Tools for idea generation and problem solving

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no dierent fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.

Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Articial, 1969 (p.129 of 1981 MIT press 2nd edition)

19Such tools could be included in the design for behaviour change toolkitfor example, helping designers evaluate the possible range of eects on behaviour of their designand would equally comprise a useful piece of work.

Designers solve problems, but they are by no means alone in that.²⁰ Design is not, then, identical to problem-solving, but it certainly involves addressing issues that are seen (by someone) as problems and developing new or changed products, services or environments (seen by someone as solutions) in response.

This review is not going to fall into the `What is design?' rabbit-hole, since that has been more than adequately explored by other authors, but it is important to understand how design processes can work, in order to identify the most useful characteristics for the proposed toolkit.

The view of design as being entirely about `problem-solving'which, at its most mech-anistic, is basically a form of means-ends analysis that aims at discovering a process description of the path that leads to a desired goalas espoused by Simon (1969/1981, p.223, and to some extent in the above quote)²¹, has become unfashionable in design research, and not just because of the implied lack of creativity in the process.²²

In particular, the reaction against the `problem-solving' view follows Schön's (1983) concept of The Reective Practitioner, whose inquiry is not limited to a deliberation about means which depends on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but denes them interactively as he frames a problematic situation

(p.68).

Thus, design is seen as being as much about problem-framing as problem-solving, an exploration and co-evolution of both the problem and solution `spaces' (Maher et al, 1996), questioning and rening the problem, changing focus and the boundaries of the problem as part of the process of generating solutions. ^{23 24}

Dorst and Cross (2001) give the example of a workshop participant asked to redesign in-train litter bins for Dutch Railways (NS) who asks whether simply making a hole in the oor for litter to be dropped through (or combining it with the toilet ush which works in a similar way) is valid within the scope of the brief. They use Cross's (1997) idea of the formation of `bridges' between problem and solution as the `creative leap' which pairs one representation of the problem with a solution, suggesting that creative design involves a period of exploration in which problem and solution spaces are evolving and are unstable until (temporarily) xed by an emergent bridge which identies a problem-solution pairing. A creative event occurs as the moment of insight at which a problem-solution pair is framed (Dorst and Cross, 2001).

Pragmaticallyand dependent on the semantic preferences of those involvedit is arguable that problem-framing is part of problem-solving. The process of interrogating a brief, stretching and testing the boundaries of what is being asked and what will count as a solution, is an integral part of addressing the problem, rather than being a distinct activity.

Paul Rand said that [i]deas may also grow out of the problem itself, which in turn becomes part of the solution (Heller et al, 1998), and this is a proposition also found within triz (see section 2.5.5), `systems thinking' in general, and specically within Edward de Bono's work. Alexander (1964, p.17), using the (re)design of a kettle as an example, notes the uidity of the boundaries of design problems:

20As Jack Schulze of berg comments, so do dentists (Kicker Studio, 2009).

21Developed in detail in the context of articial intelligence research by Newell and Simon (1972).

22Hey (2008, p.15) makes an additional criticism, referencing on the frequent use of rule-based games such as chess by researchers such as Simon as contexts for understanding problem solving: an ideation session for an NPD [new product development] project can never claim to have exhausted every possible option, in contrast to, for example, determining what next moves are possible in a game of chess (a classic problem solving challenge).

23[G2] explores some of the implications of this viewpoint for designers involved in behaviour change.

24Hey (2008) explores designers' framing in detail in his PhD thesis, in the context of new product development, in particular how design teams negotiate a common frame for their design situation, and how this is matched to the needs of their potential users.

If I say that the kettle is the wrong way to heat domestic drinking water anyway, I can quickly be involved in the redesign of the entire house, and thereby push the context back to those things outside the house which

in-uence the house's form. Alternatively I may claim that it is not the kettle which needs to be redesigned, but the method of heating kettles. In this case the kettle becomes part of the context, while the stove perhaps is form.

Many more human-related design problems (including those relating to behaviour change) may be characterised as `wicked problems' (Buchanan, 1992; Rittel and Webber, 1973), perhaps particularly exhibiting the characteristic expressed by Conklin (2009) in his re-statement of some of Rittel and Webber's principles: You don't understand the problem until you have developed a solution. Every solution that is oered exposes new aspects of the problem, requiring further adjustments to the potential solutions. There is no denitive statement of `the problem': these problems are ill-structured and feature an evolving set of interlocking issues and constraints.

2.4.1 Generating ideas

Both within and without `design', a variety of `creative thinking' techniques are com-monly used to generate novel ideas as part of problem-solving processes, often in group workshops, but also individually. While this review cannot hope to do more than scratch the surface, some which potentially oer relevant insights to the subject at hand will be discussed.

The eld comprises a mixture of academic and popular literature, and many techniques have become generally familiar, and evolved through use, without their `authorship' remaining clear. As Gray et al (2010, p.xvi) put it, [t]he practices live in a mostly oral culture, passed along from person to person by word of mouth. For example, a consultant uses an approach with a client, and the client begins to employ that approach internally. Over time... it evolves into something quite dierent, and... the source of the original idea or approach may be lost.

One of the most comprehensive online resources on the subject, Jack Martin Leith's Compendium of idea generation methods, is no longer available, but a version of the site (Leith, 2005) retained on the Internet Archive, contains over a hundred categorised methods. Most of the methods considered relevant to this thesis are what Leith calls

`springboards' (drawing on the use of the term in Synectics)those which involve the use of an external stimulus to trigger new thinking.

Lateral thinking

Over more than forty years, Edward de Bono has produced a series of popular books and training courses on creative thinking and innovation methods. The full range of his work cannot be covered here, but some concepts relevant to design and idea generation can be extracted.

`Lateral thinking', which de Bono (1993, p.52) explains via the maxim You cannot dig a hole in a dierent place by digging the same hole deeper, contrasting it with linear

`vertical thinking', comprises four principles (de Bono, 1971, p.68): 1. Recognition of dominant polarizing ideas; 2. The search for dierent ways of looking at things; 3. A relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking; 4. The use of chance.

It is noteworthy that a number of the lateral thinking examples de Bono gives across his books are specically concerned with inuencing people's behaviour and addressing a wide range of societal issues. For example, inuencing behaviour for commercial benet is embodied in the the anecdote (de Bono, 1993, p.6) about an Australian payphone

operator which needed to oer xed-cost local calls to remain competitive with rival op-erators, but wanted callers to spend less time on those calls so that the telephones were made available for other customers; so the story goes, the operator decided to increase the weight of the telephone handsets so that longer calls became tiring (subconsciously or otherwise), limiting the length of calls made. Corporate behaviour change for envir-onmental benet is also included, for example with the idea (e.g. de Bono, 1976, p.146) that a factory taking in river water and discharging (dirty) water back into the river

should be downstream of itself, i.e. planners should force the water intake pipe to be downstream of the water outlet pipe, thus making it in the factory's best interests not to discharge polluted water.

Among the methods de Bono suggests for lateral thinking, including particularly those suited for nding dierent ways of looking at things are: simple focus, a deliberate eort to pick out a new focus point for a problem (de Bono, 1993, p.92); the creative challenge, a forced questioning of the current way things are done; and the concept fan, a method of repeatedly `pulling back', abstracting the problem implied by a search for alternative solutions,<sup>25</sup> such that the need for a ladder is restated as the need to be raised above the ground, in turn restated as the need to reduce the distance between the person and the ceiling, and so on, with each abstraction suggesting a greater range of possible solutions (de Bono, 1993, p.129). Straker and Rawlinson (2002, p.4) call a similar approach `chunking up', asking What is the real problem here? at each level; it also recalls aspects of Alexander's (1964) functional decomposition and the abstraction hierarchies used in cognitive ergonomics and ecological interface design (e.g. Rasmussen, 1985).

Provocation

Many of de Bono's techniques centre on the idea of provocation, in particular, nding ways of intentionally provoking new ideas through methods ranging from the simple random input (juxtaposing two seemingly unconnected concepts²⁶ to trigger new ideas as a connection emergesthis is an expression of `the use of chance' as mentioned above (de Bono, 1993)) to more structured methods such as using reversal, exaggeration and distortion of ideas as part of a stepping-stone process to examine and alter the given problem. The concept of po (de Bono, 1972) was introduced as a marker to signify that a deliberately provocative (perhaps supercially absurd) suggestion follows, not necessarily to be adopted as a valid solution in itself, but as a trigger to help think of alternative solutions. For example, po, cars should have square wheels leads to thinking about the possibilities of adaptive suspension systems (de Bono, 1993).

This kind of prompt potentially has application in helping designers shift problem frames (see section 2.4) implied by a brief: [e]ven if an idea is wrong in itself it can serve as a starting point for a new line of thought or as a stepping-stone to get from one idea to a new one (de Bono, 1976, p.146). In some circumstances, it is easy to imagine that it could suggest behaviour change (rather than solely technology change) as an approach in the rst place, by introducing the idea that people should change rather than a product changing.

25Compare elements of triz

26One is usually related to the problem under consideration, but the other is randomly drawn, e.g. from a dictionary. Straker and Rawlinson (2002) recount that King Gillette used an `Alphabet System' where he listed every product he could think of beginning with each letter, as a way of triggering new ideas about improving them. Eno and Schmidt's Oblique Strategies (1975) are considered in section 2.7.2.

Table 2.2: The `Six Thinking Hats' (adapted from de Bono, 1990). Later versions modify the emphasis slightly, e.g. the Black Hat becomes more about judgement, acting as a `Devil's Advocate'.

hat colour characteristics of point of view