Cool 
thank you @nathaliesmith
You might be familiar with these already:
For ‘needs’ I started with learning about jobs-to-be-done and then tailored the approach to the project depending on what we needed to solve. Christensen’s video is a short good introduction if you are new to it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGtw2C95Ms&t=3s
For situations, they are also a part of jobs-to-be-done, many people include them as a “contextual clarifier”, but I also found them through ethnography ( https://hbr.org/2014/03/an-anthropologist-walks-into-a-bar ) and systems thinking ( ** ).
Happy to share more if anyone’s curious