In the late twentieth century the developed economies of the world began to make a shift of emphasis from the production of goods to the production of services, strategies, and ideas. American futurist and associate editor of Fortune Magazine, Alvin Toffler (1980) described this change as being the third wave in a series of global socioeconomic changes: the agrarian revolution (first wave), the industrial revolution (second wave), and a post-industrial revolution (third wave). This post-industrial revolution began in most developed countries in the 1950s, with the introduction of jet travel (1980). As today’s made world becomes more interconnected, complex and dynamic, the machine metaphor of the industrial age, with its vision of stable bureaucracies and ready-made answers, has now become a liability. In this post-industrial age, “organizations are not independent machines, standing in the middle of a stable field,†but instead, “living, breathing, changing organisms that are interacting with millions of other living, breathing, changing organisms†(Godin, 2002). The approach to design and professionalized work style that “were refined in the first half of the [twentieth] century, based in Newtonian mechanistic physics, are not readily adapted to contemporary conceptions of interacting open systems and to contemporary concerns with equity (Rittel & Webber, 1984 p 136).
Whereas the refined problem set of closed systems (machines) were largely “definable, understandable and consensual†(Rittel & Webber, 1984), those problems concerning open systems are ambiguous, circular, stubborn and aggressive. The design scholar Horst Rittel describes these open system problems as “wickedâ€; which in brief, means that each problem is unique, is the result of other problems, has consequences that are difficult to imagine, has no criteria for knowing when it has been solved, has numerous intervention points, is resistant to change, and has solutions that are good or bad, rather than true or false (Rittel & Webber, 1984). The ambiguous, circular, and aggressive characteristics of these sort of situations make problem-posing and problem-solving very difficult; hence, the sense that their nature is wicked.
For example, consider automobile design, which while designed as closed systems, must still operate as part of an open one. When car design improved to the point were they could travel faster than a horse, things like air speed, dust and flying bugs hitting occupants in the face became problematic (or at least undesirable). The proposed future was to place a glass windscreen so that wind and bugs would be deflected over the vehicle, while still allowing its occupants to see out (a most important requirement for the driver). This worked well enough, unless an occupant happened to be thrown through the glass in an accident, which had the nasty effect of decapitation. This new problem, led to the design of tempered glass that would break safely into thousands of little pieces. However, this solution generated a new problem, and perhaps, even worse problem. If a pebble hit the windscreen at 100 mph it would break clean through and could injury or kill. This new problem in turn, lead to the design of plastic laminate glass windscreen, now the standard on automobiles today. The point to be drawn from this example is that the solution to one design problem, invariably introduces new, often unforeseen ones. In fact, it’s often the case that the design solution to one problem creates a new and bigger problem issues (i.e. ecological ones). Moreover, as the number of dependencies increase, the design of the whole becomes more complex and difficult to modify further without introducing ever more critical problems.
The great scale, complexity and interconnectedness of our artificial world today has introduced a set of wicked problems (i.e global warming) on a scale never before known by humanity. These wicked problems, on all scales of magnitude, beg for a more effective problem-solving methodology. Due to the scale and complexity of these emergent problems
No one discipline or profession has the expertise needed to effectively cope with the systemic constraints and opportunities of these wicked problems. Consequently, resolving wicked problems has become the domain of interdisciplinary teamwork, which introduces its own set of problems that further complicate the designers work. The essence to the interdisciplinary work problem is the necessary work methodology sufficient to facilitate collaborative thinking and production. Each discipline tends to have its own problem-posing and problem-solving methods and there is often process frictions within interdisciplinary “design†teams. In an attempt to solve this problem design theorists, like John Chris Jones, have proposed the usefulness of “design thinking†as a unifying “methodology†for interdisciplinary problem-solving. Given my interest in considering the nature, quality and application of design thinking I wonder if it’s the “wicked†nature of “open system†problems that is driving (in part at least) a desire (by the likes of the Stanford d.school) to make the mental dimension of the design process more explicit?