Objective:
To develop a research-driven design framework based on personal methodology and creative practice. The aim is to create a structured, adaptable system that supports strategic decision-making in design processes in UI/UX, branding, and collaborative environments.
Constraints:
All components of the framework (phases, tools, outputs) must be modular, easy to communicate, and demonstrable in several environments.
This project translates my instinctive process into a structured design framework that can support clarity, adaptability, and collaborative decision-making across projects.
Through primary research, tested design logic, and strategic storytelling, I aim to document how this framework came to life — not only to showcase my process, but to reflect my capabilities as a design leader, systems thinker, communications strategist, and decision-maker.
By presenting it as a fully-realized case study, I hope to demonstrate how intuition becomes infrastructure, and how thoughtful frameworks can empower both creativity and teams.
PHASE 1
MAPPING
PHASE 2
SYNTHESIS
PHASE 3
TOOLKIT
PHASE 4
FIGMA TEMPLATE
PHASE 5
USE CASE
PHASE 6
FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
Phase 1
Data Collection
2022 – System Fatigue
“Every method I tried felt like it didn't check all the boxes.”
I dipped into Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile templates—Post-its, canvases, sprint boards—but they either lacked creative elasticity or felt too mechanical. Nothing helped me make sense of the process itself.
2024 – The Framework Takes Shape
“What if a system could be soft and smart?”
I mapped it. Cards. Phases. Trees. Moodboards. Notion decks. Prototypes. A framework emerged—not rigid, but responsive. Strategic, but human. This was backed by a more in-depth research and exploration of design frameworks through projects and workshops with lecturers at the Royal College of Art.
2021– The Pattern of Chaos
“Too many tabs open, too many thoughts scattered.”
While freelancing across branding, UX, and illustration, I noticed how my own process constantly shifted depending on the project. There was no central logic, no toolkit—only instinct, and it began to feel unsustainable.
2023 – Synthesis Becomes Survival
“If it doesn’t fit me, I’ll make it.”
I started borrowing selectively from each mindset. A moodboarding taxonomy here. A sprint reflection there. Tools became modular. Notes became rituals. Patterns emerged. For the first time, the chaos began to flow.
2025 – A Grid is Born
“A framework for clarity, creativity, and choice.”
This framework addresses these challenges by offering a modular, mindset-driven system that streamlines decision-making, fosters alignment, and enables both individuals and teams to think laterally while executing with purpose.
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
increase in collaborative design tools.
75%
Design teams today often struggle to balance speed with clarity- working in sprints that demand quick decisions while trying to stay aligned with long-term strategy and user needs. Meanwhile, solo designers lack structured tools to think across multiple dimensions- brand, function, user emotion, and feasibility in a cohesive and adaptable way.
How can we address this gap by offering a modular, mindset-driven system that streamlines decision-making, fosters alignment, and allowing both individuals and teams to think laterally while addressing the intersection of disciplines.
Peer Interviews for Primary Research
Insights
This set of interviews was taken around the campuses of the Royal College of Art, which consists of Master's and PhD design students, accomplished leaders in the industry, guest lecturers, and working professionals- and all very inspiring people.
This place was the ideal place to conduct the interviews due to the intersection of various perspectives, levels of experience, and perspectives from fellow design innovators.
Sample size: 100 people
"Sometimes I have five ideas competing in my head, and I don’t have a system to decide which one actually works best for the brief. Explaining it to the client falls short of the concept."
"A thinking partner is excellent, and a collaborative team is powerful, but when there are multiple sources on information and sorting out the information and making sure everyone's perspective is heard is upsetting."
"Frameworks need to evolve with process. There is no sense in repeated templates that are just forms to be filled out with no backing. As creatives and leaders, creativity has a flow but not a formula."
"The tools my agency uses are great for delivery, but they don’t help us reflect on why we made certain design choices in the first place. Somehow it seems mainstream in the end anyway, so did we actually challenge ourselves to innovate or just succeed?"
Phase 2
Synthesis
Framework Development: From Concept
The Flowgrid Framework was born from a personal need: to bridge gaps I observed between existing methodologies like Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile, and the real challenges faced during creative decision-making.
Rather than treating these mindsets as isolated processes, I explored their overlapping principles—user-centric problem solving, iterative validation, adaptability to uncertainty—and identified pockets where each traditionally left gaps.
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Design Thinking offered strong user empathy but lacked decision-prioritization tools.
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Lean emphasized value efficiency but often minimized the emotional and strategic richness.
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Agile encouraged adaptability but lacked a structured foundation for upstream research and vision.
The FlowGrid Framework is a modular, research-driven system designed to guide creative teams, product designers, and strategic innovators through structured, adaptable decision-making processes.
Built at the intersection of Design Thinking, Lean Mindset, and Agile Practices, it empowers individuals and teams to move fluidly through the messy realities of ideation, alignment, execution, and reflection without losing clarity, agility, or empathy along the way.
Rather than following a rigid process, FlowGrid offers pathways: tailored flows for Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), iterative builds, vision strategies, and impact tracking. Teams (or solo designers) can pick a route based on project needs, scale, and goals.
Evolving into the Final Framework
By synthesizing these into a modular cycle (Listen → Align → Build → Reflect), the first version of FlowGrid aimed to create a flexible system that could loop dynamically and allow for structured forking when needed.
This modular skeleton captured the basic design behavior but left room for expansion. The intent was also to create a modular system with pieces that could be moved around and played with as per the designer's needs.
The evolution from the original modular circle to the complex, layered system reflects a design process rooted in:
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Pattern Recognition
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Strategic Synthesis
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Human-centered adaptability
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A balance of creativity and logic
It positions FlowGrid not simply as a fluid breathing design operating system for modern innovation projects.
Phase 3
Toolkit
The FlowGrid Toolkit is a modular companion designed to bring the FlowGrid Framework to life. Built for real-world use, it offers a customizable set of templates, boards, cards, and maps- empowering designers, strategists, and teams to structure their projects with agility, creativity, and clarity.
Whether you’re defining a vision, mapping research, building moodboard taxonomies, prioritizing decisions, or reflecting on impact, the toolkit provides plug-and-play modules to guide every step of the creative journey.
Each template is intentionally designed to be:
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Modular and remixable
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Visual and action-oriented
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Scalable from solo projects to team collaborations
The FlowGrid Toolkit turns strategic thinking into tangible momentum — helping you move from possibility to progress.
The template gives suggestions and prompts to address in each phase of the process, ensuring that there is clarity in thought and functioning.
Phase 5
Use Case
View the UI project in my portfolio here.
Phase 6
Future Perspectives
The Flowgrid Framework was intentionally designed to be resilient, adaptive, and future-facing—qualities essential for leadership roles in design management and creative direction.
Rather than being a static checklist or rigid pipeline, Flowgrid behaves more like a design operating system, able to expand, reconfigure, and evolve alongside the needs of projects, teams, and industries.
Through its development and initial applications, the framework proved highly effective in structuring messy decision spaces, aligning diverse stakeholders, and encouraging more meaningful creative reflection.
Peer designers, strategists, and tutors consistently praised FlowGrid for its balance of clarity and flexibility, noting that it neither rigidly prescribes steps nor leaves teams unguided- a rare strength in the landscape of frameworks today.
"What stands out about FlowGrid is how modular and flexible it feels; it's rare to find a framework as a customizable, research-informed, emotionally intelligent design system."
"FlowGrid feels like a lightweight operating system for creatives. It doesn’t overwhelm, it guides- something that highlights the quality of a design strategist and shows the ability to lead teams."
"One of the most unique aspects is how the framework humanizes design thinking. The integration of reflection and emotional metrics makes it genuinely user-centered from the inside out."
"I appreciate how it gives me an outline for my thoughts, rather than me having to wonder about everything I have to consider after I've already started working."
"The framework is ideal for workshops and expands to accommodate different types of design thinkers."
"FlowGrid brings back an element of iteration and play in the process- like refined sticky notes that make it easy to present a holistic view of a project as a pitch in a presentation."
Evolution of the Framework in the Industry
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Modular Scalability:
As new tools, methods, or market needs emerge, individual modules (e.g., Sentiment Audit, Reflection Structure, New Metrics) can be updated or swapped without disrupting the entire system. -
Customized Flows for Emerging Fields:
FlowGrid can generate new custom flows for different sectors, like AI-based UX, sustainable product design, service design ecosystems by remixing existing modules or introducing new forks. -
Data-Driven Adaptation:
Over time, the Insights Wall and Impact Tracker feed back into the system, allowing the framework to refine its strategies based on real project outcomes. The model "learns" with each deployment. -
Collaborative Growth:
Teams can adapt the framework together, aligning stakeholders, scaling agile sprints, shaping user-centered branding initiatives, making FlowGrid a collaborative infrastructure, not just an individual process. -
Ecosystem Thinking:
It’s designed for systems-based design management, hence integrating research, user testing, prototyping, and business goals within adaptable cycles.
Whether the objective is a product launch, a rebranding campaign, or a service innovation, Flowgrid enables designers and decision-makers to see the system holistically, manage complexity, and prioritize smartly.
Use Cases Over Time
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Sustainable Design Innovation: Reflection structures and New Metrics could help teams pivot toward sustainability KPIs mid-project without losing core design integrity.
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Adaptive Product Development: In agile product teams, the Forks and Custom Flows allow fast response to user-testing insights, making the framework extremely suited for MVP-to-Scale journeys.
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Design Leadership & Organizational Change: Design managers and directors can use FlowGrid to facilitate more transparent decision-making, reduce "design by committee" risks, and provide teams with clear paths while preserving creative autonomy.
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Self-Reflection for Designers: Even solo practitioners can use it to create better self-initiated projects- building internal alignment, testing hypotheses faster, and reflecting with measurable growth loops. I acts as an audit system for a more flexible process.
What sets your framework apart is that it doesn’t just use these mindsets as influences-it uses them as materials.
Epilogue
Responsive
Layouts
I made significant use of the auto layout feature to create responsive designs and found that the adaptations between screens mixed with customizable layouts in terms of density and colors creates a tailored experience that will automatically enhances the experience of users with different requirements.
Laziness
Is Key
Yep- that’s it. Nobody likes to work a little extra. Seven clicks, remember a number, reset preferences, check for updates- no way. Once you realize that laziness is the universal problem for which design is meant to create solutions, the work process becomes crystal clear.
Stepping Into
Different Shoes
Many times while sketching out the wireframes, I was thinking about the importance of the flow of information, but when I laid it out on Figma, I kept coming back to place myself in the shoes of the user personas and tried to see it from their perspective- then made changes to the intial plans.