At some point in the design process, you as the designer, have to confront the blank sheet of paper and that is going to be a challenge for many of you. Now, of course, you'll probably have some ideas for concepts that are responsive to the challenge you've taken on, so go ahead and get those started. But what I wanna do now is explain an idea, a basic principle that's called decomposition. And this is a technique, I'm going to explain it conceptually, and then in subsequent videos I'm going to give you some specific examples. The basic idea is that you have this big design problem and for most people, that design problem is unwieldy or hard to get a handle on, and you're stuck in terms of not having any good ideas. So, the basic idea behind decomposition, is you're going to take that problem and you're going to divide it into pieces or sub-problems. And, so, step one is divide into sub-problems. And there are many ways to do that, and in fact, I'm gonna tell you about three, eventually. There. You can do it by key or latent needs, that is, you can consider. The key or latent needs that are part of the overall design problem. You can decompose by sequence of user actions. Thirdly, you can decompose by function. And I'm not gonna explain how to do that just yet. But I just wanna point out that your first step's gonna be. Take a big design problem. Break it into two or more sub-problems using one of these techniques. And, in fact, you'll probably use several of these techniques as you try different decompositions of the design problem. Then the second step is going to be, solve the sub-problem. And. The idea is considering only the sub problem in isolation. What are some possible concepts that would be responsive just to that sub problem. And so you solve sub problem A. You solves a problem B. And you solve sub problem C or however many sub problems you have. And then the third step is you integrate solutions. And basically, this is like choosing from a sandwich menu, you're going to take one from B, one from A, one from B, one from C. Integrate into an overall solution concept. And, you can take another one from A, another one from B, another one from C and you get some additional solution concept. And if you think about it, let's imagine that there are seven of those, and seven of those, and eight of those. Then, basically, what you got is, you got seven times seven times eight or 392 possible combinations. And the whole, the whole idea is that, for most people, while the big design problem might be unwieldy. For most people, if they can break the problem down into a smaller problem, they can, they can more readily solve that smaller problem. Once you've solved those two or three or however many solved problems in isolation, then that integration or combination step is more straightforward and will lead you to a bunch of different ideas. I said there were at least three ways to do that: by key or latent needs, by sequence of user actions, or by function. Let me illustrate how to do it by key latent needs, key or latent needs. So if we go to our cart example, We, we had several latent needs. And, let me just take two as an example. One was that the, the cart could be used as a tabletop, Whereas a table and the other was that the cart navigated curves. So the whole idea here is if you then say, Well, let me not solve my cart problem. Let me just see if I can just think of different ways to make a table. And, and so, in the abstract, let me just think about what a, what some options for a table might be that I have one option for a table might be that I have a box. And the box has a top on it. That's a box with top. Another option might be that I have a folding table. You know, like a, like a banquet table. So a table with hinges that have legs that fold down. And a third option might be that I have a table, a pedestal table. And I could imagine a pedestal, table that might be, might have a, a lift to it, of some kind. So that it could be collapsed. Alright? So there are three approaches to creating a table that have nothing to do with a cart. Alright? Now if I look over here at cart, at a cart navigating curb, we might say well, what are some ways that a, that a vehicle, a wheeled vehicle, might navigate a curb. So here are some curbs. And, one way might be if you think about the way commercial hand trucks work, They often have, there's a commercial hand truck. They often have a, kind of a skid. That a structural element that sometimes has a piece of plastic on it to make it low friction, so it's a skid. And, plus how else might you navigate a curve? Well, you might have a really big wheel, That would be a nice way to do it, Or I don't know, It might be interesting to think about a smaller wheel. But then one or more very small wheels that give a kind of virtual. Give the effect of having a very large wheel, because there's a couple of rollers there that allow the curve to be navigated. Alright, so again, that's thinking about just the curve problem. And this is the roller school solution. Alright so now the trick, step three in the decomposition principle is to take one from column A, one from column B and form an integrated solution. So, just for instance, let's take, let's take. The idea of a folding table and the idea of the roller scheme, and see if we could come up with a cart. So we might imagine. Let's see, here's our cart. We have a little wheel. We have some rollers. And we're going to have some kind of horizontal element that would store our stuff. And our cart is going to have a handle on it for pulling. But it's going to have this nice feature which is going to a little hinge there, which allows that handle to fold down, Which would allow this thing to be stably configured as a little table. All right. So that's an example of, you know, taking that and taking that and creating an integrated solution. Now, that, that's a very quick thumbnail sketch for what that concept might be, but I would then go elaborate, Think about it a little more carefully, Think about how that concept of the wheel, a couple rollers, and a fold down handle to form a stable, table might actually look as an integrated solution. But, hopefully you see that by decomposing by these latent needs, by these. A couple of focused issues really, I'm able to generate some solutions solve or address just that need some solutions that address just this need and then combine them in order to create some solution and
