- Apr 2025
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faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
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Ultimately, any effort to make sense of a problem is one of interpretation and synthesis. Your goal in reflecting on your insights is to try to understand several aspects of the data you have:What patterns do you see in the way people describe their problem?What do you know about what’s causing the problem?What are the various consequences of the problem?Which aspects of the problem seem changeable?
I always get excited about jumping into solutions without fully understanding what the problem is. For example, if I have an assignment to design something, I often find myself jumping into different solutions instead of focusing on what matters the most. The reading explains well the importance of understanding patterns, knowing the causes and consequences, and identifying what can be changed which I believe greatly contributes to effectively understanding a problem and provides knowledge for reaching our goal.
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faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
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Therefore, you can’t define a problem without being very explicit about whose problem you’re addressing. And this requires more than just choosing a particular category of people (“Children! Students! The elderly!”), which is fraught with harmful stereotypes. It requires taking quite seriously the question of who are you trying to help and why, and what kind of help do they really need? And if you haven’t talked to the people you’re trying to help, then how could you possibly know what their problems are, or how to help them with design?Therefore, the essence of understanding any problem is communicating with the people. That communication might involve a conversation, it might involve watching them work, it might involve talking to a group of people in a community. It might even involve becoming part of their community, so that you can experience the diversity and complexity of problems they face, and partner with them to address them.
I believe it’s very challenging to understand the needs of users because one person might see something as a problem, while another might see it as something simple that doesn’t affect them. This has always been a question for me, and this part of the article helped me better understand how to overcome this as a designer. Based on the reading understanding a problem is far beyond just than focusing on specific group its about understanding things like who is my user and why are they experience it and what kind of solution do they need. I completely agree with the article that communication is a key, not just in verbal way but also paying attention to the users behavior and the problem through their action.
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faculty.washington.edu faculty.washington.edu
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A cousin of appropriation is bricolage99 Louridas, P. (1999). Design as bricolage: anthropology meets design thinking. Design Studies. , which is the act of creating new things from a diverse range of other things. Whereas appropriation is about reusing something in a new way, bricolage is about combining multiple things in to new designs.
I agree about with the idea of bricolage, it got me thinking about how college classrooms are designed, specifically UW classrooms, where students from different backgrounds, life experiences, and cultures come together, bringing different unique characteristics and knowledge, creating a new learning environment, it's like designing a classroom from many unique parts, just like bricolage. Additionally, this reminds me of how AI, like ChatGPT, gave the idea to design other new AI's that can draw, create pictures, and do other things. It shows how new things are born when we mix different ideas together.
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