Moving from finding NEEDS to PROBLEMS

I recently went to see a presentation. The presentation was about an overview of a Research Group of a company. The presenter stated an interesting point “…look for NEEDS and design for it”.

This is quite interesting. I’ll just take a philosophical route (if you want to say its philosophy) and talk about NEEDS and PROBLEMS. We designers are “generally” trained to design for “needs” and researcher are trained t solve “problems”. How these words change the approach is interesting.

There will be people who will argue that NEED may not be existing and an introduction of a new gadget might create it – say like – iPOD or SMS in mobiles or Miss Calls or Mobile phones itself so on and so forth. When we look for need we bias our self to a solution; when you look for ‘need’ you have an idea about the solution. Let’s say to argue – “There is a need for a gadget that could allow people to listen to music while they are mobile”. We already have defined the need; so at psychological term we jump to finding solutions.

What PROBLEM does it; it opens up the issue for investigation. Lets say “People get bored while they are mobile for a long time”. The problem may have multiple solutions. The statement asks to investigate deeper into the problem. This means that the designer would have more scope to understand the problem thus may come up with a more appropriate design solution (or even multiple solutions) to the problem. To be better designers the approach should be…to look for PROBLEMS than NEEDS.

Though one may argue and say that both are just a play of words. It may be a play of word but they definitely change the approach and attitude towards design. The “problem statement” defines the route you would take to solve it…

The design doesn’t start at the drawing board but it ends at the drawing board. It had started with the time the designer was (actually) born. Because what he understands about people, their needs, his observation of the behavior or environment, his experience of handling the previous projects etc is all that basic data that he will use to design it. The more rich it is the better design can one make.

So if you are observant and can see the problems from you day to day life (or related to your) the better designer you can be. So pick out problems and keep your database building – you never know what may come handy in your next project. If you are a designer – you works 24x7; this world if your Labs (the best you can ever have).