The basic ideas and principles of granular computing (GrC) have been studied explicitly or implicitly in many fields in isolation. With the recent renewed and fast growing interest, it is time to extract the commonality from a diversity of fields and to study systematically and formally the domain independent principles of granular computing in a unified model. A framework of granular computing can be established by applying its own principles. We examine such a framework from two perspectives,granular computing as structured thinking and structured problem solving. From the philosophical perspective or the conceptual level,granular computing focuses on structured thinking based on multiple levels of granularity. The implementation of such a philosophy in the application level deals with structured problem solving.