I thought it followed the Socrates tradition in that the true philosopher is the one asking the questions, and it is the role of the student to answer them.
I wish I remembered who I am quoting here
The split of art vs. design you're talking about or one of the many ways to divide the act of creation into a classical/romantic divide or one of the many other ways to describe it should be considered harmful.
And I'm not trying to split hairs here but wishing the dichotomy you're talking about didn't exist and encouraging folks not to frame the world that way.
If we think of Leonardo da Vinci he created both art that created problems, and inventions that solved problems. But these world where very separate.
If you have an idea that there's a split between "creating beautiful stuff" and "creating useful stuff" then your world turns into one where something is only one or the other where someone creating only does one or the other.
These days it's thought of unique or special if something is both and the fact this isn't standard is influenced by the mental model of them being separate.
Here's one interpretation though, for the discourse:
When given a task, some artists focused less on the objective and more on the process of observation. Observation of what, would be a logical next question. And I have to imagine and indulge in some projection here and guess that any of the artists may have been looking for more of a challenge, or more meaning. How to select some combination of objects, relative to the constraints of the circumstances for the task, paired with the skills they possess to produce the task at hand.
Given the proper acumen and a relatively subordinate task, I imagine some would tend towards Parkinson's law.
So following this, maybe problem finding could be seen as: how is this beautiful/aesthetically pleasing, or what do I really want to compose to fulfill this demand? What innate qualities do these things have which express some quality? Or maybe: how can I waste an hour of this man's time?
YMMV
I think one reason it may be so difficult to express this concretely, is that artists are often looking for an ineffable quality.
There are plenty of artists who can do well on SATs, and can fill out bureaucratic forms, and complete one-hour timed tests. They might well take a lot of time to think and explore when they are making their own art on their own schedule.
But I know artists who just can't function well under artificial constraints and can't adapt well to someone else telling them how to create art.
I wonder if the quality of the art suffered within the context of the experiment because of the time constraint, even if in the long run those people tended to create better art.
It seems to me equally plausible that one group were more interested in the craft of an accurate depiction, while the other was more interested in the arrangement of a pleasing aesthetic - both could be considered "solutions" to the given task.
Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.
For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But the reason why scientists do not allow such an open dialogue with laypeople is because the majority of answers are going to boil down to either "that question doesn't make any sense, and i would have to spend the entire rest of the session teaching you why" or "we already did these experiments a bunch of times in the last hundred years, and found out the result, but the result is tricky because of so and so mitigating factors, and for me to explain these results and how to even interpret them in the first place (e.g. explaining how it was measured, explaining the theory behind why we chose that method to measure it, explaining what the numbers we get mean, etc.) would take the entire rest of the session"
And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge", and at some point you hit a point where you're stuck between "spending 4 hours drafting a response to someone who has not bothered to put in the time to learn physics, and wouldn't listen to you anyway because they think they know it all", and "getting actual work done in your field". The scientists I know do take time out of their day to answer actual questions from inquisitive folk, but the difficulty is that thanks to the addition of ChatGPT, those questions are getting more and more cramped out by the crackpots armed with a hallucinating dictionary.
I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.
As for the crackpots, well, I know some people spend time and energy with them, but it is hard to believe their true objective is learning or contributing. It is, fortunately, very obvious when you meet one in the wild.
I think at this point most of these people talk to chatbots instead, anecdotally the crank flow seems to have lessened.