Our work centers around measuring key aspects of the early, informal stages of the design process by following the activities the designers and teams and engage in. The choices made during the earliest stages of design can have enormous impact on outcome, but these preliminary stages of design are difficult to assess. The early stage activities we have examined thus far include concept generation, concept selection and decision-making, clarifying requirements through understanding user needs. We have measured these activities by analyzing the output of the design process, including written text, spoken word, sketches, and prototypes. Our research also considers early stage design more formally in order to understand the trade-offs between design choices at both the component and the subsystem level.