Define design and its place in the development process

What will be an ideal response?

Design is the path between the concept of a product and the building of the product itself. While analysis studies the product from the viewpoint of the problem domain — what it can do to solve a problem, satisfy a desire, or take advantage of an opportunity — design does the same thing from the view of the solution: what the product must be to satisfy requirements. In short, design is about "how," whereas analysis is about "what" and "where."
Design is a model-driven activity that must, eventually, produce engineering blueprints for actually building the product. Our approach to design is object-oriented, component-based, and architectural. This approach views the product as a system composed of objects, both coarse-grained and fine-grained, and holds that the design process must start from an overall view that is refined through roundtrips and iterations, not through successive decomposition of the features.
Like object-oriented analysis, design starts its voyage of discovery by going from outside in, and refines its views from inside out if new objects are discovered or required.