Designing in the Future

The consequences of poorly structured requirements obviously have enormous consequences on design. Given that problems rarely are well formed, what responsibility should we designers take to bring clarity to the problem? Whether this is official design work or not, I keep backing up to clarify problems in order to bring clarity to my design. If I don´t, coming up with simple, comprehensive solutions on the fly is difficult. Messy problems don´t lead to clean design. And small refactorings don´t always collectively add up to appropriate design abstractions. I hope the future will yield better techniques for understanding and structuring problems as well as design solutions.