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Lecture

Ideation: Problem Formulation and Creative Thinking

In course

HUM-375: Prototyping

Le cours réunit des étudiant·e·s de l'EPFL et de l'UNIL au travers d'une approche de design exploratoire et itérative. Les étudiant·e·s identifient un besoin ou une problématique de société et proposent une solution en passant par des étapes de recherche, ...

Description

This lecture covers the importance of formulating problems as questions, such as 'How can we reduce travelers' insecurity during off-peak hours on the metro line?', emphasizing the need to specify the user group and problem boundaries. It also discusses two distinct thinking systems: System 1, which is intuitive and automatic, and System 2, which involves deliberate decision-making. Additionally, the lecture explores idea generation techniques, encouraging the generation of diverse ideas, making them tangible, and setting time constraints for brainstorming sessions.

Official source

Related concepts (7)

Design thinking

Design thinking refers to the set of cognitive, strategic and practical procedures used by designers in the process of designing, and to the body of knowledge that has been developed about how people reason when engaging with design problems. Design thinking is also associated with prescriptions for the innovation of products and services within business and social contexts. Design thinking has a history extending from the 1950s and '60s, with roots in the study of design cognition and design methods.

Constraint programming

Constraint programming (CP) is a paradigm for solving combinatorial problems that draws on a wide range of techniques from artificial intelligence, computer science, and operations research. In constraint programming, users declaratively state the constraints on the feasible solutions for a set of decision variables. Constraints differ from the common primitives of imperative programming languages in that they do not specify a step or sequence of steps to execute, but rather the properties of a solution to be found.

Constraint logic programming

Constraint logic programming is a form of constraint programming, in which logic programming is extended to include concepts from constraint satisfaction. A constraint logic program is a logic program that contains constraints in the body of clauses. An example of a clause including a constraint is . In this clause, is a constraint; A(X,Y), B(X), and C(Y) are literals as in regular logic programming. This clause states one condition under which the statement A(X,Y) holds: X+Y is greater than zero and both B(X) and C(Y) are true.

Creativity

Creativity is a characteristic of someone or some process that forms something new and valuable. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary work, or a painting). Scholarly interest in creativity is found in a number of disciplines, primarily psychology, business studies, and cognitive science.

Constraint satisfaction problem

Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are mathematical questions defined as a set of objects whose state must satisfy a number of constraints or limitations. CSPs represent the entities in a problem as a homogeneous collection of finite constraints over variables, which is solved by constraint satisfaction methods. CSPs are the subject of research in both artificial intelligence and operations research, since the regularity in their formulation provides a common basis to analyze and solve problems of many seemingly unrelated families.

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