Hello, my name is Troels Monsted. I'm a post doctoral fellow at the University of Oslo and work in my research for the science of collaborative information systems and health care. In this lecture and the following one, how to introduce some methods from the field of digital design, tthat will be useful in your own innovation projects. The purpose of these two lectures combined is to prepare you for how to explore both the solution and the problem that you're solving thoroughly during your innovation process. While the next lecture covers how you can apply prototypes in these work, this lecture focuses on how you can explore and frame the design problem through field studies and through collaboration with the stakeholders of the project. When you have completed this lecture, you will, to be more specific, know about the purpose and role of problematisation in a design process. You will also have skills to plan and conduct a problematisation process, study and describe the current problem setting of an organization and analyze and reframe design problems. Finally, you will have competences to reflect about choice of methods in a problematisation process. The topic of this lecture is how you can work with exploring and framing of the problem that you are addressing in your project. Problematisation is an important design activity for two reasons. First of all, your project must fulfill a genuine need for all stakeholders of the project, including end users, important decision makers, and so forth. But often, the various stakeholders of a project have very different opinions about the problems at stake. It is therefore necessary that you base your project on a thorough understanding of what they experience as problematic. Second, a good design problem is key to making your project interesting for all stakeholders. And if they lose interest, your project is not likely to succeed. The design problem can be a great tool to ensure the sustained interest of your project partners. Problemitisation describes the process where you develop these design problems. The main purpose of the design problem is to give momentum to your project. You should not consider to be a fixed but a bearing for your project activities. In the following, I'll introduce two important points about design problems. The first is that the framing of design problem has great influence on the outcome of a design project. The second is that a good design problem is an important prerequisite for creating sustained interest among the stakeholders of the project. The consequence of this is that it is important to examine the design problem closely and probably also to rephrase and reframe it several times during the project as you learn more about what is really at stake for your stakeholders. If we look at the My Day case example from Steno Diabetes Center, the overall purpose is to develop an e-health solution that supports people with diabetes in maintaining a diet that is healthy for their condition by mobilizing Steno's specialist knowledge within the field. At first, the problem may appear as very clear. People with diabetes need help with managing their diet. But once you start looking into it, the roots of the problem are more complex. Why is it that many people with diabetes struggle with their diet? Is it because they don't know what is healthy for them? Is it because they get tempted? Or forget about healthy diets when they eat? Or there is something completely different at stake. To develop a relevant solution, you must understand the problem thoroughly and define your design problem accordingly. Otherwise, you risk missing the target completely. The reason for this is that the way you frame a design problem has a direct impact on the outcome of the project. Different design problems, so to speak, open different design spaces. Let me give you a couple of examples. If you frame the problem as a lack of knowledge about healthy diet among people with diabetes, then the solution is likely to become a platform where the users can obtain more knowledge about this. However, if you frame the problem as if people with diabetes perhaps know about healthy diets, but for some reason don't have the discipline to follow through, then the solution is likely to become a different one. For instance, a behavior change system. Which framing of the problem that opens the most relevant solution space is up to you to explore when you problematize. Besides defining the solutions base, a design problem also fulfills another important role in a design project. The French Sociologist, Michelle Kelong, has argued that problems can also served as obligatory passage points. Or in other words the central issue that make important stakeholders of a perfect interest in taking part. Kelong showed this through a study of a product where scientists try to develop a device that the scallop species pecten maximus can anchor on one growing. The purpose of this was to improve conditions for scallop fishing in [FOREIGN] in France. Here, the important stakeholders of the project, the fishermen, the scientists, and of course the scallops were united by a common concern. Can scalp lava anchor on an artificial device? Solving that problem would enable the scientists to public research papers the fisherman that fishes more and these scallops to increase the population. Of course, you're not dealing with shellfish or fishermen. You're dealing with people with diabetes, health professionals, nutrition experts, physiotherapists, citizens in rehabilitation, decision makers in the municipalities and so forth. The point is, however, the same. The way you frame your design problem critically affects how interested your stakeholders are in the project, and you should therefore also consider how you can make your design problem an obligatory passage point. The question is, what can you do to develop a good design problem. Within digital design, it has almost become the sine qua non to involve stakeholders actively in the process. This is not least the case when you problematize. The notion, stakeholder, covers both the producer, the end user, and secondary users, and people with a more peripheral interest in the e-health solution. In the Steno case, the stakeholders therefore include management and the development team at Steno, the people with diabetes, healthcare professionals and potentially several other groups. You should, to the extend possible, see if you can find ways of involving all of these in the problematization process. When you involve stakeholders in the problematization phase, I will advise you to do it in two different ways. First, you should conduct field studies of the current problem setting. The purpose of this is to study how the problems appear in practice. Second, you should collaborate with the stakeholders and frame the problem. The purpose of this is to negotiate a framing of a problem that they experience as relevant and interesting. Many schools of digital design the tradition referred to as participatory design, have a strong foundation in infographic methods. Ethnography can, as the cultural anthropologist, Bronisław Malinowski, stated in his book from 1922 called Argonauts of the Western Pacific be a way to approach the native's point of view and realize his vision of the world. In digital design, ethnography can in particular be very useful for learning about how the consumers or end users of an innovation experience the problem. To be a bit more specific, the American ethnographer, Jeanette Blomberg, argues that ethnographic studies can contribute to design in several ways. It can provide you with important knowledge about the settings you design for. It can help you to challenge your own assumptions about the problem settings. And thereby prevent you from projecting your own world view on the users. It can provide you with sensitivity for the context for use of the technology. One example could be the situations in which people with diabetes planned their meals on the way home from work, in the supermarket, or when they talk about meals with the spouse. It can give you a sense of the relations between the different practices or tasks carried out by the users. As a result, ethnography can make design problem-oriented. Ethnography offers a rich methodical toolbox that can be useful for design. When you work with digital design, I will particularly advise you to do two things. First, you should conduct observations of end users in the natural habitat to see with your own eyes what is problematic for them. Second, you should conduct interviews for the broad selection of stake holders including producers, consumers and decision makers of the innovation, to get their perspectives on the problem. For specific instructions on how to do these observations and interviews, please refer to the lecture on ethnic radical methods where these techniques are introduced. When you have built a solid understanding of the current problems sitting from your field studies, it is time to begin framing and re-framing your design problem. One simple thing you can do is to insistently ask why, for instance, why is it difficult for people with diabetes to strike a good balance of nutrients on their dinner plate? Why do some people with diabetes insist on having certain types of food, when they know that their diet would be better without? Why do some people with diabetes want to eat the same food as their non-diabetic relatives and so forth? By constantly asking why, you experiment with various framings of the problem. And at one punch, you may strike one that opens a good solution space that is interesting for your stakeholders. However, I will also strongly advice you to discuss the framing of the problem with your stakeholders. Both on the producer and consumer side of things of the innovation. In digital design, the workshop has become the most common arena for this kind of collaboration. One approach that I've found particularly productive is a method called inspiration card workshops, that is proposed by Kim Halskov Madsen and Pira Dalsgaard. The approach, really is quite simple. The idea is that before the workshop prepare two types of game cards. The first type of card is called domain cards, this are used to represent findings from your field work. This could, for instance, be places where the activities take place, things that are in use and people who are part of the activities, but also specific events or short descriptions of things that appear to be problematic. The other type of card is called technology cards. These represent technological opportunities for a solution. This can be specific technology, such as smart phone apps, wearable tracking devices or NFC chips. But also more abstract principles or attributes, for instance nudging, push messages, etc. At the workshop, the idea is that designers and users collaborate on combining domain cards and technology cards into design concepts. You can, for instance, ask, how can we make people with diabetes more aware of the composition of their meal at dinner, and discuss with your stakeholders how this can be achieved. The idea is that you hereby discuss what is really experienced as problematic while you also sketch some concept that you may explore through prototyping. I'll get back to proto-timing in the next lecture. To sum up, it is important that you do not just take for granted the initial problem that you were presented with. Rather, is it is important that you explore the design problem by doing field studies, and by discussing it with stakeholders of the project. Thank you for listening.
