Good morning!

Do you ever have a feeling that you’re using your design skills to solve the wrong problems? I used to get it a lot (and still do sometimes). That’s why I decided to dedicate the April newsletter to problems and why as a designer you should fall in love with them more than with your solutions. 

When I joined Futurice back in 2018, I was a bit skeptical about the funny ‘Love the problem, not the solution’ and ‘Always ask why’ stickers scattered around the office. It took me quite some time and a lot of learning to start feeling comfortable in the problem space. I truly believe that this is the only way to go if we want to work with and make impact in areas such as sustainability where jumping into solutions without understanding the problem is a pathway towards greenwashing.

Meet our curator of the month

Anna has recently stepped into a design director role at Futurice Helsinki. She has a multidisciplinary background as a computer scientist, academic researcher, and a very hands-on service and strategic designer. When she’s not telling everyone how busy she is trying to finish her Ph.D., she enjoys sleeping, reading, and drinking coffee more than anything else and is currently regretting her choice to leave the writing of this newsletter to the last day before the deadline.

Anna's picks

The problems of problem-solvers

By Ricardo Brito

I’d like to start with this piece by Ricardo Brito about his journey away from problem solving. I very much like his take on how solving a problem acts as a dopamine for our brain, encouraging us to jump into solutions as soon as we can. Taking a step back to reflect on the problem itself is a valuable exercise because it helps to understand why our solutions sometimes don’t create an impact we intend them to.

Moneyball, 2011

My second pick is a bit unusual: it’s not an article or a blog post but a scene from a movie. My father used to play baseball and I inherited some of his gear and his love of the game so Moneyball, a 2011 sports drama, is important for me from several perspectives. In this scene, Brad Pitt’s character, a general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, has a confrontation with several scouts who are searching for replacements for the club’s key players. And they talk about problems. Without spoiling the whole movie I can say that reframing the problem is what defined the success of Oakland Athletics and many other teams later on.

Fake problem statement

 By Hang Xu 

Next one, behold a fake problem statement! In this very short but very informative piece Hang Xu demonstrates how often our definition of the problem already contains a solution (this shouldn’t be the case). Especially when stakeholders already know what feature they’d like to build, they tend to formulate the problem in a certain way to point at the desired solution. It’s important to take a step back and get to the root of the real problem instead of designing the wrong thing right.

Design is the art of being wrong safely

 By Pavel Samsonov

Finally, I’d like to share this piece by Pavel Samsonov which raises a very important point: the role of design is to shape the problem space by repeatedly being wrong and to bring learnings to the team before we can deliver value to the customer. That’s why creating a safe space to fail and prove yourself wrong is essential for impactful design to emerge. While I don’t necessarily agree that design critique is a safe space (I get some nasty flashbacks from my own university years), ‘being wrong safely’ is something which helps tackle the wicked problems with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. By letting others prove ourselves wrong, we gain more clarity on the problem space and learn faster than by deploying great solutions to wrong problems.

Few facts about the curator

Name one superpower that makes you different from the others.

For whatever reasons I’m very comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing what exactly we’ll create in a project and how. That’s why I often end up exploring the problem space in depth before starting to deliver anything tangible. Sometimes it annoys other people who are used to designers being very solution-oriented but they get used to it with time and become slightly less annoyed.

Something you feel very grateful for when looking back on your career.

Working with fantastic clients who continuously open my horizons and help me learn new things without expecting me to be a domain expert in what they’re doing, my super supportive colleagues at Futurice, and a number of people in my Aalto University network who inspire me every day with their thinking and attitude.

Most interesting design case you’ve worked with.

Lots of them but if I had to pick one where we had the most fun then it’s definitely a project with Nokia Bell Labs on the role of Trusted Computing in safety-critical systems. I have been a fan of Bell Labs since I was a teenager and the project was better than anything I imagined. We got to hang out in the lab a lot, built a real-size remote hospital, and used design fiction to come up with future scenarios, this was a real blast!

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