Problem domain

A problem domain is the area of expertise or application that needs to be examined to solve a problem. A problem domain is simply looking at only the topics of an individual's interest, and excluding everything else. For example, when developing a system to measure good practice in medicine, carpet drawings at hospitals would not be included in the problem domain. In this example, the domain refers to relevant topics solely within the delimited area of interest: medicine.

This points to a limitation of an overly specific, or overly bounded, problem domain. An individual may think they are interested in medicine and not interior design, but a better solution exists outside of the problem domain as it was initially conceived. For example, when IDEO researchers noticed that patients in hospitals spent a huge amount of time staring at acoustic ceiling tiles, which "became a symbol of the overall ambiance: a mix of boredom and anxiety from feeling lost, uninformed, and out of control." The research team then "started a series of deliberate discussions about the findings, and those led us to talk about improving the overall approach to ER logistics, so patients were treated less like objects to be positioned and allocated, and more like people in stress and pain." Although not originally within the bounded problem domain of measuring good practices in medicine, this non-intuitive finding could then be added to the domain space. A rational, problem seeking, and non-linear approach to research such as art, design, creative work, and post-normal science may help internalize previously excluded areas of interest within a problem domain.

In mathematics, the term defines a domain where the parameters defining the boundaries of the domain and sufficient mappings into a set of ranges including itself are not well enough understood to provide a systematic description of the domain.

This would be a target space of meta-tools designed to explore a search space.

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