Stephen Macneil: Hi I'm Steve MacNeil, and today I'll be presenting the work that I've been doing with my colleagues Zijian, Kexin, Thomas Yajie, and Stephen. Our work focuses on problem framing, an often overlooked part of the creative design process.
Stephen Macneil: Designers rely on creativity support tools to do creative work they use search engines, news websites, and design probes to discover insights about a problem.
Stephen Macneil: They use tools like IdeaMache, IdeaHound, and the Design Space Explorer to curate and synthesize these findings.
Stephen Macneil: They also use tools like IdeaGens and CrowdMuse to help find inspiration and brainstorm new solutions.
Stephen Macneil: Finally, they implement these solutions and seek out feedback from stakeholders and colleagues. Creativity and cognition has contributed a variety of tools that help designers and novices through this process.
Stephen Macneil: However, a recent review by Frich and others at Aarhus University shows that while 40% of creativity support tools focus on ideation and implementation, but only 10% support problem identification.
Stephen Macneil: And while design is not a linear process, solutions are informed by the problems that designers choose to solve. A problem gives a focal point, a frame of reference for exploring and evaluating solutions. Without a problem, solutions have no intrinsic value.
Stephen Macneil: Given the importance of problems in the design process it's surprising that more creativity support tools don't support this important part of the creative process.
Stephen Macneil: In this work, we explore problem framing and how novices developed problem statements. A problem statement is a clear and concise articulation of the problem. So here's an example of a problem statement that uses the "how might we format", a popular pattern for describing problems in design.
Stephen Macneil: We started this research with a pilot study of students in the design class.
Stephen Macneil: And while most students and included a goal, they often omitted other information like stakeholders are the obstacles that a stakeholder faces when writing these problem statements.
Stephen Macneil: Omitting this key design information suggested to us that more scaffolding might help novices do a better job.
Stephen Macneil: And so we developed ProbLib to help novice designers write better problem statements.
Stephen Macneil: We decompose the problem framing process into to design activities first on the left, identifying components of the problem, such as obstacles goals and stakeholders and then on the right there's an area to compose these components together, using a template.
Stephen Macneil: This tool was designed to help students frame problems and externalize their thinking, making the tacit explicit.
Stephen Macneil: We conducted a between-subjects study with 74 students. Students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the control condition, students used an open text form. In the experiment condition, students used our interface, but otherwise, the two interfaces were equivalent.
Stephen Macneil: Participants in both conditions received training about how to write a good problem statement.
Stephen Macneil: So to evaluate the effects of this intervention, we had two designers qualitatively code the resulting data.
Stephen Macneil: One was a design TA and the other was a professional designer both coders were blinded condition and not aware of our research questions.
Stephen Macneil: Our results show that scaffolding provided in our experiment modestly improved the quality of the problem statements for novices. However, there was no difference in the statement lengths and there's no difference in the number of statements created.
Stephen Macneil: Finally, participants using ProbLib tended to include more design information, as seen in blue.
Stephen Macneil: In addition to these main takeaways, we also observe some creative behaviors related to problem framing in the surveys. Participants to describe the number of ways that the problem components help them.
Stephen Macneil: participant 42 said "by writing down the components I am layering the dots that can be connected together to provide a full picture of the problem to be solved."
Stephen Macneil: participant 11 said "once I was able to identify one component, I could start filling in the blanks for the other components it helped me to connect my ideas and make them into statements that worked. If something was missing, it was easy for me to come up with that missing component."
Stephen Macneil: Participants also talked about how it helped them to explore alternatives, they described as a really good brainstorming session it allowed room for creativity.
Stephen Macneil: And participants six said, it also allowed me to more clearly look at the wide array of individuals and groups who have been affected by a particular action.
Stephen Macneil: So, in summary, higher-quality problem statements were generated by ProbLib compared to the open text form.
Stephen Macneil: decomposition and the templates help novice designers include the right information, but more help appears to be necessary to get that information right.
Stephen Macneil: Decomposition helped participants make connections creatively combine their problem components to form new problem statements.
Stephen Macneil: And participants described the activity as a brainstorming session that help them think more broadly and explore alternatives.
Stephen Macneil: And finally, we see the creativity is not limited to ideation but can also include other parts of their creative process like problem framing.
Stephen Macneil: I'd like to thank my co-authors once again and I hope this works shows how creativity support tools can focus on problem framing and important, but often overlooked part that creative process, thank you.