The Problem is the Problem: Mastering Problem Recognition over Solution Veneration

Part 1: Why design's best minds struggle to truly define problems worth solving.

On a warm evening in Goa, on the sidelines of a conference, I bumped into a professor from Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. As we strolled past the landscaped gardens of the venue, he happened to share a particular concern. Sometimes, dormant thoughts get activated when someone vocalises them for you. My interest got piqued and I decided to narrate the conversation here.

"We're cultivating visualisation skills and creative confidence through our Design programmes" said the professor, who has spent nearly two decades teaching. "but we're still graduating object-makers, not enough problem-seekers."

“It's seductive to showcase cutting-edge concepts, but we've grown distracted from interrogating whether these are genuinely solving underlying human needs or mere documentations of ingenuity."

I immediately connected to the professor’s lament. While hiring, attending juries and coaching designers, I’d noticed this lacunae not only in students, but also experienced professionals and I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes even in my own practice.

For a field once celebrated for human-factors-led need-finding and creative problem-solving, many designers today have become enraptured by slick prototypes, renderings and technologies seeking problems to solve. This fixation on shiny solutions over rigorous inquiry poses an escalating risk of gimmickry overtaking true impact. The causes are manifold.

• A prevalence of ‘Innovation Theater’(1) over quiet, difficult work of problem mastery.
• Time Famine: A perceived shortage of time that results in short-circuiting problem definition.
• Perception of design as decoration or applied-art: Misunderstood role of designers as creative form-givers over empathetic problem-solvers who own end-to-end customer experiences.
• Technological capabilities enabling aesthetic mastery over critical thinking: It’s easier to prompt an LLM to throw up a high-fidelity visual representation of ideas over asking it to reason/debate on a topic or solve simple puzzles like Wordle (2).
• Missing discourse on critical thinking: Rarely do we find good examples of leaders guiding the way for teams to step back, observe tensions in the world through an ethnographic lens, and selecting the right problems to pick. There is a shortage of confident coaches who encourage questioning. Even in the socio-political scenario outside of work, solutioning is rewarded while questioning is frowned upon and silenced.
• No relatable rubrics. Eloquently framing problems represents a new frontier of learning for many professionals. Ask a PM or designer to write a user story, problem statement or PRD, and you’ll often find that a solution has creeped into the text. After all, coming up with self-interrogating problem definitions is less instinctive than visualising solutions.

As we make our way to the beach, I wonder if each point above deserves to be expanded into a dedicated article of its own. Our conversation steers towards the business aspects of the subject. Look out for the next part as I continue to write more deeply on this topic. Note: Although I’ve taken creative liberties and paraphrased sentences from our original conversation while writing this text, the essence of the conversation remains intact.

Hi, I'm Ruchin. I am passionate about the Business of Design. I talk about leading global teams, creative culture building and my approach to innovation.

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Further Reading

1. What is Innovation Theater? - Forbes
2. What can LLMs Never do? - Y-combinator Hacker News