#problem framing

“I stopped by the bar at 3 A.M.To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friendAnd I woke up with a headache like my head against a boardTwice as cloudy as I’d been the night beforeAnd I went in seeking clarity” — Lyrics from The Indigo Girls: Closer to Fine If you think programming is cognitively difficult, try parallel programming. It is generally harder to design, to code, and to debug than…

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com You have probably heard variations on this old saw, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I’ve also heard, “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” There is also this popular anecdote:One night, I took my dog out for a walk and I noticed one of my neighbors under a nearby street lamp crawling around on his hands and knees, apparently looking for…

Photo by Little Visuals on Pexels.com After a long day’s work, I arrived home to a distraught wife. Not, “Hi, sweetheart” but “This doorbell is driving me crazy!”  Me: “What doorbell? What are you talking about?”  People differ in how they perceive the world around them. In my case, for instance, I’m very easily distracted by movement in my visual field. Noise can be annoying, but it rarely…

Photo by Nikolay Ivanov on Pexels.com This post focuses on the importance of discovering who knows what. It’s easy to assume (without thinking!) that everyone knows what you know.  At IBM Research, around the turn of the century, I was asked to look at improving customer satisfaction about the search function on IBM’s website. Rather than using someone else’s search engine, IBM used one…

This week some work were done following the IDEO design kit, frame your design, impact ladder and ecosystem mapping work sheet were completed.

The literature review from previous week help gave insight into filling this worksheet. From going through the worksheet, I realized that the how might we statement need to be change to better fit the topic. While I did complete this worksheet, I feel like more insight can be inputted into it and the fact that this was done in less time than the recommendation on the website suggests that more work can be done.

Here is the impact ladder (left) and ecosystem mapping (right), both would be used to complete the theory of change framework. While the website provided comprehensive guide for completing the impact ladder, there are very little information on the ecosystem mapping. The work was done on rough estimation of the framework, but these two framework probably will not play a huge role in the final project as these would be edited when working through the theory of change.

for week 3 of creative technologies, we learnt about project framing and considering different ways we could go about solving a problem you may be stuck on.

an example of problem framing would be handling keyboards for phones. most people had originally considered the best solution for giving a phone the ability to write was to add a large keyboard or find some other ways to implement a full keyboard to the design. however, by simply framing the problem differently, phones no longer have direct keyboards, but instead a touch screen that opens a multi-layered keyboard on the screen.

the exercise had us taking already existing solutions, looking t it's opposite properties and then trying to use those properties to find a solution.

for my group, we were tasked with coming up with a unique solution like that of a raincoat. of the different properties we found, the primary properties we considered were that a raincoat is light, deflects water and sits around the body. looking to try to frame the problem in a different way, we considered their opposites.

the 4 different ideas we thought of were:

water-based heating coat. umbrella hat which absorbs water hydraulic exo-suit (absorbs rain for use in the system) hamster wheel. while most of these are rather nonsensical, they are unique possible ways to consider the problem. in particular, one thing I realized after considering the possibilities is that a water-based exo-suit could also be used for generating electricity, giving it possible use in powering personal devices.

overall, problem framing can be incredibly useful when other solutions are not working or helping. however, it is really only useful in considering multiple avenues of solutions. it may also leave people considering pathways that would not be realistically viable or possible. if done correctly, you may find a solution that could revolutionize a form of technology. if done incorrectly, you create a device that will act as a gimmick at best or be unusable at worst.

Astronomy Lesson: Invisible Circles

My senior year at Case-Western Reserve, I went to college full-time but I was also head of a small family. I was married and we had small baby to take care of. I worked three jobs. One of those jobs was as a teaching assistant in downtown Cleveland at a place called “The Supplementary Educational Center.” The job involved a wide range of activities including putting new walls in, painting them,…

Training Your Professor for Fun & Profit

Photo by Max Fischer on Pexels.com The name of B. F. Skinner is not often invoked in discussions of User Experience. There are limitations to his basic theory, but perhaps it is time to revisit the baby that was, by many, thrown out with that bathwater. Skinner’s approach has two major limitations that come to mind. First, human behavior is moderated by internal structures such as beliefs,…