Considering Complex Problems with Product Design
When you’re working on solving a problem as a product designer or developer, it can sometimes generate other, unforeseen problems. These are called “complex problems,” or “wicked problems.” For example, when a company like Walmart decides to become organic with its produce while being one of the largest stores across the United States—and this happened in 2007 and 2008—they’re assuming that there is actually that much organic food being produced to supply such a large retail supplier. However, that may or may not be the actual case.
When given the questions of scale and the complexity of the problem that you’ve identified and want to address, you may run into real-world conditions that push back and make the problem more complex than it initially appeared to be. For example, the seaweed straws by Sea Briganti immediately ran into a question of scale. If you’re going to reduce the number of drinking straws consumed each day in the world, that means that you’ll have to produce as many seaweed drinking straws as there are plastic ones being produced.
If you’re scaling up and producing a competitive quantity of an alternative material, such as seaweed, then that means you’ll have to harvest a lot of seaweed and produce a lot of drinking straws on a different scale. That means that instead of having centralized factories producing huge amounts of plastic, which then end up in the ocean and cause all of the problems that we’re aware of, you have to ask yourself where you’ll get all of that seaweed. So you may have to decentralize that work and work in tandem with people around the world to produce the required seaweed in various locations.
Ultimately, the problems that you choose to address may give you options, as well as alternative solutions, proposals, or opportunities for iterative thinking that considers many different scales and choices. For these reasons, it’s really important to consider the ripple effects of addressing the problems that you choose to solve as well as what other complications may come up later on in the process.
These concepts are very important to understand in the world of product design and product development. To learn more, consider giving product design education a try, and remember that online product design education is also an option.