Defining The Problem of The Foster Care & Adoption Experience
Understanding and framing a problem statement during the design process.
In our previous articles, we discussed the basics of user experience and the insights we retrieved from the research around the foster care and adoption experience. In this article, we will dive a little deeper into what we refer to as the “defining the problem” stage of our design process.
WARNING: Brace yourself. It’s a wicked problem!
Before anything else, let’s get down to the basics and talk about why defining a problem is an essential step of the design process.
WHY DEFINE A PROBLEM?
Defining a design problem is one of the most essential steps in a human-centered design process. For designers and creative problem thinkers, a problem is not merely an unwanted situation. It’s an unmet need that, if met, can satisfy the user’s purpose they desire to accomplish. It is essential to define a problem statement and be able to frame it correctly to avoid stumbling in the dark and end up with useless solutions. Along with secondary research, we, the MDES graduate students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design conducted several interviews with social workers, foster parents, and prospective parents and engaged in detailed quantitative and qualitative data to identify several problems in the foster care and adoption system.
For many children, the foster care system can be harmful to their wellbeing in many ways. The longer children remain in the system, the more likely they will be exposed to mental health issues because of the multiple placement changes and the damaged relationships caused before and during such changes. On the other, when these children age out (meaning: leave the foster care system), they don’t have a proper support network, and likely tend to become homeless, do not complete their school’s degree or end up behind bars. Children aren’t the only victims of this lack of support, foster and prospective parents don’t have the right support either “There are many good, loving people who would consider adopting a child who never pursues adoption because the steps required are confusing and inconvenient.” (prospective parent).
After defining these wicked problems, the team generated a variety of questions which gave different perspectives and ways of thinking about the topic and helped us narrow these problems into big main ideas.
Among those questions:
Who are the actors in this process?
What does the journey of a foster child look like?
What does the journey of an adoptive parent look like?
What does the journey of a social worker look like?
What does the journey of a foster parent look like?
Who is affected by these problems?
What are the specific pain points?
What are the different ways of solving the problem?
What is the immediate need?
To answer these questions, the team analyzed the data collected and began visualizing it on our studio walls by using post-its and design thinking tools such as mood boards to track our progress, journey maps, and create personas to identify patterns and themes.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD PROBLEM STATEMENT
Writing a meaningful problem statement tends to be extremely complex and challenging. With the combination of a reliable team, we were able to unpack the research and stories we have gathered. There are essential traits to keep in mind when building a problem statement. The statement should be human-centered, about the people the design team is trying to help.. It should also be narrow enough to make a large problem manageable and provide sufficient constraints to make the project achievable. After dissecting the insights, we organized them into several “How Might We” questions. This method helped us narrow the research and focus on our specific needs.
“How Might We” — The Ideation process
This method’s goal is to find opportunities for design and generate plenty of How Might We(HMW) questions that will allow a variety of innovative solutions. If it doesn’t, then we go back to the drawing board and broaden it. It is necessary to keep the HMW questions narrow enough so that you can explore new ideas.
After creating the HMW questions, the next step is to brainstorm and priorities the most important ideas to the next round of the process, “Ideation.”
During the ideation stage, the team selects different topics and tries out a few of them to find the right path to follow. Keeping the people we are designing for in mind, we then dive in deeper and come up with more compelling solutions that can genuinely make a positive impact.
The design process has many steps; defining the problem tends to be one of the messiest and longest of stages. It is where the team spends most of their time to understand what the real problems are and which ones are worth tackling. It’s through problem finding that real, meaningful solutions are born.
