Beyond translation: how ‘context work’ during problem formulation enables effective solving by outsiders

Generating novel ideas is fundamental to the design process; it requires deep expertise and contextual knowledge to do well. Yet, that same expertise and context can create barriers to generating innovation, locking solvers into traditional solving approaches. One way to overcome this tension is to open problems to outsiders – solvers from other domains who can attach their domain's solving heuristics to your problem. While the growing adoption of open and distributed innovation has been successful, a systematic way to attract surprise outsiders remains elusive. This paper offers a set of ‘context work’ practices as a way to bridge disciplinary divides in cross-boundary problem solving. Leveraging a decades-long sequence of field studies at NASA, this paper (1) induces three key dimensions of ‘context work’, (2) integrates them to define four alternative formulations for a given problem and (3) tests the impact of formulation on who is attracted to solve, and the quality of their solutions. We find a tension between attracting a greater number of new solvers with different expertise and receiving high quality solutions from them. We conclude by relating these findings to emerging opportunities to improve the adoption of generative AI in the design process.