Frame Creation

Quick facts

Mechanism: Generates a new problem frame from theme analysis of the broader context, an abductive standpoint stated as approach it as if it were Y that redefines what the problem is and reasons forward to native solution directions.

Produces: frame-proposal

Evidence: C/P · Domain: Problem Framing

Use when an open paradoxical problem keeps resisting solutions inside the frame it arrived in, when conventional problem solving has only produced more of the symptom, or when the way a problem is framed is itself the obstacle and a fresh standpoint would be worth more than another solution attempt.

Some problems do not yield to better solutions because the frame they arrived in is the obstacle. More police did not fix the late-night entertainment district; more generous-vs-limited dials do not settle a free tier. Frame creation refuses to solve inside the given frame. It explores the broader situation, distils its underlying themes, locates the core paradox and the value actually sought, then abduces a new working principle - a genuinely new standpoint, usually crystallised as an “approach it as if it were Y” reconception that redefines what the problem is - and only then reasons forward to the solution directions that frame unlocks. The reconception is the durable move; it is the de-branded core of Kees Dorst’s frame creation (Dorst 2011; Frame Innovation, 2015). The output is a frame proposal, not a discussion, and never a proven answer.

When to Use

• The problem is genuinely open, complex, and paradoxical, and conventional problem solving inside the frame it arrived in has already failed or is producing more of the symptom.
• The way the problem is framed is itself the obstacle - the people closest to it have (mis)framed it, and the leverage is in re-seeing what kind of problem it is rather than optimising the current one.
• There is a real conflict of standpoints or requirements (a core paradox) that cannot be resolved head-on.
• A fresh standpoint would be worth far more than another solution attempt inside the existing terms.

When NOT to Use

• The problem is closed, familiar, or already well-framed. When the situation is settled and a frame comes to mind straight away, the elaborate move only manufactures a paradox that is not there - the same failure as reframing a correct problem. Frame creation earns its cost only when the situation presents a real paradox. This is the central wall.
• The reframe drifts off the real goal (goal-reformulation failure). The documented failure mode (Vermaas and Dorst, 2015) is reframing so freely that you end up solving the reframed problem, not the original one. The value actually sought has to anchor the frame, or the move produces a clever answer to the wrong question.
• The frame cannot be adopted by the people who own the problem (frame failure). A frame the client or stakeholders will not take up is inert, however elegant. This skill surfaces a new standpoint; it does not by itself make a powerful actor accept it. Check adoptability before proposing.
• It is mistaken for surface analogy or for solution generation. The “as if it were Y” line is the crystallisation of a frame built from themes, not a free-association prompt. Run as “pick a cool analogy and brainstorm” it collapses into ordinary ideation. For an analogy pointed at the solution with the problem held fixed, use think-far-analogy-ideation; for menu-driven rewordings of the given problem, use think-problem-restatement.
• A frame is treated as definitive before it is tested. The frame cannot be accepted as proven until a design built on it has been shown to deliver the value sought. The output is a promising standpoint to develop and test, never a settled answer.

Instructions

When asked to reframe an open, stuck problem, follow these steps:

1. Confirm it is an open, paradoxical problem. State the problem as given and check that solving inside its current frame has failed or is producing more of the symptom. If the problem is closed, familiar, or already well-framed, stop and say so - do not manufacture a paradox. If it is merely vague rather than genuinely two-sided-and-stuck, route to think-problem-restatement first.
2. Explore the broader context. Look around the problem, not only at it. Gather who is involved, what they are actually trying to do, the surrounding forces and history, and what conventional solutions inside the frame have already tried and failed. The new frame emerges from this engagement with the broader context, so do not skip to the analogy.
3. Distil the underlying themes. From the broader context, name the recurring underlying patterns - the experiences, motives, and meanings that actually drive the situation (a sense-making move, not a list of facts). These themes are the raw material the new frame is abduced from.
4. Locate the core paradox and the value actually sought. Name the real conflict that makes the problem hard (the standpoints or requirements that cannot both be satisfied head-on). Then name the value actually sought - what success would really deliver. Do not attack the paradox head-on; use it as the diagnostic that the current frame has failed, and let the value anchor everything downstream (this is the guard against goal-reformulation drift).
5. Abduce a new working principle - the reframe. From the themes, construct a genuinely new standpoint: a working principle that, if adopted, would let the value be created. Crystallise it as an “approach it as if it were Y” reconception that redefines what the problem is (the music-festival reframe of a late-night district; not “this is a crime problem” but “this is a hospitality problem”). Y must be earned by the themes, not free-associated, and it must change the problem, not just suggest a solution. State it as an IF/THEN implication: IF we see this situation as Y and adopt its working principle, THEN we create the value sought.
6. Reason forward to solution directions. Derive the solution directions the new frame generates natively - the needs and moves that become obvious once the problem is seen as Y (a festival frame generates staggered transport, wayfinding, friendly guides). These are derived forward from the frame, not transferred mechanisms from the source domain. Sanity-check adoptability: would the people who own the problem take up this standpoint?
7. Emit the frame proposal. Produce the artifact in references/TEMPLATE.md: the themes distilled, the core paradox and the value sought, the new frame as an IF/THEN “as if it were Y” implication, and the solution directions it unlocks - flagged explicitly as a standpoint to develop and test, not a proven answer.

Output Format

Use the template in references/TEMPLATE.md. The deliverable is the filled frame proposal - themes, core paradox and value, the IF/THEN “as if it were Y” frame, and the solution directions it unlocks - not a prose essay, and explicitly marked as untested.

Quality Checklist

Before finalizing, verify:

• The problem is genuinely open and paradoxical, and solving inside its current frame has failed - not a closed or already-well-framed problem with a manufactured paradox.
• The frame was built from distilled themes of the broader context, not grabbed as a surface analogy or free-associated.
• The core paradox is named, and the value actually sought is named and anchors the frame (guard against goal-reformulation drift).
• The new frame redefines what the problem is (an “as if it were Y” reconception stated as an IF/THEN implication), not a reworded problem and not a solution analogy under a fixed frame.
• The solution directions are derived forward from the new frame (what it generates natively), not mechanisms transferred from the source domain.
• Adoptability was checked - the frame is one the people who own the problem could actually take up.
• The output is the frame-proposal artifact, presented as a standpoint to develop and test, never a proven answer.
• No overclaiming: the evidence is conceptual and transferred from human design practice; claim “constructs a new, theme-grounded standpoint that generates native solution directions,” not a measured improvement in outcomes (see evidence/dossier.md).

Evidence

Tier C (governing; honest read C/P, capped at C). Frame creation is an influential, well-developed account of design reasoning, built on roughly fifty years of design research and Dorst’s own observational studies of expert designers (Dorst 2011; Frame Innovation, 2015), with worked case studies from the Designing Out Crime centre; the general proposition that how a problem is framed shapes the solutions found has moderate support in the wider problem-framing literature (Schon’s reflective practice; problem-finding research; small-N design-team studies). But there is no controlled, comparative, or outcome study of the named method - no trial showing the move produces better problems, frames, or results than not running it; the cases are demonstrations, not measured comparisons with a baseline or control. The frequently-cited “about 20 design directions from one frame” is an illustrative count from a single case, not an effect size, and does not influence the tier. The entire base is human designers and human organisations, transferred and not validated for AI-augmented use - a second reason the grade is C. Full grading, sources, and caveats: evidence/dossier.md.

Examples

See references/EXAMPLE.md for a completed frame proposal on a real decision.

Deep dive: worked example

A full worked run (the shared Northwind scenario)

Frame Proposal - Worked Example

A completed run of the frame-creation skill on a real, consequential decision. This is the quality bar a generated frame proposal should meet.

Uses the shared recurring scenario (Northwind, a B2B SaaS weighing a self-serve free-tier launch) so examples across skills read as one coherent product. Where abstraction-laddering relocated what altitude to work the free-tier problem at, and contradiction-resolution tried to dissolve the generous-vs-limited trade-off, this skill steps back further: it treats the stuck framing of the free tier itself as the obstacle and abduces a new standpoint for what the free tier is. See docs/internal/AUTHORING.md.

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Problem under reframing

• Problem as given: “We’re launching a self-serve free tier and we keep fighting about it. Marketing wants it big to drive signups, sales wants it small to protect deals, finance wants to model the conversion rate. Every plan we draw up is a worse version of the paid product, and nobody’s excited by any of them.”
• How it arrived / who framed it: Brought by leadership as a growth lever, and framed by everyone since as an acquisition funnel - a free plan whose job is to capture signups and convert a percentage to paid. The fight is over the dial settings of that funnel.
• What solving inside that frame has already tried (and how it failed): Three rounds of “where do we draw the line” - feature gates, usage caps, trial lengths. Each round produces a cut-down paid product and a fresh argument about cannibalisation. Conversion projections swing wildly because nobody can say why a stripped-down tool would make anyone want the full one. The symptom (a joyless, contested plan that excites no one) persists across every version. The acquisition-funnel frame is the obstacle, not the dial settings.

Summary (top of the artifact)

The team has framed the free tier as an acquisition funnel and is stuck arguing about its dials. Exploring the broader context - what actually makes someone champion a B2B tool internally - the themes are that adoption is social (a person who loves a tool drags their team onto it), that trust is earned by being useful before being paid, and that the free users who matter are not “leads” but future hosts of the product inside their org. The core paradox the funnel frame can’t resolve: the free tier must give away real value (to create advocates) yet withhold value (to protect revenue). The value actually sought is a population of internal champions who pull Northwind into their companies. Reframe: approach the free tier as if it were the hospitality of a great host welcoming a guest, not a funnel metering a lead. That standpoint generates its own directions - make the solo user genuinely successful and proud, equip them to bring others in, and earn the upgrade as the natural next step of a relationship rather than a paywall. This is a standpoint to develop and test, not a proven plan; the smallest test is whether early free users actually invite teammates.

Broader context explored

Looked around the problem rather than at the dial. How do B2B tools actually get into companies? Overwhelmingly bottom-up: one person tries something, succeeds with it, and becomes the person who advocates for it in meetings, onboards colleagues, and defends the renewal. The “buyer” is often downstream of that champion. What makes someone a champion is not that they were converted by a feature gate - it is that the tool made them look good and feel capable, and that bringing others in was easy and rewarding. Northwind’s own best paid accounts, asked how they started, mostly trace back to one early enthusiast. Meanwhile the free tier had been designed entirely around the company’s funnel metrics and not at all around that one enthusiast’s experience.

Themes distilled

• Adoption is social, not transactional. Value spreads through a person who loves the tool and pulls their team in, not through a conversion event. The unit that matters is a future host, not a captured lead.
• Trust is earned by being useful before being paid. People champion tools that helped them first; a relationship that starts by metering and withholding starts on the wrong foot.
• The withholding instinct is fighting the growth instinct. Designing the free tier to protect revenue makes it worse at the very thing (creating advocates) that produces revenue.
• Pride and capability travel. The free user advocates because the tool made them effective and made them look good - not because they hit a wall.

Core paradox and value sought

• Core paradox: the free tier must give away real value (to create genuine advocates) and withhold value (to protect paid conversion) at the same time. Inside the funnel frame these pull against each other on a single dial, which is why every “where’s the line” round reproduces the fight. (Used here as the signal that the funnel frame has failed, not as the thing to solve head-on.)
• Value actually sought: a growing population of internal champions who succeed with Northwind and pull their teams and companies onto it. Signups and conversion rate are downstream proxies; the real prize is advocacy that originates inside target accounts.

The new frame (abduced working principle)

• Reconception: approach the free tier as if it were the hospitality of a great host welcoming a guest - not an acquisition funnel metering a lead. A good host makes the guest genuinely comfortable and capable first, makes it natural and delightful to bring friends, and lets the deeper relationship (paying, scaling) grow from a good first experience rather than from a barrier.
• IF / THEN: IF we treat the free tier as hospitality - a host making a guest successful and equipped to bring others - THEN we create the population of internal champions who pull Northwind into their companies (the value actually sought).
• What this changes: this is not a funnel-tuning problem (“how stingy is the free plan”), it is a hospitality problem (“how do we make a solo user successful, proud, and eager to bring their team”). The question stops being where to draw the line and becomes what makes a great first stay and a natural invitation. The generous-vs-limited dial that contradiction-resolution wrestled with largely dissolves, because withholding is no longer the lever - a host does not win by rationing.

Check: Y (“hospitality / great host”) is earned by the distilled themes (social adoption, trust-before-payment, pride-that-travels), not free-associated. It changes the problem (funnel -> hospitality), not just the solution. And it is adoptable: “make free users successful and bring their teams” is a standpoint marketing, sales, and finance can all get behind far more readily than a contested dial. Frame is ready to develop.

Solution directions the frame unlocks

Derived forward from the hospitality frame - what becomes obvious once a free user is a guest to be made successful, not a lead to be metered. (Note these are generated by the frame; they are not “things festivals/hotels do” copied across.)

• Design the free tier around one person’s complete success, not a cut-down product. The solo workflow should reach real first value with real data and no time bomb - because a guest who succeeds is the entire engine. “Limited” stops meaning “crippled” and starts meaning “scoped to one person.”
• Make bringing the team in the marquee feature, not the paywall. Invitations, shared workspaces, and “show a colleague” should be the easiest, most rewarding actions in the product - the host helping the guest bring friends. Team and admin/scale capabilities become what you grow into together, which is also what gets paid for.
• Earn the upgrade as the next step of a relationship. Prompt to paid at the moment the champion is succeeding and wants to bring their org along (the natural “your whole team should be here”), not at an artificial gate. Conversion becomes the continuation of hospitality, not its interruption.
• Re-instrument success metrics around advocacy. Track “did this free user invite a teammate / champion internally,” not just “did they convert,” because the frame says champions are the asset. This also gives sales a warm signal (an active internal advocate) instead of a cold lead list.

Status

This is a standpoint to develop and test, not a proven answer. The hospitality frame is a promising reconception, not a validated plan, and it could fail two ways the skill warns about: a frame-failure if finance will not fund a genuinely generous solo tier (then the funnel frame reasserts itself), and goal-reformulation drift if “delight the guest” quietly replaces “create paying champions” as the goal. The smallest thing that would confirm or break the frame: ship a generous solo tier to a small cohort and measure whether free users actually invite teammates and champion internally - if they do, the frame is generating the value sought; if they don’t, the hospitality reconception is wrong for this product and the team should fall back to a deliberately-chosen funnel via think-decision-option-review.

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Note how the value is in re-seeing the problem, not optimising it: the problem arrived as “tune the free-tier funnel,” and an unaided pass - like the three rounds the team already ran - would have proposed another set of gates and caps. Frame creation explored the broader context, distilled why B2B tools really spread, named the value (champions) and the paradox (give away vs withhold), and abduced a standpoint (“as if it were hospitality”) that redefined the problem and generated solution directions native to it - directions a funnel frame structurally cannot produce. It is distinct from listing solution analogies: nothing here was copied from how hotels or hosts operate; the frame changed what the free tier IS, and the directions fell out of that.

Grounding: the full evidence dossier

What the research does and does not show, with graded sources

Evidence Dossier: Frame Creation

The single source of truth for the frame-creation skill. The SKILL.md, the sidecar (skill.meta.yml), and the eval cases all derive from this file. If a claim is not here, it does not belong in the skill. Drafted by the think-research-framework engine and admitted as a Build.

Skill	thinking-framework-skills.frame-creation (installable name think-frame-creation)
Family	problem-framing
Evidence tier	C governing (honest read C/P, capped at C - see “What the evidence shows”)
Confidence	Moderate that theme-grounded reframing surfaces useful new standpoints in open, paradoxical problems; low that any specific effect transfers to agents
Status	draft (admitted from the SP6 discovery shortlist)

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1. The mechanism (what actually does the work)

Some problems do not yield to better solutions because the frame they arrived in is itself the obstacle. Frame creation is the core design-reasoning move at the centre of Kees Dorst’s work on framing and Frame Innovation (2015). Its durable cognitive move is to reframe the problem situation itself by constructing a new standpoint - not to generate solutions inside the frame as given, and not merely to reword the problem, but to create a genuinely new way of seeing what the problem is, and then to work forward from that new frame to solutions.

Dorst grounds the move in a logic of abduction. Ordinary problem solving is Abduction-1: you know the value you want and a working principle (“how”), and you create a “what” (an object, service, or system) to fill the gap. Open, complex problems demand Abduction-2: at the start you “ONLY know the end value we want to achieve,” so you must create a working principle and a thing in parallel. A frame is what lets you do this. In Dorst’s own definition it is “the creation of a (novel) standpoint from which a problematic situation can be tackled,” formally “the general implication that by applying a certain working principle we will create a specific value,” carrying the key thesis: “IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for.”

The decisive structural feature - the thing that separates frame creation from rewording the problem or from transferring a solution - is where the frame comes from. Dorst is explicit that “frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor” but “are in fact very complex sets of statements.” The frame is not grabbed from a distant domain at random; it emerges from theme analysis of the broader problem context. Expert designers “do not address the core paradox head-on, but tend to focus on issues around it. They search the broader problem context for clues. New frames … then arise (or emerge) from this engagement with the broader problem context.” The engine has a recognisable order:

1. Explore the broader situation - look around the problem, not only at it.
2. Distil its underlying themes - a phenomenological sense-making move (“the experience of focus, of meaning”), not a list of facts.
3. Locate the core paradox (the real conflict that makes the problem hard) and the value actually sought.
4. Abduce a new working principle - usually crystallised as an “approach it as if it were Y” analogy that reconceives what the problem is.
5. Reason forward to the solution directions that frame unlocks. Only a completed, tested design confirms the frame.

The canonical illustration: a metropolitan late-night entertainment quarter (about 30,000 young people on a good night) had entrenched drunkenness, fights, theft, and sporadic violence; the local council had framed it as a law-and-order problem and answered with more police, CCTV, and bouncers, producing a grim environment where the problems persisted. The Designing Out Crime designers studied the revellers, distilled the themes (overwhelmingly non-criminal young people wanting a good time, becoming bored and frustrated as the night wore on, made worse by the security), named the value (a good night out), and reframed the situation by “proposing a simple analogy: that this problem could be approached AS IF they were dealing with organising a good-sized music festival.” That single reframe then generated its own solution directions - staggered transport so people can leave when they want, chill-out and wayfinding spaces, visible friendly guides instead of bouncers - because “well-run music festivals provide for needs that have not been taken care of in this public space.” The festival frame carried no festival apparatus into the district; it carried a new standpoint that then generated native solution directions.

2. Lineage

• Frame creation / frame innovation: Kees Dorst, professor of design at the University of Technology Sydney and at Eindhoven University of Technology, and a founder of the Designing Out Crime research centre. The reasoning logic (abduction, framing, the core paradox, the WHAT/HOW/VALUE equation) is set out in “The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application,” Design Studies 32(6) (2011); the full nine-step process model (archaeology, paradox, context, field, themes, frames, futures, transformation, integration) and its case studies are in Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (MIT Press, 2015).
• Roots: the lineage runs back to Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner (1983), where “framing” and “problem setting” enter design and professional-practice theory, and draws on Max van Manen’s phenomenological notion of “themes,” Caroline Whitbeck on satisfying conflicting requirements in engineering, and Roozenburg and Eekels on abduction in design.
• Naming and IP: “frame creation” and “frame innovation” are generic terms in the academic design-research literature (an MIT Press book and peer-reviewed journal articles), not trademarks. This skill credits Dorst as lineage but is not branded and needs no trademark string - the same attribution-not-branding treatment applied to Schon-derived and other academic-origin methods in this catalog. It ships under a mechanism-over-brand name, frame-creation, per the library’s first commitment.

3. What the evidence shows, and what it does NOT show

The honest grade is C (conceptually plausible but under-tested), a C/P split capped conservatively at C.

What the record supports. Frame creation is an influential, well-developed account of design reasoning, built on roughly fifty years of design research and on Dorst’s own detailed observational studies of how expert designers actually work (the protocol/observation work in Describing Design, Dorst 1997, and Design Expertise, Lawson and Dorst 2009), set out theoretically in the Design Studies paper (Dorst 2011) and elaborated into a teachable nine-step process in the book Frame Innovation (2015), with worked case studies from the Designing Out Crime centre. The general proposition underneath it - that how a problem is framed shapes the solutions found - has moderate support in the wider problem-framing and problem-finding literature (Schon’s reflective practice; problem-finding research; and small-N empirical design-team studies that find reframing associated with more creative outcomes). That is a real, coherent, observationally-grounded body of work with a clear mechanism and a clear apparatus.

What the record does NOT support. There is no controlled, comparative, or outcome study of the named frame-creation method - no trial showing that running the nine-step process (or this reframe-by-themes-and-analogy move) produces better problems, frames, or results than not running it. The evidence is reflective design research plus illustrative case studies; the cases are reported as demonstrations, not as measured comparisons with a baseline, a control, or replication. Dorst is candid about the maturity of the account, closing the 2011 paper by saying these practices “need to articulate … with subtlety, clarity and in much more detail than has been achieved in this brief paper.” The small empirical literature that does exist (for example comparative studies of high- vs low-creativity student design teams) studies framing/reframing in general, not Dorst’s specific method, and is itself small-N and student-based. This is the line between C and P: there is influence, theory, expert-observation, and illustrative cases, but no practitioner-outcome base for the specific move - so C, not P.

No laundered statistics. The frequently-cited “about 20 design directions sparked by the single frame” is an illustrative count from one case study in Dorst (2011), not a measured effect size or success rate; it is reported here only to describe the example and is explicitly not treated as evidence of effectiveness and does not influence the tier. No effect-size or success-rate figure is cited for frame creation, because there is no nameable primary source for one, and none is invented.

Net grade: C (governing), honest read C/P. Claim “constructs a new, theme-grounded standpoint that redefines the problem and generates native solution directions”; do not claim a measured improvement in problems, frames, or outcomes, and never present a frame as a proven answer.

4. Transferred-evidence flag (required honesty for this library)

The entire evidence base is human designers and human organisations. None of it studies a frame created by or with an AI agent. The evidence is transferred from human design practice and not validated for AI-augmented use - a second reason the conservative governing grade is C, not higher. There is no S- or M-tier research on this specific move to borrow from, so there is no optimistic half to inflate from. Treat the AI value as: the agent makes the explore-themes-paradox-abduce pass cheap and disciplined, resists the reflex to solve inside the given frame, keeps the reframe anchored to the value actually sought, derives solution directions forward from the new frame rather than transferring source-domain mechanisms, and enforces the honesty that a frame is an untested standpoint - benefits that do not depend on any unproven outcome claim.

5. When it works / when it fails (drives the eval negative cases and “When NOT to Use”)

Works best when:

• The problem is genuinely open, complex, and paradoxical, and the frame in which it arrived is itself the obstacle - conventional problem solving inside the given frame has already failed or is producing more of the symptom.
• It is an intractable, multi-party situation that has been (mis)framed by the people closest to it, where the leverage is in re-seeing what kind of problem this is rather than better-optimising the current one.
• There is a real conflict of standpoints or requirements (a core paradox) that cannot be resolved head-on.

Fails or misleads when (poor-fit / anti-patterns):

• The problem is closed, familiar, or already well-framed. Dorst notes that when “the problem situation is familiar, and the designer has dealt with such matters before, a frame … will come to mind straight away”; the elaborate move “only comes into play when the problem situation presents a real paradox.” Forcing it on a settled, single-answer problem manufactures a paradox that is not there - the same failure as reframing a correct problem. This is the central wall.
• The reframe drifts away from the real goal (goal-reformulation failure). The documented failure mode (Vermaas and Dorst, ICED 2015): you reframe so freely that you end up solving the reframed problem, not the original one. The value actually sought has to anchor the frame, or the move produces a clever answer to the wrong question.
• The frame cannot be accepted by the people who own the problem (frame failure). The second documented failure mode: a frame the client or stakeholders will not adopt is inert, however elegant. Frame creation surfaces a new standpoint; it does not by itself make a powerful actor adopt it.
• It is mistaken for solution generation, or run as surface analogy. The “as if it were Y” line is the crystallisation of a frame built from themes, not a free-association prompt. Treated as “pick a cool analogy and brainstorm,” it collapses into ordinary ideation and carries none of the benefit; the value comes from the theme/paradox work that earns the analogy. For an analogy pointed at the solution with the problem held fixed, that is think-far-analogy-ideation, not this.
• A correct frame is treated as definitive before it is tested. In Dorst’s logic the frame “cannot be accepted as definitive until the whole equation has been filled in by the creation of the design, and that design has been shown to lead to the aspired value.” The output is a promising standpoint to develop and test, not a proven answer.

6. Output artifact

The skill must emit a frame proposal, not prose: the themes distilled from the broader context; the core paradox and the value actually sought; the new frame stated as an IF/THEN implication (often as an “approach it as if it were Y” reconception that redefines what the problem is); and the solution directions that frame unlocks, derived forward from the frame. The proposal is explicitly flagged as a standpoint to develop and test, never as a proven answer. A short summary sits above the proposal.

7. Sources

1. Kees Dorst, “The core of ‘design thinking’ and its application,” Design Studies 32(6) (2011): 521-532. The primary source for the move: abduction-1 vs abduction-2, the frame definition (“a novel standpoint from which a problematic situation can be tackled”; the IF/THEN thesis), frames emerging from theme analysis of the broader context, and the music-festival case. Peer-reviewed, theoretical + observational. (C - theory/observation, no outcome study.)
2. Kees Dorst, Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design (MIT Press, 2015). The book-length account and the nine-step frame-creation process model, with varied real-world case studies. Foundational / practitioner. (C - cases, not controlled.)
3. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Temple Smith, 1983). Origin of “framing” / “problem setting” in design and professional practice; the lineage Dorst builds on. Foundational.
4. Kees Dorst, “Frame Creation and Design in the Expanded Field,” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 1(1) (2015): 22-33. Dorst’s own extension of the frame-creation approach beyond conventional design. Peer-reviewed. (C.)
5. Pieter Vermaas and Kees Dorst, “Framing in Design: A Formal Analysis and Failure Modes,” Proceedings of ICED 2015 (International Conference on Engineering Design). Formal analysis of design framing and its two failure modes (goal-reformulation failure; frame failure); the source for the when-NOT-to-use wall. Peer-reviewed analysis.
6. Scott Weedon, “The Core of Kees Dorst’s Design Thinking: A Literature Review,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 33(4) (2019). Independent review situating frame creation in Dorst’s body of work; useful for the honest state of the account. Literature review.

Verification status: The mechanism descriptions and the music-festival case (Dorst 2011; Frame Innovation 2015) are well-attested and mutually consistent, as is the abduction-1/abduction-2 distinction and the IF/THEN frame definition. The two failure modes are reported from Vermaas and Dorst (ICED 2015). The “about 20 design directions” figure is an illustrative count from a single case study and is excluded from the tier on the evidence rule. None of these gaps changes the conservative governing grade of C. Any unsourced “frame creation improves outcomes by N%” figure is excluded and does not influence the tier.