I have developed a general process to engineering design that I carry out when designing something new:

1. I research the issue and try to better understand causes, effects and stakeholders so I can enhance my design decisions

2. I come up with many different divergent solutions so I will be able to analyze the different benefits and disadvantages they all have. Also allows me to come up with unique solutions that aren't obvious.

3. I develop each of my Ideas further and evaluate them on how good they are at meeting my requirements.

4. I compare the ideas against each other in order to see if any are clearly superior to another, and so that I can potentially combine multiple ideas to make an even better one.

5. I narrow down my list and repeat steps 3 and 4 until I am left with, at most, a couple of potentially great designs.

6. I continuously tweak my final designs to help them overcome their shortcomings and then, after comparing them move on with what I feel is the most promising one.

7. I create a prototype of the best design to gain a further understanding of it, and make sure there aren't any practical disadvantages I did not conceptually think of that limit it.

8. Using what I have learned from the prototype, I tweak my design and make modifications to the prototype as necessary (or I explore some of the final designs if they now appear more promising).

9. I develop all the final details of my design to complete this design process. However, changes in requirements or other factors may require me to go through parts of my design process again to improve upon my design.