Find the Gap - Problem Identification in Design (Design Course 1.4)

The first step in the design process is to sense the gap. That is to recognize in fact that there is a problem. Now, in some cases you as the designer are handed the problem as part of your job or as part of an assignment. But in in many cases you're you're responsible for

detecting the problem yourself and for identifying a problem that you want to tackle. That in fact is the way we're going to proceed in this course. I've given you an assignment to find the gap. That is to identify some problem in your own life that you can take on as a as a

course project. So, I want to give you a sense of some of the kinds of projects or gaps that I think you can address. Let me start by identifying the main criteria that I want to apply to your projects. The first is that you personally feel the pain. That is that this is a gap in your

own life. That's important because our first assignment is going to be to just design something for yourself. Um and in fact this is a really common pattern in in design that the designer him or herself is the one who's identified a problem in his or her own life and seeks to to solve it. The

second criterion is that you can have access to at least five other people who share some related gap or some related pain point in their lives. That's important because one of the things that we're going to learn in this course is how you understand the user needs from a group of people and you need to have

access to those people and I'd prefer that that access be face-to-face as opposed to a an online connection or relationship. Third, the the problem has to be simple enough that you can reasonably imagine addressing it in an in an eight-week course. It it's not going to work if you say I'd really like to find a better way to get