How do you approach the design process? (+video)

[commodoredl]

Blue Lightning's design process isn't quite as complex as 234's, but we have some pride in it. As our team uses a lot of 80-20 in our robot, we are very big on Pareto and the 80-20 rule.
On the day of the kickoff, the team has a meeting immediately following the webcast, for about 4 hours, where all members of the team are involved in a preliminary design session. We outline the most basic roles in the game first. (This year, we had offense, defense, and hybrid, and under offense we had hurdling, herding, and lapping.) Then we have the team all decide which area(s) we wanted to focus on the most with a Pareto vote.
How a Pareto vote works, is each member of the team is given multiple votes they are allowed to use (3-5). We let everyone vote with all their votes, and they can vote multiple times on one thing. The end result is a lot of votes stacked in one or 2 columns, with only a few votes in the others. In other words, 80 percent of the votes go to 20 percent of the options usually, hence the name Pareto vote.
Once a focus is determined, we have the team get into groups, and we do activities to generate ideas for accomplishing the task. One example is having everyone go around in a circle from A to Z naming a method beginning with that letter. So when coming up with hurdling ideas, we might get Arm, Bump, Catapult, etc. There are obviously some stupid sounding ones, but it generates a lot of unique ideas.
After the first idea session, it's down to the subteam responsible for building the robot to make the other decisions. They look at all the ideas, do some calculations and simulations to find out what works the best, and pick a method. Then they start some drawings in CAD and build prototypes for the proof of concept.
We try to be done as early as possible, but like many teams we are always in a time crunch inevitably. We are always looking for ways to improve our design process.