A Design Approach to Creative Problem Solving: Five Strategies Anyone Can Try

Strategies at work: Diagramming the process of parking in a garage is an activity that can help identify opportunities for improving the parking experience.

You’re stuck. Maybe you’ve started an important new project, and you’ve moved through the initial burst of energy and into the weeds just enough to realize it’s not as straightforward as it might appear. Or maybe you’ve been making steady progress with your team on a key problem for your organization, and some new information has complicated your previous understanding of the situation. It could be that you’ve tried something out, only to discover that your initial idea didn’t work. You might feel a sense of urgency for coming up with a breakthrough idea or a new approach that unlocks progress for yourself or for your team. You mull over the problem as you go about your day. How do you move forward? What do you do next?

As designers, we relish an opportunity for creative problem solving. There’s a lot out there about solving problems through design — whether that’s by creating a new product, optimizing a service, or making change at the systems level. We often focus on aspects of design practice like process, tools and methods. Thanks to organizations like IDEO and the Stanford d.school, you might already be familiar with representations of the design process that articulate a series of steps devoted to understanding a problem and identifying and testing solutions. You might recognize design methods and tools like ethnographic research, usability testing, journey maps, or wireframes. This focus on process and tools exists for good reason: a strong design process that involves appropriate methods and tools is a tried and tested way of approaching a problem.

In this article, we offer a series of strategies that anyone can use to crack a problem open, whether or not you identify as a designer. These strategies form a layer between a design process and its methods and tools. While they are not a substitute for these aspects of design practice, these strategies are things that designers are often doing, regardless of where we are in a design process and the tools and methods we might be using. Though these strategies have been structured and formalized in the design world, we believe that they are fundamentally human ways of working through problems, and anyone can learn them. In fact, designers have been gathering and codifying methods and tools from many contexts and disciplines for decades. As such, you might find that you already use some of these strategies, or know them by another name. These strategies are not silver bullets, and they do take some practice; though we hope they will become as useful to you as they are to us.

1. Understand and document the current state

It’s hard to solve a problem that you don’t understand. And, most of the time, the problems we work on are bigger than just ourselves. That’s why one of the most foundational strategies we use when getting started is to observe the world around us. We use observation and other qualitative methods of design research to understand what’s really going on in the world of the problem. We talk to people implicated by a given situation, whether they are affected by it or they are responsible for managing some aspect of it. If we’re humble and deeply curious about what’s happening, we can start to understand people’s needs, patterns, and behaviors. This can bring interesting, new-to-us facets of a problem to light, and in turn, can reveal new opportunities and spark ideas.

Taking the time to observe the world and talk to people has its perks. For one thing, this is a part of design that we really enjoy. We love talking to people, learning about how they see the world, and trying to uncover and understand the challenges they face. For another, when we’re able to connect with the people we are designing for through observations and interviews, we feel a vested stake in representing and meeting their needs throughout the design process.

In this example, Dezudio worked with a client in the vision field who wanted to better understand how people use their near-focus vision in order to improve their products. We sent camera kits to participants so they could record what they were seeing and doing, while sharing thoughts and feelings related to their near-focus vision. The video diaries gave us clear pictures of participants’ lives with respect to their vision and enabled us to identify patterns and pain points.

There are lots of ways that you can approach this strategy. We often observe and shadow people in real time; we’ve gone into people’s workplaces and homes as they show us how they move through their days. You might be wondering about what you’re looking for when you set out to observe and to talk to people. One useful framework to keep in mind is AEIOU (Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users). What kinds of activities do people perform in a given environment? What kinds of interactions exist between users and the environment, or users and objects? Where have people modified or hacked an environment to work better? What pain points are people experiencing? We look for these things and make note of them. These observations can point you in the direction of interview topics to probe on, or highlight opportunity areas and even potential solutions.

2. Externalize your thinking

This strategy is about getting your ideas out of your head and representing them visually, sooner rather than later. Externalizing your thinking helps you to clarify your ideas and identify what you don’t yet know. It also helps you to check what you think you know with others, so that you can work towards a consensus on the problem definition or the contours of a given solution. After all, it’s common to find yourself in a situation where you have one thing in mind, while your colleagues have another.

Externalizing your thinking visually orients everybody to a shared representation of the conversation at hand.

“But what if I can’t draw? I’ll just tell you about it instead.” Words are essential in communication. And yet, it’s important that we externalize our thinking in a visual way. When we visualize, we are trying to understand who or what is involved and the relationships or processes at hand. Visualizing something can make explicit the relationships that are described implicitly in text. Representing our thinking using a simple map, sketch, or diagram allows us to stop asking questions of one another and start asking questions about the representation. Someone who does this really well is Don Moyer. Don’s book The Napkin Sketch Workbook helps people learn how to develop visual explanations. According to Don, a good visual explanation highlights key ideas and makes relationships between ideas visible. Visual explanations don’t replace verbal ones: effective visual explanations combine text and images to communicate. They show and tell.

Don’s Lasagna Project example shows how a visual explanation of the text on the left makes hierarchies visible.

As designers, we externalize our thinking all the time. It helps us communicate our ideas with each other, and then with our clients and stakeholders. Whether we’re representing a big, complicated process, a data visualization, or an interface; whether we’re drawing on the whiteboard or sketching in our notebooks, we’re getting things out of our heads and learning as we go. We make annotations and ask questions. In fact, we discover questions we didn’t know we had until we started representing our thinking.

In this example, our colleague Raelynn sketched screens for a digital tool that connects people to financial advisors. You can see how her annotations include lots of question marks. The act of externalizing her thinking resulted in ideas and questions that identified things for her to do next. She was also able to show the sketches to her collaborators, orient them to her ideas, and build and improve on them together.

You might not find yourself sketching an interface. It may be more likely that you find yourself in a meeting, and you’re the person who picks up a whiteboard marker (or shares your screen) and starts capturing the conversation visually. To be successful in this scenario, you don’t need to be able to draw every object under the sun on command. In fact, it’s likely that you will make the most use of a small set of representations that, with practice, you can use quickly and confidently. If you work in technology, for instance, it could be that a person, a computer, a database, and a document are recurring elements in your conversations. Practicing these sketches can arm you with a handy set of simple representations to use at will.

3. Rely on abstraction to identify and frame opportunities

When we make a model or a diagram to convey our thinking about a problem, we are often relying on abstraction. If we do this right, we are embracing abstraction in the sense that we have pulled back from the details of a specific situation to take a broader, higher-level view (as opposed to abstraction that makes something difficult to understand). Using abstraction in this manner helps us describe what’s happening, and in turn, to identify and frame opportunities.

Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson, and Rick Robinson’s Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model, or, as we like to call it, the Model of Models.

We often rely on the Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model to help explain this strategy. Let’s start in the lower left quadrant, where we describe “what is.” This is where the concrete facts and observations we have made about a problem or situation congregate. Gathering this information provides the foundation for us to move from a concrete description to an abstract interpretation of the current state: a model of how things are today. We build this model by analyzing and interpreting our research. Considering the model of “what is” will in turn point to opportunities for improving on the current state, allowing you to create a model of what could be. The model of the preferred future state becomes a guide for bringing that future into reality, at which point we find ourselves back in the realm of the concrete, and the cycle can begin anew.

The move from the concrete description to the abstract interpretation of the current state is the crux of this third strategy for creative problem solving. The abstraction lets us begin to build a bridge between the problem space and the opportunity areas for solutions. With a model of the current state, the model of what could be in the future is implied. As Dubberly, Evenson, and Robinson explain, this third strategy of relying on abstraction is closely related to our second strategy of externalizing our thinking: “Analysis begins as thoughtful reflection on the present and continues as conversation with the possible. Crucial for progress is documenting and visualizing our analysis, making it possible for us to come back to it, making it possible to imagine alternatives, making it possible ultimately to discuss and agree with others on our framing and definition.”

As part of a communication system redesign initiative for ACCESS, a paratransit organization in Pittsburgh, Dezudio conducted an inventory and made a model of the current state of the documents and communications their riders rely on at different points throughout their journey. This model showed them, for the first time, how each document is used and how it relates to the others. Doing so facilitated a conversation about how we could redesign their current communications ecosystem to be better organized and clarify how each works together with the rest as part of a system.

In this example, we relied on abstraction to visualize a preferred future for educational assessment, fueled by investments in targeted infrastructure. Our early sketch of key ideas and their relationships gave us the chance to interrogate our ideas. When we felt the model accurately interpreted the current state and clearly framed the opportunities for investment and innovation, we refined the diagram into a fully resolved illustration. Learn more about this argument for change at EquityByDesign.org.

We use models often in our work, and so can you. Try your hand at using abstraction to make a model of your interpretation of the current state of a problem space, and show it to people. Ask them what’s working, and what might be confusing or missing. When you have a shared representation of the current state, you may find that it’s a natural transition to make a model of the preferred future state, where the problem has been mitigated. Hopefully, this model-making exercise will help you pull back from the details to identify and frame opportunities.

4. Diverge and converge to unlock creativity.

Any design project moves through phases of divergent and convergent thinking. When we diverge, we are running in multiple directions at once. We develop many ideas at the same time and sometimes defer judgement or a decision until we have had some time to explore and experiment. When we converge, we are narrowing down. We synthesize, find patterns, evaluate ideas, and make decisions. Some of us are naturally predisposed to divergent thinking, and others tend to gravitate towards convergent thinking. This mix of skills and the productive tension it creates is part of what makes working in teams so effective, and sometimes challenging.

If you like to march down a linear path towards the finish line, each point of divergence can feel like going backwards. When you’re pushing yourself to diverge, you’re forcing yourself to think, “What else? How else could it be?” You get the obvious ideas down first, and then dig deeper. You remain curious about other ways of addressing the problem, and it’s that curiosity that unlocks creativity. That isn’t to say that the first or second idea you have will pale in comparison to the fortieth. Rather, by creating options, you give yourself the chance to compare them and identify what’s working and what’s not working.

This process of comparison, analysis, and pattern-finding is where convergent thinking comes in. Intentionally deferring judgement during a divergent phase implies that it will be invited back in when it’s time to make decisions. If you live in the world of possibilities and could happily continue coming up with new ones, points of convergence can feel restrictive. When you push yourself to converge, you’re forcing yourself to think, “Why this idea, and not this one? How should I decide?” Confronting reality by naming your constraints and establishing criteria for a potential solution helps you to evaluate your ideas accordingly and make a strategic choice. After all, if you don’t choose a direction, you might never make progress.

Divergence and convergence can occur in multiple cycles throughout a project.

We use this diagram to explain some of the many opportunities for divergence and convergence in a design process. A key place to diverge and converge is in your exploration of the problem. Give yourself the opportunity to investigate multiple points of view of the problem space, and then use convergent thinking to narrow down to a shared definition of the problem. You can use the same mix of thinking when it’s time to develop concepts by coming up with lots of ideas before narrowing in on a proposed solution. Once you have a clear sense of direction, it can be time to diverge again on the many ways in which you might execute or implement that concept, before converging and resolving the details of its final form.

5. Try it out and see what works

In a nutshell, our final strategy is about prototyping. There comes a point — and sometimes, multiple points — in a project where it’s time to try something out and see what works. We find that diagramming and discussion are not substitutes for building something or simulating the experience and seeing what you learn.

There are many reasons to prototype.

We use making and prototyping for different reasons and at different points in the design process. Sometimes, we prototype something to explore how an idea could work. Other times, we make a prototype to express a concept to someone else, such as a client or stakeholder. We also make prototypes in order to evaluate options, or understand which parts of a tool or experience work, and which parts need improvement. Finally, we make prototypes to evoke enthusiasm, consensus, or buy-in from a stakeholder in order to help them win resources and move forward into implementation.

In this example, CMU School of Design student Ulu Mills made a prototype to illustrate how the experience of using the ticket machine in the parking garage could be improved. She started with sketches, and iterated leveraging different materials like foam and clay. While her final design boasted a refined, 3-D printed control, on the back you’ll see that she was scrappy in attaching an inexpensive pen to mimic the satisfying click feedback she’d imagined the user would feel and hear.

Prototyping doesn’t have to be expensive, formal, or high-stakes. It’s often effective to be scrappy and find ways to represent and try out your ideas by making use of repurposed materials you already have on hand. In our experience, ideas are not born perfect. Instead, they are developed and evolve through many rounds of making, evaluating, and iterating. The more you iterate on something, the more you will learn, and the more resolved it will become over time.

Five strategies for creative problem solving.

And there you have it! In the spirit of making and trying things out, we invite you to experiment with these strategies for yourself. Keep them in mind, and when you’re feeling stuck, dust one off and give it a go. We hope they can help bring some creativity to the way you approach a problem.

Reflecting on our process and sharing what we learn are critical parts of our practice at Dezudio. We initially developed these ideas for a workshop at the request of the Design & Business Club at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. If you’re interested in exploring these strategies further through an interactive workshop for your organization, reach out to us at info@dezudio.com.

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A million thanks and claps to Raelynn O’Leary and Ashley Deal, my co-authors on this article!