Making No Time For Questions

I’ve noticed a problem in the way I’ve approached some of my assignments.

We’ve been working on finding specific problem spaces so that we can come up with a solution later on. I’m in a group that’s focusing on Social Impact; we started with topics like the environment and carbon footprints, accessibility of spaces, virtual reality used in schools, and safety.

As soon as we had these really broad topics, I automatically wanted to jump into designing solutions instead of trying to learn more about them.

We have been narrowing down our problem space over the last several weeks, and we’ve finally come to a place where we have our question that we can find answers for: How might we help pedestrians feel safer at night so that they can have a less stressful journey from A to B?

I am so excited to finally tinker with solutions and ideas! But this process has brought out my ‘need’ to fix and solve things so that I’ve really had to grapple with it. As we’ve been going through this process, we didn’t need more ideas, we needed to ask more questions. We didn’t need solutions yet; we just needed to know what problem we were going to solve. I didn’t need to fix anything; I just needed to listen more.

I think that this need to fix everything shows up in my everyday life, too. If a friend is venting to me, my instinct is to look for solutions or see if I can fix their problem for them. Over the past few years, I’ve had to learn how to stop being a “fixer” in my relationships, and now I’m realizing that I need to learn how to hold off on fixing anything when it comes to problem spaces, too. It’s nice to want to tackle all sorts of problems right away, but it’s vital to make time to learn and specify and communicate with a team.

I don’t know if I have any good advice here, but I know that I’m learning a lot that’ll help me in the long run. I’m learning that when I feel like I need to come up with a solution right away, that’s usually the best time to be still, lean in, and ask more questions. As I ask more questions, I get more clarity on where we’re hoping to go in our design; if I can lean into my discomfort when questions are unanswered or problems are unsolved, the clarity I could gain in it will help me be a better problem solver and a more effective designer.