WHAT'S THE BENEFIT OF PROBLEM EXPLORATION?

Models of the design process often start with activities of problem exploration before generating ideas, but the benefits of exploration have not been properly investigated. We did an experiment with undergraduate industrial designers during a design course. Except for the exploration methods, all teams had to follow the same design process. We observed that exploration methods increased the design teams’ perceived knowledge about the problem, but no impact on the quality of their final designs was seen. This challenges a widely held assumption about the value of problem exploration in design.

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