MYP Design Identifying a Design Problem Notes

Design Situations Come With the Problem Hidden

1. Every MYP design unit starts with a design situation, meaning a real context your teacher hands you or one you notice yourself, such as the Year 7 art room having nowhere to dry wet paintings.
2. A situation describes a place, a group of people and something going wrong, and that is all it does.
3. It does not tell you what to make, and if it does, someone has already done the interesting thinking for you.
4. The job of the first strand of Inquiring and analysing is turning that loose situation into a problem somebody could actually solve.
5. Two students handed the same situation should end up with different problems, because they notice different things about it.

Symptoms Are Loud, Problems Are Quiet

1. A symptom is the thing people complain about, while the problem is the reason the complaint keeps coming back.
2. "The art room smells of wet paint" is a symptom, while "wet A3 paintings get stacked on the radiator because there is no rack" is closer to the problem.
3. Chasing the symptom gets you an air freshener, and chasing the problem gets you a drying rack.
4. Symptoms are easy to spot because they are noisy: queues, mess, breakages, the same complaint twice a week.
5. One quick test is whether your fix stops working the moment you stop applying it, which means you treated a symptom.
6. Keep asking what has to be true for the symptom to happen and the possible causes get fewer and more specific each time.

Who Is Affected Decides What You Build

1. Every design problem has people attached to it, and listing them changes the shape of the solution.
2. Start with whoever suffers the symptom directly, then add everyone else who touches the situation.
3. In the art room the list runs to three groups: Year 7 students carrying wet work, the art teacher who loses ten minutes of every lesson sorting it, and the cleaner who scrapes dried paint off the radiator.
4. Those three want different things, so a rack that delights the students but blocks a fire exit still fails.
5. Write each group down with one line saying what they lose right now, measured in minutes, money or ruined work.
6. Detailed work on clients and audiences comes later in this unit, so at this stage the list is enough.

Ask Why Until the Answers Stop Being Obvious

1. Take the complaint, ask why it happens, then ask why of your own answer, and repeat about five times.
2. Paintings get damaged. Why? They are stacked while wet. Why? Nothing flat is free. Why? The only clear surface is a radiator shelf 400 mm deep, and an A3 sheet is 420 mm long.
3. That last answer is a measurement, and measurements are where a vague annoyance turns into something designable.
4. Stop asking why when the next answer would be something you cannot change, like the school budget or how fast poster paint dries.
5. The layer sitting just above that immovable wall is your problem.
6. Write the whole chain into your design folder so a moderator can see you reasoned your way down rather than guessed.

The Problem Sentence: One Line, No Solution In It

1. Write the problem as one sentence carrying three parts: who, what they cannot do, and the consequence.
2. A template that works is "X cannot Y, which means Z", filled with real people and a real cost.
3. "Year 7 art students cannot dry A3 paintings flat, which means about a third of finished work is smudged or torn before it is marked."
4. No rack, no shelf and no material appears in that sentence, so every design route is still open to you.
5. The consequence clause is the part that makes the need arguable when you justify it in the next strand.
6. Keep it to around 30 words, and if the sentence needs an "and" you probably have two problems and should choose one.

Test the Statement Before You Trust It

1. Read your sentence and try to name three genuinely different solutions, because if only one comes to mind the sentence still hides a product.
2. Check that every noun in it is something you could point at, count or measure.
3. Check the scale, because a problem you can address in six lessons with the school workshop beats one about global plastic waste.
4. Check that somebody other than you would agree the situation is real, since a problem only you can see is usually a preference.
5. Read it aloud to the person affected and watch for corrections, because being corrected now costs you nothing.
6. Expect to rewrite it once your research comes in, since a problem statement is allowed to sharpen while the design brief is still being built.

Everything Downstream Hangs Off This Sentence

1. The problem statement sits at the front of a criterion A design folder, usually on one page with the situation written above it.
2. Everything after it has to point back at it: your research, your product analysis, your design brief and your specification.
3. A vague problem makes the later strands vague too, because you cannot judge whether a piece of research is relevant without knowing what you are solving.
4. Rewriting one sentence in week one is far cheaper than rewriting the ten pages that depend on it in week six.
5. Date the page and keep the earlier version, since showing how your understanding moved is evidence of inquiry, not of being wrong.