Having submitted this essay I was lead to understand that it did not meet the goal of professor Finger's assignment, which was to write an essay which detailed our understanding of design such that by writing an other such piece at the end of the semester, our growth in the understanding of design could be evaluated. My original impression was that design is a very broad and abstract concept and that I could do no justice to my understanding of design by describing and pigeon-holing the concept. Apparently this train of thought lead me to fail in meeting the assignments goals. Having asked for suggestions as to how to achieve the goals more thoroughly professor Finger suggested that I try and describe a specific design initiative in which I was involved. And thus this became a meta essay.

    Why do I feel that this meta essay is appropriate? For one I think that a reasonable and plausible definition of the design process is the series of steps that are undertaken in brining to existence and idea that is a response to a particular challenge. As I mentioned in the original draft of this essay, a challenge is also a very broad and non specific term that can either be internal or external. In this case the challenge was external in that it was the assignment.

    I mentioned also in the original essay that one possible design process is a three step iterative one. The first step was brain storming coming up with the actual plan of the argument that I was going to present in the essay. The next step is drafting. In this case this consisted of just typing the actual essay up. In other situations this involves drawing sketches of the proposed ideas putting them on paper or some sort of tangible format that can be presented to others. The third step is analysis in this case it consisted of submitting the essay for review.

    What makes the process iterative is that upon analysis and review I needed to go right back to the brainstorming with a new variant on the assignment; to find a specific example of design to work with. Once I came up with the idea of a meta essay I continued to brainstorm the iterative process and improvements that I could make to the web page. And as I iterated thought again and got to step two I actually made the web page and am typing it up right now. To expand on the iterative process, while drafting the web page I found there were more improvements I could made...brainstormed on different frames configurations and then iterated though making the frames and then analyzed the results by viewing the web page.

    Now I will post the site and read it over all the time brainstorming about how it can be improved etc...