Asking Effective Questions: Awareness of Bias in Designerly Thinking

The formulation of questions in processes of design is an activity affected by cognitive biases inherent to humans. Cognitive biases, developed through gaining experience, influence how decisions are made during problem solving. When an outcome is predictable, experience provides mental shortcuts or heuristics to enable the problem solver to act effectively. When an outcome is uncertain, cognitive biases can wrongfully project preconceptions, elevate self-interest, and undermine the problem solver’s greater ambitions for positive impact. Mitigating cognitive bias is thus vital for design problem solving under conditions of uncertainty. Designers explore uncertainty through an approach typified by human empathy, problem framing, and creativity. This chapter reveals the nature of asking effective questions within designerly thinking. This means understanding nuances of context, surfacing novel insights about how a system performs, and crucially working out how people within systems experience the world around them.