Perhaps the most enduring joke (or truism) of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series was that the answer to life, the universe and everything was 42. Obviously, it's a pretty shoddy answer without the right question (the scheming mice of the book try to pawn off "how many roads must a man walk down"). The same problem confronts designers every day. We are taught that design is about finding answers to question and solutions to problems. Fine, but without the right question or problem, these answers become useless, or even damaging.

Imagine, for example, you are at a tailgating party for your favorite football team. You've got the bratwurst, the burgers, and 10 of your best friends. You've got a cooler full of beer. But you forgot a bottle opener. Somehow, among 11 people, you don't have a spare. Immediately, with great purpose and bravado, you begin crafting an ad hoc opener from a lug wrench and rubber band. Your best friend Mike seems to remember a dance-move-like opening strategy involving a spoon. His wife Nancy makes a strong, but failed attempt to use
sabrage.

All of you feel real silly when, after 30 minutes of answering the question "How can we make a bottle opener?", you discover that the bottles are twist off. Somehow, the right question "How do I get these bottles open?" got lost in the excitement of designing.

OK, so this is a sort of ridiculous example, but you'd be surprised how close to home it is for thousands of design projects each year. In fact, some get so far off track, it's as though their bottles were not only twist off, but empty as well. Finding a good problem to solve is hard, and requires solid self critique even before drawing takes place -- something that most design programs skip over in favor of starting to draw those sexy pages of hundreds of tiny products. Lets look at a real world example of how a very well meaning design project went astray because of a misguided initial problem.

Case 1

Designboom.com is probably one of the best design portals on the web right now. Their obsessive coverage of European, Asian, and North American design, and interviews with top designers around the world make them a powerhouse with the clout to do some real good. Their contests are entered by thousands of the top rising stars from around the globe. And Birgit Lohmann, Editor-in-Chief of the site, is a real sweetheart, genuinely excited about making the next generation of designers the best ever, through education and inspiration. So when they announced the "shelter in a cart" competition last year, with a new open-source sponsorship model, we were impressed and excited.

The premise of the contest was that a growing number of cities around the world have large homeless populations, and these groups use carts to carry and move their belongings. Often, supermarket carts are used, and the confiscation of the cart by police can leave a homeless person without many of their necessary possessions. Simply, the contest was to design a cart which included shelter and storage for this population.

The contest's launch received great coverage on the blogosphere, and over 4000 designers entered their visions of the perfect mobile shelter and storage unit.

Despite the design freedom available to participants in the contest, and the relative freedom from an initial question, most designers choose to work toward solving the simplest question possible--"How can you make a cart which contains storage and fold-able shelter. This might seem like a valid direction to pursue to someone unfamiliar with the problem of homelessness--they're just people without homes, right?

Of course not. Homelessness is a problem as complex and subtle as government budget making or the causes of religious wars. While lack of immediate housing is an obvious symptom (hence, the name), substance abuse, mental illness, economic instability, familial or social problems, and artifacts of our cultural system all contribute. Additionally, few common threads unite all homeless people. Recent research indicates that only a small percentage of people are responsible for most of the perceived societal burdens imposed by homelessness. Illness is not uncommon, but ranges from acute to chronic. To complicate matters further, homelessness is not a defined state, but rather a range; the utterly destitute panhandler; a single mother of two who receives food-stamps, but not enough for a house; a man who's mental illness keeps him from successfully renting a home, but allows him to live in shelters; a model whose income requires "creative lodging".

In short, complicated. A problem like this, with so many influences, and so many factors deserves a thorough exploration before an appropriate question can be formulated. Ideally, a designer would choose some specific portion of the problem, and distill a question from that. "Correctness" of the question depends on the problems you wish to address. For example, someone interested in reducing the number and severity of homelessness in youths might ask "How can a mobile storage/living product better prepare homeless youth for the transition into healthy, societally integrated adults". Designers wanting to address the cultural factors affecting homelessness might ask "How can a cart raise the awareness of the community to it's homeless members. Or, someone who believed that homelessness was positive might even ask "How can a cart allow for a safer, more exciting homeless lifestyle". In all of these, factors of how to implement the cart, where the money comes from, and how the carts are distributed are crucial points to consider.

In contrast, the entries and winners of the contest look as though they spent as little time on the formulation of the question as possible. Many look as though a question of "make me a tent with wheels" was enough ,and some even disreguarded the original assertion that using supermarket carts was part of the problem to be solved.

Winning designs

Other designs(many more are available at Designboom)

A few at least extended their questions to include "How will homeless and presumably poor people afford these carts?", by using reclaimed materials and volunteer labor. Of course, this is still only a small extension of a flawed initial question.

In the end, the hard work of thousands of talented designers generated quite a few exciting tents, but little in the way of novel solutions for the problem of homelessness. This is the ultimate price of asking the wrong question. At least solving the right problem poorly makes a step toward a workable solution. Solving the wrong problem well leaves the right problem completely unsolved.

Case 2

For a look at a good question, lets jump from homelessness to hatchets, and look at a company who answered the wrong question first with mediocre results, then went on to totally redefine their question with great success.

Axes and hatchets are one of humanities oldest and most fundamental tools. The first forged iron axes appeared in the middle east around 1000 bce. From that time until the onset of The Industrial Revolution, ax making and repair was done by small blacksmith shops, usually in the region where they were used. The work was time, skill, and labor intensive, with a high amount of feedback from the community of local farmers and craftsmen.

All this changed when The Industrial Revolution and its hunger for raw material hit Europe. Demand for lumber soared. At the time, the best technology for getting that lumber was still lots and lots of lumberjacks. So demand for axes went up as well. That's where our little case study came in. Gränsfors Bruks is a Swedish forge which started making axes in 1906. As lumber harvest became more of a streamlined, business-driven industry, the lumber companies demanded uniformity in their operations, to ensure predictable expenses and performance. Axes, therefore, grew more and more "predictable". To quote from Gränsfors site:

Little by little the form and structure of axes changed, often at the expense of quality. Axes became mass produced industry products... In order to hide the structure of the axe head forged by hand, the surface of the forging was stoned, ground, buffed, painted, japanned and stove varnished. Colourful brand labels became a must.

This ideology carried on through the beginning, middle, and end of the twentieth century, despite the fact that chainsaws and harvesters took over the bulk of jobs once done by axes. At the height of their misguidance, Gränsfors Bruks realized that they were wasting lots of energy, using lots of toxic chemicals, and creating lots of pollution, all in order to make a low quality product that didn't really have a market anymore.

So they asked a new question. Rather than ask "How can we make more uniform axes for cheaper?", they asked "How can we make axes people will want?" In exploring this question, they realized something. Now that lumber companies were out of the picture, the axe was a tool of campers, firewood cutters, hunters, and outdoorsmen. Simply put, people who appreciated the act of using an axe. So Gränsfors set out to make the experience of using axes as gratifying as possible. They set out 5 principles to govern their work. They researched traditional techniques and forms to generate an entirely new line of axes for today's users. And the committed to research and exploration of their product by creating a museum of axes in Sweden, and a publication, The Axe Book, which is sent with each axe.

In the end, the answer to their question was a return to a more craft-centered product. Each axe is hand forged (though a mechanical hammer setup is used for economics sake), signed by its smith, and guaranteed for 20 years. Smiths are not paid on commission, so they can take their time to ensure a quality product. All of this information is taught to the purchaser through their website, museum, demonstrations at the forge, and through the book (which can be requested separately). Now business for this small relic of the past is doing better than ever, and best of all, I got a hatchet that answered all my real needs.

Finally...

These questions were very different from one another. Their answers were perhaps equally separated. But the cause of success or failure in each was the same. Designers must explore the problem long enough so that they can develop a good question. In most cases, this problem exploration and question making should be the bulk of the work. We love to get down to sketching, or cutting paper or balsa foam, but the real value of us as designers must be in this first stage.

Great designers are set apart by their ability to ask good questions.