Gerald Ajam

The seven steps

I rarely begin with a method.

Status From practice

Published September 2026

How I work

I begin by trying to understand what is actually happening: what people are trying to accomplish, what the environment makes easy or difficult, what assumptions have become invisible and what evidence might explain the situation.

The exact process changes with the work. The underlying moves are surprisingly consistent.

  1. 01Readthe situation
  2. 02Explainthe mechanism
  3. 03Examinethe evidence
  4. 04Judgeunder constraint
  5. 05Translateinto form
  6. 06Observewhat happens
  7. 07Transferwhat was learned

The seven steps

Four ways to read them

  1. Step 1: Read the situation

    Start with behaviour in context.

    What are people actually doing? What are they trying to achieve? What constraints shape their decisions? What workarounds have they invented?

    The artefact (a screen, classroom, policy, workflow or resource) is only part of the situation.

  2. Step 2: Explain the mechanism

    Description is necessary but insufficient.

    The more useful question is usually why the observed behaviour occurs.

    The mechanism might involve cognition, incentives, information, physical layout, institutional rules, interaction design, social norms or several of these at once.

  3. Step 3: Examine the evidence

    Evidence differs in strength and relevance.

    A repeated design convention isn’t automatically a learning principle. A laboratory finding doesn’t automatically transfer unchanged into a classroom. A successful implementation doesn’t prove that every element caused the result.

    I try to separate what is known, what is plausible, what is contextual and what remains assumption.

  4. Step 4: Judge under constraint

    Evidence rarely specifies the design.

    Someone still has to decide what matters under the constraints of the actual situation.

    This is where design becomes judgement rather than compliance.

  5. Step 5: Translate into form

    A useful idea eventually has to change something.

    Depending on the situation, that might mean:

    • an interface
    • a classroom arrangement
    • a routine
    • a policy
    • a workflow
    • a representation
    • a facilitation structure
    • a guide
    • a decision rule

  6. Step 6: Observe what happens

    Implementation produces new information.

    People reinterpret designs, develop workarounds, encounter constraints that were invisible earlier and adapt the intervention to their context.

    Those responses are part of the design problem rather than noise around it.

  7. Step 7: Transfer what was learned

    Whether it worked is only half of it.

    The final question is:

    What did this situation teach us that might improve judgement somewhere else?

    Sometimes the most valuable output of a project is a better way of seeing the next problem.

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