Design Need and Design Opportunity. What are they? Is an Identified “Problem” = Design “Need”?

Design Needs and Opportunities: Commonly attempted as “Problem(s) Situation”. 

Design Needs and Opportunities, are they they same? Or are they not.

I’ve gone well past the way of identifying Design Needs with problems, but I won’t be surprised this might still be what everybody else is doing. I find this not fruitful. 

So what is the problem when one tries to identify Design Needs, but treats it as identifying problems? The problem with this is there is hardly any ‘problems’ you can identify today.

At least not so easy. If you do, you WIN big time. Otherwise what can we do if we don’t go around searching for problems? 

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We innovate. We strive to change things a little bit here and there. Make some improvements from the previous versions, etc. We find things to innovate, or further innovate. 

If you find a Need for an improvement (a genuine one), you have a meaningful Design Opportunity. This will lead to a meaningful project, for yourself.

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Design Opportunities to THE Design Opportunity

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Designed Solution Outcomes and Origins

All designed product solution outcomes come from either one or a combination four of the following origins...

1) a problem is identified and there is a need to resolve it,

2) there is a need for making things better and hence an opportunity for improvement,

3) there may be a challenge to design for an alternative solution, and

4) an inspiration by nature or objects that inspires the challenge to design something.

When you have a design situation (or an identified need or opportunity), you must be very certain about the origin of your intention to design and the end objectives of your solution.

Is this design attempt to solve a problem? To improve something? A challenge to design an alternative solution? Or a combination of the four origins? Unless you are clear in the beginning, you will never realize your intention because you never knew in the first place what the product must achieve to do at the end.

So you must be able to articulate clearly your intention and the outcomes of your proposal, both verbally and in writing (i.e. on record in your design journal).

Identifying a Good Design Opportunity

A good design opportunity is one that is real and studied. You'll have to be able to justify what you claimed through research and conclude your findings with facts that the issues you mentioned are indeed real and is socially recognizable. There is no other way.

Putting Research on Record Support your researches with photographs and images taken in a real context rather than conveniently browsing through the intenet and simply printing and putting down the source (URL). Finally do not forget to annotate and record what you are doing on your supporting photographs or images.

Conclusion + Moving forward... The objective of this section is for you to ultimately be able to select the ONE design opportunity which you will work on for the next few months.

A problem statement (see image below) beginning with "In what ways..." will enable you to think broadly, and as you change some of the key words within your statement, you will be able to gain new perspectives on the design opportunities.

A well drafted problem statement will lead you to further research where you will really dig deep into your design opportunity... looking out for existing examples, comparing them, etc. 

 The better your research at this stage, the better prepared you will be when you arrive at drafting your Design Brief and subsequently your Design Consideration and Limitations.