Design Process

For a design process, to me there are 5 steps to creating anything and possibly everything. 

The first step would be to find out the topic and then mind-map or make notes that could then be researched on; this means that the more notes that are made there will be more pathways to take when researching.

Research is the second step to the process; research every single pathway you can get from the topic, most will lead to dead ends but you will get ideas from the dead leads. The leads that turn out some sort of idea, whether it is completely out of the subject or you’ve gone off to a different tangent, it will still hold ideas that can be combined or kept on their own. This is known widely as exploration as you'll be exploring different leads as well as different techniques.

The next step is to refine two or more of the ideas either into one single idea or take one of the leads and research that lead more thoroughly. Researching more into the specifics allows the idea to have more information as well as having more opportunities to combine leads. More refining is done after this to get rid of the leads that are unwanted and have no chance of influencing the final outcome. 

The next step would be to start work towards the final production, for example, selecting the final materials that will be used. By going through the exploratory stage, the different techniques that had been tested will then be selected out of to be used within the final product. 

The final step would be to take all the techniques you have decided to use in the final product and test them for a final time before using them for the final product. The final product would then be created by using the techniques learnt.
(Not quite 500 words, couldn't quite make it that long)