Methodology

TRIZ + Design Thinking

dttriz guides you through a five-phase process that pairs the empathy-first lens of Design Thinking (start from the people affected) with TRIZ/ARIZ — a structured method for picturing the ideal outcome and resolving the trade-off at the heart of a hard problem. You don't need to know either framework before you start: the Guide explains everything as you go.

The five phases

1

Empathize & Define

Understand the human experience behind the problem before touching any technical framework. Who is affected? What have they tried? What specifically fails? The phase ends with a single, sharply-worded problem statement — concrete, specific, no jargon, no solutioning.

Example: "deliveries are late" turns out to mean — suburban customers wait at home for windows that are missed about 30% of the time, and the company has already tried buffer time and extra drivers. Problem statement: "Customers can't rely on the promised delivery window, and adding slack has made deliveries later overall."

Design Thinking origin — borrowed deliberately: TRIZ without this lens produces elegant solutions to the wrong problem.

2

Isolate Contradiction

Find the trade-off at the core of your problem: what gets better when you push in one direction, and what gets worse as a direct result? TRIZ calls this a contradiction. It comes in two kinds — a technical contradiction (improving one thing worsens a different thing) or a physical one (the same thing must be two opposite ways at once, like coffee hot enough to enjoy but cool enough not to burn). Naming it precisely — and knowing which kind it is — is the engine of the whole method. You describe your situation in your own words; the Guide translates it for you. (Under the hood the Guide maps it onto TRIZ's 39 standard engineering parameters and its contradiction matrix.)

Example: a delivery company adds buffer time to its routes. Each stop becomes more reliable (better) — but routes get longer, so deliveries land later overall (worse). "Reliability per stop vs. total route time" — that trade-off is the contradiction.

Pure TRIZ — but you bring the problem, the Guide brings the theory.

3

Envision the Ideal

Before hunting for solutions, picture the Ideal Final Result — the situation where the problem is simply gone and the benefit happens almost by itself, with no new cost, effort, or side effect. It's meant to sound too good to be true: aiming at the ideal first stops you settling for a weak compromise and points at the boldest directions worth trying. The Guide also helps you spot resources you already have — materials, space, time, information, even existing side-effects — that a solution could put to work for free.

Example: the ideal — every parcel inside its window at no extra route time or cost, each one already where the customer wants it. Resources already on hand: the fleet's idle overnight hours, neighbourhood shops open long hours, and the complaint log that flags the riskiest stops.

The pivot of TRIZ/ARIZ — aim at the ideal, then resolve the contradiction toward it, instead of compromising away from it.

4

Inventive Ideation

Now resolve the contradiction toward that ideal — and there are two routes. For a physical contradiction you separate the clashing demands: in time, in space, by condition, or between the part and the whole. For a technical one you reach for inventive principles — recurring solution patterns distilled from millions of patents. The Guide picks the right route and the few moves that fit, explains each in plain words, and helps you adapt it into a concrete direction. Generic patterns are useless; contextualised directions are actionable.

Example: for "reliability per stop vs. total route time" — a technical contradiction — the Guide proposes Prior Action (stage parcels at neighbourhood pickup points the night before) and Segmentation (a fast van covers only the at-risk stops). Each is judged by how close it gets to the ideal, and the pickup-point direction wins.

Distilled from decades of patent research — you only ever see the handful that matter for your problem.

5

Prototype & Validate

Shape the strongest inventive direction into the smallest testable prototype. Define who to test it with, what assumption it tests, and what signal would validate or invalidate it. The phase captures open risks and ends with a concrete validation plan — not a finished product.

Example: pilot pickup points in one postcode for two weeks, with the twenty customers who complained most. Success signal, read against the ideal: missed-window complaints drop by half without total route time growing. If it fails, the segmented-fleet direction is next in line.

Design Thinking again — invention without validation is still just theory.

Background reading

These two articles on comandanteshche.com explain the Soyuz-Apollo framework that dttriz is built on — Soviet TRIZ meeting Californian Design Thinking, with a real worked example.

Part 1

Dark Soviet TRIZ, Sunny Californian Design Thinking, and One Toilet Seat Cover

Two innovation frameworks invented on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain — and how to combine them.

Part 2

Thinking Outside the Bottle

A real business problem, a real solution using TRIZ and Design Thinking, and a real patent.

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