Reframing shifts perspective to see things in a new way

When resolving complex challenges, it can be helpful to adopt a designer’s mindset and consider the entire problem situation from a new perspective. By putting it in a different frame, new opportunities for understanding the relationships pertaining to the problem and potential solution emerge.

In questioning the established patterns of relationships in a problem situation, design abduction creates both a new way of looking at the problem situation and a new way of acting within it. This comprehensive new approach to the problem situation is called a “frame” within design literature… Expressed in terms of the concepts in our logical formula, a frame is the proposal through which, by applying a particular pattern of relationships, we can create a desired outcome.[1]

Reframing is “a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way. The new frame ‘re-embeds"‘ a product, system, or service in a new (and not necessarily logical) context, allowing the designer to explore associations and hidden links to and from the center of focus.”[2]

The process of reframing a complex challenge from a designer’s perspective involves the following steps:[3]

  1. Identify the initial frame – Understand the traditional (default) framing of the problem.
  2. Create blank reframing indices. The design opportunity will be reframed from the point of view of new entities, new contexts, and new embodiments (or new manifestations of the core artifact). (Three charts can be used to structure the reframing exercises.)
  3. Reframe – The designer will begin to develop (through structured or casual brainstorming) new items for the left column of each chart.
  4. Extrapolate likely user goals – As the charts begin to become populated with new frames, the designer will begin to fill in the Primary User Goal for all items in all charts. They will paint a picture of a credible story, judging responses and adding criticism as appropriate.
  5. Extrapolate design implications – The reframed design context will have produced new constraints or implications, or will have highlighted existing constraints and implications that may have been otherwise hidden or overlooked.

#complexity #innovation #paradigms

See also:

  1. Frame Innovation – Dorst (2015), ch. 3, § “What makes design hard? Problems and paradoxes.” ↩︎

  2. Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking – Kolko (2010), § “Method: Reframing.” ↩︎

  3. Ibid. The process is described by Kolko (2010). ↩︎