Exploring themes leads to solutions

Within the context of a well-developed problem space and creation of a frame that illuminates cognition, the exploration of the theme is able to generate a creative event that bridges the problem and solution.

Themes are a tool, a form of capturing the underlying phenomenon in a situation one tries to understand. Themes arise from the need or desire to comprehend—they are the sense we are able to make of a situation when we approach it openly, without prejudgment. The formulation of a theme is, at best, a simplification, helping us to distinguish a set of significant experiences and a deeper layer of meaning that underlies many observations.^[1]

This requires that the designer get as far into the situation as feasible, though their rationale for it and actions pertaining to it may be incomprehensible to others.

Designers talk about “getting close” to the situation, they talk about the importance of “richness” in the problem area, and they stress the significance of getting “firsthand experience” of the problem situation to build “empathy.” And yet they are quite vague about why they go to such lengths. Once they get into the problem situation, they seem to have no deliberate or systematic way of dealing with it. It looks as though they just hang around aimlessly. We would argue that they are observing clues that could lead to themes which will help them create a response to the problem situation. These clues are not explicitly expressed as themes, but are often packaged in episodic knowledge, as stories.^[2]

#design #innovation-creativity