In defining, the ultimate goal is to gather the information you currently have in order to define the core problems faced by a company. According to an article published by the Stanford Design School, the define mode of the design process should bring clarity to the design space, and should result in some sort of actionable problem statement. Defining results from synthesizing information to discover connections and patterns.
It is important to clearly articulate the problem that you are trying to solve, and it is imperative that the problem is not too narrow nor too broad. Defining is crucial for creating how-might-we (HMW) questions as they help to create parameters in which to brainstorm.
Initially I was worried that as a group, we would be too narrow in our scope. Its easy to “go down the rabbit hole” in terms of ideas – latching onto a concept/theme too early and trying to fit our HMW’s to our idea. Surprisingly, this was not the case. By writing down our HMW’s before discussing, we were able to create effective “Chinese walls” to keep from latching onto other ideas. We did notice after we wrote down our HMW’s that many of our ideas overlapped. Through discussion, were able to both make some of the ideas more broad as well as narrow down some of our over-arching thoughts. By “linking” our post-it notes, we were able to broaden our vision, and look at our HMW questions with different lenses. This plays right into the synthesizing of information, and helped us to recognize patterns within both the industry as well as demands from our persona category (ours is the millennial generation).
For our group, the sky’s the limit (literally!). Reflecting back, there was never a point where we thought that an idea wasn’t possible. I believe that this was because our HMW’s were not too specific – meaning that we didn’t think about how we would actually do something, but conceptually, how something could “be.”
As time progressed, something that we struggled with was preemptively overlapping/grouping our ideas. In looking for consensus, its easy to try to adapt ideas to fit together, but its important to first define what we are trying to solve before ideating and linking too many HMW’s.