EthnoBorrel: “I have a problem, but how do I develop a solution?”
Problem vs. Solution-Focused Thinking: April 2021 Event Recap
This is part one of a planned series of meetup events that examines the role of research in the design process. The EthnoBorrel community have been talking about building healthy research cultures since the beginning of this year, running events in both January and February. One of the key insights stemming from those events and from a research project conducted by myself and Erin B. Taylor is that doing research in the industry is understood as a team practice and not a solo practice. A key building block of a healthy research culture is successful working relationships built on a “shared language” such as a design process framework.
Provocation. This week the organisers decided to use the double diamond approach as a provocation. The series examines the common dilemma of qualitative researchers and designers as they navigate the work process of design teams visually represented as the double diamond design process. The double diamond is a result of a 2007 study of the British Design Council of how 13 iconic products came to be developed.
On the left side, you have the problem space where researchers identify their strengths and core work practice. On the right side, you have the solutions space where designers identify their expertise and develop human-centric applications. The middle is the interaction point in the chain between the two. This visual representation of a complicated work process breaks down the mindset challenges and work partnerships necessary to do design work. Using this double diamond representation, some of the questions we discussed were:
- How does this shift from problem to solution happen? And vice versa?
- What are the challenges for researchers and designers as they move between spaces?
This post centres on two focal points that emerged from the discussion. One, the discussants found the uses of the double diamond useful but limited. Second, the practitioners mitigated its simplistic approach through the use of various workshopping methods to make it pragmatic. Finally, the session concluded that the design process is messy and require various ways of deeply examining the context of the problem prior to any solutions.
Double Diamond (DD) is Limited. As a design framework, several discussants agreed that the double diamond approach is limited. User experience researcher and strategist Angela Obias-Tuban called it, “not practical” for research purposes because it remained a “high-level concept.” However, she did add that for those who did not know about the process, this is a good way to explain it. jane fletcher, a service designer at Kainos Design, agreed and she specifically noted that the DD is a “great sales tool” and introduces the design process to her gov.uk clients. She cautions though that the DD visual model leads to clients having “poor expectations” of the process, thinking of it as linear and straightforward contrary to the continuous loop and learning explicitly advocated in the LEAN start-up.
Similarly, the DD model must also be thought of as a learning mechanism to arrive at the solution. Another external consultant agreed that clients might have a mistaken impression that the design process is linear rather than messy and complicated.
Most of the discussants agreed that the double diamond served an entry level purpose to understand the design process but required modifications for it to work on the ground.
Workshopping to the Solutions. To overcome the conceptual DD approach, the discussants used different workshopping tactics as tangible ways to take design thinking and problem solving further to get to the solutions. The discussants unanimously agreed that going deeper in the problem space was essential to building towards a solution. Angela broke down her design process into “staged conversations” using customer journey mapping. A potential session may look like a 1–2 hour story session which may then be followed by another 1–2 hour affinity mapping. The goal of these sessions is to prototype early ideas, but not necessarily to identify the final outcomes or solutions. For her, this type of in-depth process clearly links research insights to the final solution.
Going Deep to the Solutions. The others discussed their workshop preparation phase among their cross-functional teams to take the DD concept into practice. This process required going deep in the problem space. For instance, a research lead pointed out that it was important to “challenge the outcomes” and not just problems in her cross-functional team. She looks at big questions and proceed to narrow the question further. An example of a big question is, “what is the (user) habit?” but it could be narrowed more closely to “what would be the resistance to change (the habit)? ” Her job is to find the minimal question that she needs to answer, “to narrow the question but in a human-centric way.”
Two discussants described their in-depth process as being more akin to the scientific method. Khushmin Mistry of Kainos Design shared that she usually begins with a hypothesis to test such as with her current government-based project. She “looks at constraints like the timeline” and from there “breaks it down into four research questions.” Similarly, a service designer explicitly focuses on identifying bias to “get it out first” before embarking on a “granular research” approach.
From Solutions to Problems. The back to front approach is what another service designer calls as “visualising results.” This is when mapping the “journey in time” exposes what “users need and see,” which in turn, reveals “gap for analysis” or what she calls as “hotspots” that can be useful in identifying domains of research.
Another discussant, design researcher Merlijn Kouprie shared another type of thinking process by starting at the end (a user test) as a way to “getting stakeholders on board.”
“Basically… by starting with a quick user test I can show the power (to stakeholders) of involving user feedback into the process, after which I engage them to identify knowledge gaps (what else would you like to learn?), after which stakeholders then are much more keen/onboarded to do exploratory/discovery research. So “a quick user test” helps to get stakeholders on board and show them that we do need other types of research (that take more time, etc.) that I would usually prefer to start with, but is not always possible.”
Bringing it Back Up to the DD Concept. Another practitioner brought the discussion back up to the conceptual problem by pointing out the co-evolution of the problem and solution. One way to separate them he says was by becoming “context-driven.” For instance, asking a big question, “what ideal behaviour to acquire?” and exploring it accordingly. Angela also shared that DD was “good for tactical solutions.” She follows a yearly research schedule as indicated in Indi Young’s Mental Models publication to allow space to deep dive into foundational research once a year that may not be possible in dedicated solutions-oriented problem solving.
To close, all discussants agreed that the design process is not linear and is more convoluted than depicted in a DD process. The Design Squiggle best represents this messy process.
However, practitioners tease out the integrated strands through various workshopping techniques to outline specific steps needed to articulate problems that can eventually rank and prioritize several solutions in cooperation with other team members.
The organisers of the Ethnoborrel are: Erin B. Taylor, Gunjan Singh, Abhigyan Singh, Melanie T. Uy, and Gawain Lynch. Melanie facilitated this event in April 2021. EthnoBorrel is a community of designers, researchers, managers, and more who use ethnography, in whatever shape or form, in their practice. It was founded by Erin B. Taylor and Gawain Lynch on December 2017, patterned after the Ethnobreakfasts held in the USA and also the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC) community, to forge stronger connection among professional ethnographers and between ethnographers and industry. The group was established in the Netherlands but with a broad audience in the EU and beyond, thanks to the current switch to virtual events.
