[Open Source Broadcasting] Rethinking the problem for creating the Public Rad...

[John Tynan]

In response to Aza Raskin's suggestions about writing down and refining a problem statement for a project so that the solution could be better understood, I wrote a problem statement for the Public Radio Roadtrip:

I want to curate stories from multiple sources and associate geolocation information with these stories.  I want to organize these stories into collections.  I want to publish these collections of stories onto an embeddable map.  I also want to publish these collections to additional destinations automatically, like a person's mp3 player (via podcasts), like Google Maps, Layar  and more...  I would like to easily create printed flyers of these stories with an accompanying qrcode which links to the audio.

Is this really the problem?  It sounds more like a description.

Aza quotes engineer Paul MacCready in his article "You Are Solving The Wrong Problem"

“The problem is we don’t understand the problem.”

Aza notes that "the problem was the problem".  The problem was the process itself, and to arrive at the solution the process needed to change.  Both Aza and Bert Herman said that repetition, that iteration was key.


So, perhaps rather than describe what I have now, perhaps the problem is, how can I better refine the process?  How can I better test the app, gain feedback, refine my assumptions and my work and try again.  What will my problem statement look like then?


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Posted By John Tynan to Open Source Broadcasting at 7/17/2011 03:57:00 PM