WEBVTT 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:05.999 One thing in relation to this that I want to talk about is the difference between 00:00:05.999 --> 00:00:08.606 *puzzles* and *problems*. 00:00:13.346 --> 00:00:17.981 I think if you've been practicing it for a while doing real design, 00:00:17.981 --> 00:00:21.180 you'll understand this difference without thinking about it. 00:00:21.293 --> 00:00:23.706 If you're perhaps newer, 00:00:23.706 --> 00:00:25.590 perhaps you've done a university course and you're newer at that, 00:00:25.590 --> 00:00:28.160 it might be less obvious. 00:00:28.527 --> 00:00:30.015 Let's start with puzzles. 00:00:30.015 --> 00:00:33.530 The thing about puzzles is they have a *single right solution*. 00:00:33.530 --> 00:00:38.140 The same is true of exam questions. Exam questions are puzzles. 00:00:38.140 --> 00:00:40.975 They might say, "This is a problem," but they're puzzles. 00:00:40.975 --> 00:00:44.613 There's one right solution, and in fact I get annoyed if I do the newspaper puzzle 00:00:44.613 --> 00:00:48.026 and I realize there was a couple of right solutions. I expect there to be *one*. 00:00:48.130 --> 00:00:50.520 But certainly, there is a right solution. 00:00:50.543 --> 00:00:53.526 And what you're presented with in a puzzle is you have 00:00:53.526 --> 00:00:58.047 only and all of the relevant information. 00:00:58.328 --> 00:01:01.709 Indeed, one of the ways if you're doing an exam question 00:01:01.709 --> 00:01:05.000 to actually work out "Am I on the right track?" — you can say: 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:08.124 "Have I used all the information?" 00:01:09.189 --> 00:01:13.278 You get the same with a whodunit book. You know, you open the book, the detective book. 00:01:13.422 --> 00:01:15.856 When there's something in there, you think: 00:01:16.129 --> 00:01:19.558 "The author's put that there for a reason. That's probably part— 00:01:19.559 --> 00:01:23.149 It might be there to mislead you. But it's either *deliberately misleading* 00:01:23.150 --> 00:01:25.857 or it's actually crucial. 00:01:26.600 --> 00:01:29.243 The other thing about problems and puzzles is that 00:01:29.243 --> 00:01:33.507 the solution is *fixed* – as in, you can't change the problem. 00:01:33.658 --> 00:01:37.370 So – I mean, you *can*: I can pick up my newspaper 00:01:37.370 --> 00:01:40.982 and I can just color in the squares in the sudoku rather than solving them. 00:01:41.737 --> 00:01:43.820 But that's not the idea of it. 00:01:43.820 --> 00:01:46.269 And if you do that in an exam, you'd probably get no marks. 00:01:46.269 --> 00:01:50.720 A few philosophy — you know, there are these stories about the philosophy questions, like: 00:01:50.720 --> 00:01:52.881 The question says, "Is this a good question?" 00:01:52.881 --> 00:01:55.636 and the student says, "If this is a good answer!" 00:01:55.956 --> 00:02:00.526 I don't know if anybody really got top marks in philosophy for doing that sort of question! 00:02:00.610 --> 00:02:04.586 But – on the whole – if you've got a puzzle, you have to do what the puzzle says. 00:02:05.426 --> 00:02:09.626 *Real-world problems* are not like that. 00:02:10.771 --> 00:02:14.828 Real-world problems may have many, many solutions, 00:02:14.828 --> 00:02:18.900 or they may be actually *insoluble* in the way you first approach them. 00:02:18.993 --> 00:02:22.631 You may not have all the information you need. 00:02:22.703 --> 00:02:27.552 And you've probably got lots of information available that's totally superfluous, that doesn't help you. 00:02:27.552 --> 00:02:31.101 So, often part of problem-solving is *finding that information*. 00:02:31.101 --> 00:02:34.090 But actually, the problem might be insoluble; so, 00:02:34.090 --> 00:02:37.399 partly, problem-solving is about *negotiating* 00:02:37.399 --> 00:02:41.117 and working out what *is* doable and perhaps negotiating 00:02:41.761 --> 00:02:44.709 and a reformulation of the problem 00:02:44.709 --> 00:02:48.684 that is one that's both doable and solves the problem. 00:02:48.848 --> 00:02:51.128 So, it's about *redefining* it 00:02:51.128 --> 00:02:54.333 and it's about *understanding* it again. 00:02:54.484 --> 00:03:00.146 And the two kinds of things – puzzles and problems – have different ways of addressing them. 00:03:00.618 --> 00:03:05.204 So, things you've learned about puzzle-solving don't always help you with problem-solving. 00:03:05.321 --> 00:03:10.341 So, I mentioned a classic heuristic – an exam – is "Have I used all the information?" 00:03:10.354 --> 00:03:13.526 Of course, that doesn't help in actual life. 00:03:15.382 --> 00:03:18.297 Part of the reason I was talking about that is that 00:03:18.321 --> 00:03:22.425 this redefinition of problems, of *understanding* a problem 00:03:22.425 --> 00:03:25.000 is often the first stage to find a solution. 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.359 Indeed, I often find – and you've probably found this yourself – 00:03:28.359 --> 00:03:32.848 if you really, really understand a problem well, 00:03:32.920 --> 00:03:35.666 often solutions are obvious. 00:03:35.666 --> 00:03:37.939 I mean, sometimes they are really hard! 00:03:38.035 --> 00:03:43.360 But often, once you've really got to the nub of "What's really going on with that? *Why* is that difficult?", 00:03:43.955 --> 00:03:47.047 "Aha!" — and you get to solve it. 00:03:47.047 --> 00:03:50.000 So, often the solution is trivial if you understand the problem. 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:52.353 But how do you get to understand the problem? 00:03:53.545 --> 00:03:56.267 You might have a very abstract way of approaching it, 00:03:56.267 --> 00:04:00.387 but often the way we understand things is through concrete instances. 00:04:00.537 --> 00:04:04.882 You actually want solutions – you want things that are solid and down-to-the-ground 00:04:04.888 --> 00:04:09.771 in order to look at them, make sense of them and then understand the problem better. 00:04:10.886 --> 00:04:14.091 But how do you *get* those concrete solutions 00:04:14.091 --> 00:04:16.520 if you don't understand the problem? 00:04:18.800 --> 00:04:24.028 So, actually understanding the problem is as important as solving the problem. 00:04:24.179 --> 00:04:27.384 There's this quote – you might have come across some variant of this – 00:04:27.384 --> 00:04:29.625 and I'm just going to give one variant that says: 00:04:29.625 --> 00:04:32.878 "If I had an hour to solve a problem 00:04:32.878 --> 00:04:36.259 I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem 00:04:36.259 --> 00:04:39.383 and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." 00:04:39.608 --> 00:04:42.523 Now, this is often attributed to Albert Einstein. 00:04:42.796 --> 00:04:46.049 And it's actually the sort of thing you could imagine him saying. 00:04:46.371 --> 00:04:49.574 But, actually, the evidence is that he never said it at all. 00:04:49.678 --> 00:04:52.417 It's just one of those sayings that 00:04:52.417 --> 00:04:55.758 seems reasonable, and it gets attributed to other people as well. 00:04:55.875 --> 00:04:58.903 However, even though he didn't say it, it is true 00:04:58.903 --> 00:05:01.626 and I'm sure it's something that he would have espoused as well. 00:05:03.061 --> 00:05:07.068 Spending time really understanding the problem 00:05:07.068 --> 00:05:09.280 often is the first stage to solving it. 00:05:09.280 --> 00:05:12.084 Once you really understand the problem, sometimes – and very often – 00:05:12.084 --> 00:05:14.502 solutions find their way out. 00:05:14.502 --> 00:05:18.720 Some years ago, I did a walk around the perimeter of Wales 00:05:18.720 --> 00:05:21.216 – about a 1000-mile walk. And 00:05:21.216 --> 00:05:25.834 there were some things that I was interested in from a research point of view: 00:05:26.192 --> 00:05:32.768 How to deal with issues when you have low connectivity in terms of mobile signal and things. 00:05:32.865 --> 00:05:35.620 But part of it was about *learning questions*. 00:05:35.620 --> 00:05:38.327 And the way I often phrased it to people before I did it was: 00:05:38.327 --> 00:05:41.717 You know, if I've just got a problem, I can probably find a solution. 00:05:41.717 --> 00:05:46.158 But actually knowing *what are the important questions* were part of what I was doing. 00:05:46.158 --> 00:05:48.849 So, for instance, I came away with 00:05:48.849 --> 00:05:53.306 questions about the nature of community when industry died in areas. 00:05:53.306 --> 00:05:56.591 And you could observe — in some areas, the community seemed to collapse; 00:05:56.591 --> 00:06:00.069 in others, it seemed to be resilient – and trying to *then* 00:06:00.069 --> 00:06:03.982 answer that question or seek more understanding of what it was 00:06:03.982 --> 00:06:06.438 with the factors that made that difference. 00:06:08.693 --> 00:06:11.464 Wicked problems have properties. 00:06:11.464 --> 00:06:13.978 It's a whole list of properties; I've got some of them here. 00:06:13.978 --> 00:06:16.267 One of them is about *being unique* 00:06:16.267 --> 00:06:18.476 – that it doesn't mean you can't learn from previous ones, 00:06:18.476 --> 00:06:22.853 but you can't just take the solution you had for a previous problem and apply it to new ones. 00:06:22.853 --> 00:06:25.801 For wicked problems, each one you have to look at *individually*. 00:06:25.801 --> 00:06:29.503 There's *no definitive formulation* – that is actually 00:06:29.503 --> 00:06:33.799 even stating what the problem is is problematic. 00:06:34.882 --> 00:06:37.288 *Non-enumerable* – you can't just go through 00:06:37.288 --> 00:06:40.335 a set of things and say, "Which one of these is better?" 00:06:40.383 --> 00:06:44.182 The space of potential ways you might tackle it is unbounded. 00:06:44.182 --> 00:06:46.541 So, you can't just sort of try the first idea, 00:06:46.541 --> 00:06:49.280 try the second idea. You've got to go beyond that. 00:06:49.280 --> 00:06:52.324 They talk about *one-shot operation* – and this is about the fact that 00:06:52.324 --> 00:06:55.904 often you have to start executing the solution 00:06:55.904 --> 00:06:57.904 before you know what it all is. 00:06:57.904 --> 00:07:01.028 So, imagine you're in a desert and you've only got a certain amount of water 00:07:01.028 --> 00:07:03.124 and you don't know which way to go, 00:07:03.124 --> 00:07:07.036 and you spot a very high dune. 00:07:07.036 --> 00:07:10.995 What you might do is walk to the dune in order to spy the land. 00:07:10.995 --> 00:07:14.039 But in walking to the dune – if it was a long way away – 00:07:14.039 --> 00:07:18.962 you of course have used up some of your water; you've got hot and you've used up some of your food; 00:07:18.962 --> 00:07:23.882 you've *committed* yourself. And real problems are often like that. 00:07:23.882 --> 00:07:26.476 *No stopping rule* – You know: Have you finished? 00:07:26.476 --> 00:07:29.504 And that's related to the fact that often in the real world 00:07:30.384 --> 00:07:33.245 you don't just say, like with a candle – and you get to this and you say, 00:07:33.245 --> 00:07:36.158 "Yes, I've done it. I've got a solution that works – done!" 00:07:36.247 --> 00:07:39.498 In the real world, there isn't a fixed solution – or the dots – I say: 00:07:39.498 --> 00:07:42.888 "Yes, I've got a solution, with four lines that go to a dot." 00:07:42.888 --> 00:07:45.659 You can't just say, "I've done it!", because – actually – you tend to have 00:07:45.659 --> 00:07:49.923 things that are better or worse solutions, rather than the perfect solution, 00:07:49.923 --> 00:07:52.469 the right solution, versus another solution. 00:07:53.745 --> 00:07:58.379 And so, you're probably not trying to solve the economy. 00:07:58.732 --> 00:08:04.426 But these kinds of characteristics you actually will find in a lot of real design problems. 00:08:05.209 --> 00:08:08.976 So, they are difficult – and that's why you need to think creatively. 00:08:09.063 --> 00:08:13.584 But you're not unique in having to solve some of these issues.