When we work with clients, partners, and students who are unfamiliar with design, we often start with asking two questions. These two questions — when thoughtfully considered — can serve as the basis for designing the best possible products, services, and policies.
To use a phrase often attributed to Albert Einstein (which is believed to have paraphrased something else), but nevertheless is taken as words of wisdom when tackling complex problems:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
What’s meant by this expression is that consideration of the questions we ask can have profound effects on the answers we get. This has been explored in great detail by Warren Berger in his book A More Beautiful Question.
The two questions we encourage you to begin with are:
What are you trying to improve?
Who are trying to improve it for?
Both of these questions have been explored in detail as lessons over at The Design Loft. However, in short, here’s why these questions matter.
What Are You Trying to Improve?
The What question is important because it forces us to consider the problem at hand. Design is about finding solutions to problems and addressing situations that we aren’t happy with. In short: design is about innovation.
To be successful, we must consider: 1) what is going on right now (what’s the status quo), 2) what are the multiple issues that are making the current situation unattractive, 3) what would improvement mean or look like (how would change from the current baseline look like)?, and 4) what kind of transformation can we envision?
These four questions do the following:
- They inspire us to pay attention to our current situation, our baseline. It is possible that the problem we’ve identified isn’t the real cause or issue. By understanding what is going on in some depth, we can ensure that the problem and it’s sequalae are the ones we are interested in addressing. In other words: we answer the right question.
- It ensures we understand what the various potential outcomes might be from our change efforts, and where the barriers might come in. Any situation, no matter how bleak or unappealing, has upsides for someone or something. Know what’s unattractive helps us identify who is benefitting from the status quo, what kind of resistance we might encounter, and enable us to plan and attend to these things in our design efforts. The aim is always to ensure that we address the issues while minimizing the negative effects within the system for those who are invested in the current state.
- The last two questions are different sides of the same coin: what is the change we seek?. If we are unable to envision the changed state, we will have little idea of when we get there. Even if the desired future is something far away and beyond our current resourcing, the ‘north star‘ goal provides us with a means to align our efforts. By stretching ourselves, we also open up to new possibilities.
Who Are You Trying To Improve it For?
This question is about designing for a person, group, situation, or some combination.
While user- or human-centred design are popular, commonly-used terms, there is also the possibility of expanding our scope to include other parts of the natural world. This might include things such as carbon considerations, regenerative design, or circular design — where energy and resources are put back into the system, instead of taken out.
Asking this question also identifies both the varied possible beneficiaries of a design, but also which ones to privilege in our design choices. Sometimes, these choices are not straightforward. To illustrate, let’s consider this example from a recent Design Loft lesson:
Consider hospice care. In designing beds, we need to make them sturdy and comfortable for those who are to lay in them, but we also need to make them moveable and able to be operated by care workers.
To impede the spread of germs and maintain cleanliness, it needs to be shaped in a manner that allows for easy cleaning. In order to make these available and cost-effective, the bed has to be made to be durable, low-maintenance, and accessible to many types of patients, contexts, and settings.
To allow visitors and loved ones to engage with the person in the bed, it needs to be designed to allow people access, while also creating the kinds of barriers to ensure that the patient is protected from falls.
If we are designing a bed, we might want to focus on any combination of these users.
The way we do this is often through using stakeholder maps, journey maps, or system maps. Mapping ensures we create a cartographic illustration of the situation so that we can see relationships, connections, and actors who are involved in any system, no matter how we’ve defined that system.
Maps also require us to put boundaries and make choices about what is most relevant, for whom, and how those relationships affect the system.
If you can ask these two questions, you will be set for what to do next, which is undertake the focused design exploration, prototyping, and production phase. Without asking these questions, you might find yourself going down the wrong path.
As part of the 2026 Summer series, we are looking at these questions in more depth. Visit our summer series page for more on how to register for the webinars, or find the resources after the event if you’re reading this at a later time.