A System for Problem Framing: Building Service Program of Design Thinking Methods

Abstract

With the advancement of modern life meanwhile emerging new social needs and problems coming from different fields are increasing every day Like most social problems environmental problems civil problems political problems educational problems business problems and design problems had been considered as a wicked problem which means ill-structured complex and real world problems Previous study indicated that an effective problem-solving process starts with asking the right questions in the beginning (Perry and Vanderklein 2009) Therefore how to define and get insights of a problem and frame a problem in the problem-solving process has become a crucial issue Based on review on relevant models in problem solving decision making innovation management and so on we considered Design Thinking process as building blocks to constitute our design patterns We investigated the required tools and process to develop a platform for problem solvers to define their problem based on the context of Design Thinking Through engaging ourselves into a class with 53 students named “Creativity Innovation Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking “ this research combined an action research with a longitudinal study and used Design Thinking methods to observe the problems that happening in the class There were three findings: (1) students need a set of standardized criteria of tools for evaluating the effectiveness of design thinking tools; (2) students need to have more instructional examples for references to check the correctness of the usage of Design Thinking tools; (3) students need to have a well-structured instruction for guiding them to a better solution Drawing on the user experience derived from the field study we developed a problem-framing system for problem solvers based on the insight of user needs The service system includes: (1) Finding Construction (2) Data Collection (3) Insight Construction (4) Profile Construction (5) Journey Construction and (6) Idea Construction We also developed the program and the conducted prototyping test and the results showed that this service system can help them reframe their project comprehensively and provide a guidance of the right direction with the supported tools There are five contributions of this research including theoretical and practical contribution The theoretical contributions include: (1) identifying the key components of problem framing and (2) helping users better understand about how to use Design Thinking tools correctly to solve a problem The practical contributions include: (3) assisting users to improve the ability of framing problem and make sure the project develop well in a both systematic and rational way (4) helping users to find out the ultimate goal of design and determine whether it is feasible or not based on the user experiences and (5) providing a problem-framing platform based on user needs and experiences

Date of Award	2016 Jun 30
Original language	English
Supervisor	Shyh-Nan Liou (Supervisor)