Abstract
Framing and reframing facilitate communication of design problems and opportunities between stakeholders for value creation and innovation in products, services, and systems. In design education, design briefs are first framed by the faculty, and design activities that follow require processes of reframing. Likewise, in industry, design briefs are framed and crafted by clients or project leads at the start of a project to articulate their objectives and designers engage in reframing towards more viable and desirable outcomes. Our studies aim to contribute to what makes good framing in design briefs and seek to understand effective reframing processes to foster creativity and innovation. Through a university setting in design education, we test how the framing of design briefs and instructions to reframe improve the novelty and usefulness of solutions produced by student designers. By testing over twenty different brief treatments over four years of experiments, we learn that there is no perfect brief but only briefs that can be best framed for different contexts and outcomes. The main gauge of framing or reframing ability was primarily based on creativity scores. However, creativity evaluation for framing and reframing outcomes is not reflective of the entire process or the student’s ability to frame or reframe. A better means of encouraging and measuring educational outcomes of framing and reframing is needed. We recommend a set of professional competencies in the industry needed to overcome challenges in framing and reframing and propose that design education should aim to nurture these abilities in student designers. Lastly, a method to study and characterize the thought development of student designers in framing and reframing is proposed. Overall, the studies aim to be a resource to inform and improve design education.