Problem solving is essential to everyone's life. People survive if they are nourished, sheltered, and protected--and they construct ways to obtain nourishment, shelter, and protection through problem solving. Though problems vary in complexity--survival at the one end and the pursuit of comfort at the other--we are reliant on our ability to solve problems. The design process provides a cognitive framework of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, which is used by many professional designers to create solutions to design problems. Students in art education programs may be taught these problem-solving steps to use as an effective life and career skill. Students discover through testing, revising, and retesting that there may be some solutions that work better than others but there are many possibilities for success. Teachers can use their viewpoint as art and design educators to teach the design process as a framework for training students to identify and solve complex, multidisciplinary, open-ended problems that people routinely encounter in many situations. In this article, the authors describe each step of the design process and then provide one example of how the process is used by a professional interior designer, followed by the methods two teachers have used in working with young students.