Once you have identified two different, appropriately-scoped problems that both interest you and in which you have some knowledge and expertise, use two of the problem formulation techniques discussed in this classPoint's of View and the 5 Why's as follows:

1. Briefly describe the area that will be the focus of your work
2. After each problem, apply one of the tools following the outline below to get a richer understanding of the problem formulation:
   1. Choose and apply four different and novel points of view to one of your problems and record in the write-up the most valuable novel insight you gained from each point of view. Remember that a point-of-view is identified by a key characteristic (e.g., age: old or young, experience: novice or expert, gender: male or female, wealth: rich or poor, ethnicity: Asian or Hispanic, position: user or buyer, etc.). Do not take the points-of-view of specific people that you know (e.g., my mom, my best friend, my boss, Susan, or Rick at the gas station) but you can be more specific than just general demographic categories if you want (e.g. 7th grade girl in a rural town, brand-new manager of a local bank). Use the point of statement elements of User, Need, Insight.
   2. For one of the two problems not used in the point-of-view task, apply a 5 Why's analysis to determine the underlying, human-based cause to your problem. In your assignment write-up, record your answers to your questions and then suggest simple solutions for each of the five levels of your 5 Why's analysis to solve the problem at multiple levels. Note, that while this assignment asks for solutions here, the focus should be on understanding the underlying cause. There are a few pitfalls here to avoid: 1) make sure each of your 5-Why questions is connected in a logic chain. Don't just pose 5 unrelated questions that start with the word "Why". 2) Test the logic of each step in your chain. One of the most common errors in doing the 5 Whys is giving an answer to one of the questions that doesn't actually answer the question being posed and thus breaking the logic chain. 3) Often there may be multiple answers/causes to a single Why in the chain. When this is the case, choose the answer that is both in your domain of control and the largest driver of the symptom in the question. If you finish a 5 Why logic chain and you end up with a cause that isn't alterable (e.g., "because people value their time"), you need to rethink your answers to each question. Also, when there are multiple answers to a Why, don't be afraid to explore more than one answer and essentially create a branching logic chain with multiple key causes.