Framing and Reframing

Definition and contextual overview

Framing determines how problems are defined, shaping the boundaries of inquiry and the possible directions for intervention. It sets the mental models, assumptions and priorities that guide decision-making, often invisibly. Reframing, in contrast, disrupts and expands these definitions, challenging inherited constraints and surfacing overlooked perspectives. By shifting the lens through which a challenge is understood, reframing opens new pathways for systemic change, breaking free from conventional thinking and exposing latent opportunities.

Historically, framing has been central to disciplines such as cognitive science, communication theory and systems thinking, shaping everything from media narratives to policy agendas. In design and innovation, it determines which futures are imaginable and which remain excluded. Reframing, therefore, is not just an intellectual maneuver, it is a strategic and political act. It can unsettle power structures, shift priorities and realign interventions with a broader, often more inclusive, understanding of change.

The challenge is that dominant framings are often invisible and taken for granted. Reframing at this level is not merely a creative pivot, it requires epistemic tools to surface how a system is understood, including its internal conflicts, contradictions and tensions. This is the structural layer: the lived complexity of systems as they operate and break down. But beneath that lies a deeper anchoring, a paradigmatic layer that defines what is thinkable, valuable or even real. Without engaging this meta-architecture, teams risk redesigning surface symptoms while leaving the symbolic foundations of the system entirely intact.

Strategic challenges and design implications

One of the primary challenges in framing is that assumptions are often embedded within organisational cultures, industry conventions and societal norms. These assumptions shape what is perceived as a problem, what counts as a legitimate solution and whose perspectives are included in the process. Left unexamined, they constrain imagination, locking teams into familiar solution spaces and limiting the ability to engage with more radical or systemic possibilities.

For example, an industry that once thrived by regularly releasing improved versions of a core product may respond to its decline by asking, once again, how to make the product better. But the forces driving that decline often operate elsewhere: digital creative destruction, generational shifts in behaviour, regulatory changes or the fragmentation of delivery infrastructures. When challenges emerge across multiple, overlapping scales, framing them purely at the product level becomes a form of misdirection, innovation focused on the wrong question.

When the scale of the intervention doesn’t match the scale of the problem, efforts remain trapped in surface-level fixes. This is where reframing becomes essential, especially in complex, systemic challenges where initial problem statements often reflect symptoms rather than underlying causes.

When organisations fail to question how a challenge is framed, they risk falling into solutionism, deploying predefined interventions while leaving structural issues untouched. Reframing disrupts this tendency. It introduces critical questions: What assumptions are shaping this definition of the problem? Who benefits from this framing? What perspectives are absent or excluded? These questions make space for more transformative interventions, ones that move beyond surface adjustments and toward structural insight.

The implications for design practice are significant. A robust reframing process can realign interventions with the actual dynamics of a system, avoiding the trap of optimising within outdated models. It also builds organisational adaptability, allowing teams to reorient as conditions shift and new understandings emerge. Without reframing, projects risk becoming rigid, short-term and complicit in reinforcing the very power structures they ought to challenge.

Methodology and operational steps

Framing and reframing are not technical procedures. It is a critical design practice that makes visible the hidden architectures shaping how challenges are understood and addressed. This work is structured but necessarily iterative, moving between systemic analysis, positional reflection and strategic reinterpretation.

• Identifying the dominant frame by analysing how the issue is currently constructed, whose perspectives shape that construction and what worldviews or institutional logics are embedded in it.
• Surfacing implicit assumptions by revealing the contradictions, exclusions, constraints and inherited priorities that limit how the problem is defined and who gets to define it.
• Situating the design team within the framing process, acknowledging the role of the designer not as a neutral facilitator but as a systemic actor shaped by their own assumptions, values and position within power structures.
• Exploring alternative frames by engaging multiple perspectives and intentionally surfacing conflicting interpretations of the challenge. This includes holding space for tensions between worldviews that may not align, especially where cultural, disciplinary or ideological differences reveal deeper epistemic divides.
• Expanding systemic context as system reframing. Questioning the system’s boundaries, actors, values and assumptions to shift how the challenge is understood. This means examining what is treated as relevant, which relationships are prioritised or excluded and how the framing reinforces structural patterns or generates unintended consequences.
• Temporal reframing by questioning dominant time horizons. Shifting from short-term optimisation to long-term system stewardship, intergenerational thinking or post-growth transitions.
• Engaging the emotional and symbolic layers of framing. Recognising that dominant narratives often hold psychological, moral or identity-based weight and that reframing can provoke discomfort, resistance or loss.
• Prototyping reframed perspectives by testing how alternative definitions of the challenge open new paths for intervention and whether they support alignment with strategic, systemic and ethical goals.

This is not a linear sequence but a recursive process. Reframing requires epistemic humility, emotional intelligence and systemic awareness. It demands that design teams hold space for contradiction, remain attentive to what is not said and recognise when they are reproducing the very assumptions they aim to challenge. At its most transformative, reframing changes not only how problems are defined, but what becomes possible to imagine and to do.

Reframing design briefs

In strategic design, the brief is never neutral. It carries embedded assumptions about what the challenge is, which outcomes are valid and which timelines, values and perspectives are prioritised. Often, these briefs reflect the very systems they aim to transform, compressing complexity into deliverables, reinforcing dominant logics and masking structural contradictions.

Reframing the brief means treating it not as a fixed starting point, but as a constructed artefact that must be interrogated. In strategic design, we read the brief as ethnographic data. An artefact shaped by institutional logic. Not a transparent expression of reality. Most organizational language blends authoritative decisions that are not meant to be questioned with a performative aura that projects alignment, ambition or clarity where none may actually exist. This makes methodological distance essential: taking the brief seriously, but not literally.

Reframing exposes the gap between what the brief claims and what it avoids, where transformation is signaled but constrained by incrementalism, or where systemic issues are reduced to technical fixes. The goal is not to reject the brief, but to reorient it, to clarify what kind of change is possible, what kind of system is really at stake and what forms of knowledge and participation are needed. A reframed brief realigns intent with context, adjusting the coordinates of intervention to meet the true scale of the challenge.

Example of outputs and deliverables

Outputs in reframing work are not simply documents or tools. They are interventions that surface hidden assumptions, reveal structural misalignments and challenge the language through which problems are constructed. They support teams in resisting premature convergence and open space for alternative framings to emerge and mature.

• Framing canvases that expose how problem definitions are shaped, whose interests they serve and what assumptions they carry.
• System maps that show how different framings illuminate distinct leverage points, feedback loops, or blind spots within a system.
• Narrative analyses that unpack the performative and normative roles framing plays in internal discourse, decision-making and public communication.
• Scenario explorations that stress-test competing frames by situating them in longer-term, plural futures.
• Strategic intervention frameworks that embed reframing as an ongoing practice, ensuring interventions remain sensitive to context shifts and epistemic tensions.
• Creative provocations. Respectful but sharp artifacts that surface contradictions, make tensions visible and invite stakeholders into progressive phases of reframing. These might take the form of speculative artifacts, reframed personas, altered design briefs, or counter-narratives designed to unsettle dominant interpretations just enough to reopen the field of possibility.

These outputs help design teams stay critically engaged with the frame itself, avoiding the trap of aligning too quickly with organizational expectations disguised as clarity and ensuring that decisions reflect the real complexity at stake.

Significance and broader impacts

Framing and reframing shape whose voices are heard, what problems are considered valid and which interventions are pursued. Through the lens of the dimension framework and barrier archetypes, reframing becomes essential for preventing cognitive stagnation and unlocking transformative potential. In the absence of reframing, teams risk becoming trapped in path dependency, where the inertia of past decisions constrains the possibility space of the future.

Reframing also plays a crucial role in social equity and systemic justice. Many dominant problem framings reinforce existing power structures, marginalizing perspectives that do not fit within prevailing paradigms. By actively interrogating and expanding frames, designers and strategists can redistribute agency, ensuring that interventions do not simply reinforce the interests of those already in positions of influence.

In addressing planetary challenges such as climate adaptation, economic restructuring and social resilience, reframing is particularly valuable. It allows teams to move beyond technological solutionism and short-term optimization toward paradigm shifts that question fundamental assumptions about growth, sustainability and human well-being.

Innovation ambition

Framing defines the level of change an intervention can achieve. When it operates within existing paradigms, it tends to generate incremental innovation, producing refinements that optimise familiar structures without questioning their foundations. Transitional reframing goes further by enabling shifts in strategy or positioning as systems evolve. But only radical reframing interrogates the underlying ideologies, mental models and epistemic assumptions that shape how problems are even perceived. This kind of reframing does not refine; it reconfigures. It questions what counts as value, which futures are permissible and how institutions determine what is real, urgent, or solvable. At this level, framing becomes a strategic force that can set the conditions for transformative innovation across industries, governance systems and economic models.

Intervention coordinates

Each framing decision carries normative consequences. It defines whose perspectives are included, what concerns are prioritised and what kind of future is possible. Some frames make the lived realities of affected communities visible, while others obscure or marginalise them. In the context of the climate crisis, framings that present it as a technological or external problem tend to reinforce superficial adaptation. They avoid confronting the structural nature of ecological breakdown and bypass opportunities for systemic redesign. Ethical rigor in framing comes not from neutrality but from reflexivity. It means recognising that how we define a challenge shapes whose knowledge is validated, whose interests are protected and whose futures are rendered actionable. A frame is not a description; it is a decision about what becomes possible.

Process dimensions

Reframing is a continuous and situated practice. Its impact changes depending on when and how it is introduced. During early-stage discovery, reframing helps expand the problem space and prevents premature closure. It encourages teams to notice what they might otherwise overlook. As work progresses, reframing supports strategic adaptation, helping teams adjust to new insights or shifting systemic realities. But process also governs who gets to participate in shaping the frame. When reframing is confined to internal roles or hierarchical settings, it risks reinforcing the very assumptions it should be questioning. Participatory reframing counters this tendency by bringing in perspectives and experiences that are often excluded. The broader the range of contributions, the more generative the reframing becomes.

Deliverable dimensions

Reframing leaves visible marks on outputs and artefacts. In early phases, it influences frameworks, maps and strategic diagrams that help teams reorient their understanding of the challenge. These are not neutral visuals but active interventions into how a system is perceived. Later, reframing shapes the adaptability of narratives, prototypes and policy designs, ensuring that they stay responsive to complexity rather than locked into narrow interpretations. The real value of reframing lies not in the format of the deliverable but in its ability to keep inquiry open, assumptions visible and decisions aligned with systemic relevance rather than institutional inertia.

Guiding principles for framing and reframing

Frame awareness for epistemic accountability

Framing shapes not only what problems are seen but how they are understood and by whom. Most dominant frames operate beneath awareness, naturalising assumptions and limiting the range of acceptable inquiry. Developing frame awareness means learning to see these defaults, recognizing how they filter complexity and holding them accountable to the realities they obscure. Without this awareness, interventions risk reproducing the very systems they aim to shift.

Structural interrogation for systemic relevance

Frames are not neutral containers. They are embedded in institutional logics, professional vocabularies and political interests. Interrogating a frame means surfacing its exclusions, tracing its origins and asking who benefits from its persistence. This principle invites designers and strategists to confront the structural forces that shape meaning, not just to refine definitions but to challenge the architectures that stabilise dysfunction and prevent transformation.

Generative disruption for imaginative capacity

Reframing is not about tweaking existing perspectives. It is about shifting the cognitive scaffolding that makes certain problems visible and others invisible. It challenges the mental models, categories and heuristics that shape how meaning is produced. Generative disruption at this level invites cognitive dissonance as a productive space, interrupting habitual thinking and making room for unfamiliar logics to take root. It is through this disturbance that radically new frames emerge, ones capable of reconfiguring what is thinkable, sayable and actionable.