Our experience in the Design Fest served to show that we should keep the design simple, and never put into it more functionality than the problem description asked for. There were times when we considered adding features which were appealing by themselves but also increased the complexity of the solution and somewhat changed the focus from the problem at hand. Thus, these features were dropped in favour of a simpler design.

We found that sharing a common design vocabulary (that might include design patterns) can speed up the design process considerably.