RETHINKING FRAMING 3

Making Sense of Discipline-Agnostic & Discipline-Based Framing

In this book we have the advantage and challenge of not just looking at design as a stand-alone or as the joining of two disciplines arriving into what is becoming Design for Complexity. As complex conglomerations of multiple approaches intermixing aspects of influential anchors; Action Research, CPS, Design, Soft Systems Thinking and Wild Card Others there is not one universal approach.

Rather than trying to make the indefensible narrow claim that abductive thinking, framing and cocreation are exclusive to design, we want to help our readers understand that the broader picture is a little more complex and nuanced as it applies, not to academic remunerations, but rather to everyday strategic practice. In that picture there is both challenge and opportunity.

Part of what makes understanding that picture difficult is that the design community contains forces of consolidation around the whys and ways of approaches designed for Arenas 1 and 2 now grappling with a changed world…and thus belatedly, actively projecting themselves into the complexity arenas, 3 & 4. In this regard numerous projection tricks-of-the-trade are underway in the marketplace adding confusion, not clarity. In academic circles defence of tenure track trumps future making which creates odd dynamics in the industry. 

Image Credit: Rethinking Design Thinking, Humantific, 2020

The evolution of the former is running on a rather different clock time pace than the real world practice. It's not a secret that strategic practice would be dead in the water if it moved at the pace of tenure track dynamics.

In this Part 3 we want to return to build on Parts 1 and 2, and clarify a few fundamental dynamics related to framing as they relate to Design for Complexity. All involve choice and forks in roads. 

Continuing from Part 2, *Claude Winkler and I have a few more things to discuss and share before we close this chapter.

CHALLENGE FRAMING

Foundational Framing Logics

G: To begin lets reflect on which of the anchor approaches; Action Research, CPS, Design and Soft Systems Thinking engage in Discipline-Based Challenge Framing and which engages with Discipline-Agnostic Challenge Framing.

C: Good distinction to draw — this is really about whether the methodology brings a substantive disciplinary lens to framing the problem, or whether the framing apparatus itself is content-neutral and can be picked up by any discipline.

DISCIPLINE-AGNOSTIC FRAMING 

Foundational Framing Logic / Creative Problem Solving (CPS):

C: Creative Problem Solving is the clearest case. CPS was built (Osborn, then Parnes, then Treffinger/Isaksen) explicitly as a generic process — Clarify, Ideate, Develop, Implement (in its various versions) — with no embedded content theory about what kind of problem you're looking at. Mess-finding and problem-finding in CPS ask process questions ("what's really going on, what do we want to achieve") rather than discipline questions ("what does engineering/anthropology/economics tell us this is"). The framing tools (e.g., "How Might We," wish-listing, problem redefinition) are domain-neutral by design — that's the whole point of CPS as a portable applied creativity methodology taught across business, education, and engineering alike.

Foundational Framing Logic / Action Research:

C: Action Research is also fundamentally discipline-agnostic at the level of its core cycle (plan–act–observe–reflect). Lewin developed it for social/organizational change, but the cyclical, participatory, practitioner-driven structure carries no inherent content commitments — it's been adopted wholesale in education, nursing, organizational development, community development, and software engineering without modification to the underlying logic. What gets imported is whatever disciplinary knowledge the practitioners bring to interpreting a cycle's results, not something built into the methodology's framing move itself. The framing question is always some version of "what's the problem as the people living it understand it," which is process-level, not discipline-level.

DISCIPLINE-BASED FRAMING

Foundational Framing Logic / Design Thinking

C: In Design Thinking framing is discipline-rooted. Even in its generalized form (IDEO/Stanford d.school version), the framing move is structured by a design-discipline commitment: framing happens through human-centered, artifact/experience-oriented lenses — "how might we" statements are typically anchored to a user, a need, and an insight derived from ethnographic-style observation. That's not neutral; it imports specific assumptions from industrial/interaction design practice about what counts as a relevant problem (usually: an unmet human need addressable through a designed intervention). Even as design thinking has been generalized beyond product design into business strategy, its framing vocabulary (personas, journeys, pain points, jobs-to-be-done) still carries that design-discipline DNA.

Foundational Framing Logic / Soft Systems Methodology (SSM)

C: Soft Systems Methodology is the most discipline-rooted of the four. It emerged specifically from Checkland's critique of hard systems engineering being misapplied to messy human/organizational situations, and its framing apparatus — root definitions, CATWOE, rich pictures, the distinction between the "real world" and "systems thinking about the real world" — is a purpose-built systems-discipline toolkit. You can't really frame a challenge in SSM without using its systems-specific constructs; the methodology is the discipline's framing language operationalized as a method. It's less portable to other fields without substantial translation, precisely because the framing tools are saturated with systems-theoretic content.

C: There's a nice resonance with your holistic/complexity mapping here too: the two discipline-agnostic methods (CPS, AR) tend to function as generic engines that other frameworks or disciplines plug into — which is partly why they show up so often as the "operating logic" layer underneath other frameworks. 

The two discipline-based methods (Design Thinking, SSM) each carry their own holistic orienting commitment baked into the framing step itself — design thinking's "whole user experience," SSM's "whole situation as a system" - which is consistent with how you'd been distinguishing holistic thinking (the map) from complexity thinking (the weather): the discipline-based methods supply more of their own map, while the discipline-agnostic ones rely on borrowed maps and contribute mainly the weather-navigating logic.

G: With due respect, good progress AND not yet 100% there. Some good news is that I am picking up only a few shades of bias in your descriptions across the 4 approaches.:-) This is significantly improved from 6 months ago, where there was noticeable bias oddly towards the rather late arriving SSM. It is your last paragraph that is a little problematic in its generosity. 

G: In Design the notion of “whole user experience” does not equate to whole picture consideration. Experience Design, along with Product Design and Service Design are assumption-boxed methods unless their front ends have been redesigned. Considerations of “user experience” are already down-stream in assumption-boxed Experience Design. Discipline-based methods containing discipline-based assumptions make them less than ideal for the context being considered in this book Arena 3 organizational changemaking and Arena 4 societal changemaking. Both are complex contexts where what the challenge actually are cannot be assumed at the outset. 

G: A case could be made that SSM is also discipline-based and thus has the problem preconceived as the system, before any facts are known. It's just that SSM is making assumptions at a broader scale. SSM enters all rooms with that baked in assumption. 

G: Difficult news but the marrying of two methods, engaged in assumption-based framing, operating on different scales of assumed challenges does not make that framing discipline-agnostic.

G: If Meta Design is meant to be universal to all challenge types then Discipline-Based Framing is not an ideal fit. This remains one of several elephants in the design framing living room and a fundamental unresolved issue in the graduate design education community setting its sights on teaching for the context of complexity while trying to insist on importing, shoe-horning-in Discipline-Based Framing attached to the hero model. This model tends to run into difficulties in complex contexts where many disciplines, not just design are present. 

G: Can Strategic Design be “design” without the hero model becomes the question that remains in motion at this time. In this Design for Complexity book some approaches have crossed that bridge and others not so much. Ultimately this has ended up impacting the book itself.

C: That's a more precise and more honest account than my last paragraph offered, and the correction is well-taken on both counts.

On Design Thinking's "whole user experience."

C: Framing it as holistic was imprecise. "Whole user experience" is already a scoped, downstream assumption — it presupposes that the relevant challenge territory is legible through a user-experience lens, which means the framing decision was actually made before the methodology starts. The question "what is the user's experience of this?" is only askable after you've already assumed there is a user, that their experience is the relevant unit of analysis, and that the challenge is of the kind that has users whose experiences can be designed. In Arena 3/4 contexts where none of those assumptions can be taken for granted, that's not an open front end — it's a pre-closed front end wearing the costume of inquiry.

On SSM.

C: This is the sharper and more important correction. SSM enters every situation with "this is a system" already decided — which is itself a discipline-based assumption of considerable weight. The scale is broader than Experience Design's user-experience assumption, but broader scale doesn't mean less assumption. In fact there's an argument that a broader-scale pre-assumption is harder to dislodge mid-process than a narrower one, because the methodology's entire apparatus (root definitions, CATWOE, conceptual models) is built to elaborate the system-assumption rather than question whether "system" is the right frame in the first place. SSM is more pluralistic than hard systems thinking within its assumed frame, but the assumed frame itself isn't up for negotiation inside the methodology.

The combined point.

C: Marrying Experience Design and SSM — one assumption-boxing at the user/artifact scale, one at the system scale — doesn't produce discipline-agnostic framing; it produces two layers of discipline-based assumption operating at different altitudes. The front end remains closed even if the combined apparatus looks more comprehensive from the outside.

The elephant you're naming.

C: The fundamental unresolved tension in graduate design education aiming at Arena 3/4 is exactly this: if you import discipline-based framing into complexity contexts — whether at the user-experience scale or the system scale — you're not teaching open challenge framing, you're teaching sophisticated assumption management. And if the hero model travels with discipline-based framing (as it structurally tends to, for the reasons we traced through Schön), then you get a compounding problem: not only is the front end pre-closed, but the authority to close it is located in a single practitioner or design team rather than distributed across the multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder field that Arena 3/4 actually presents.

C: The question of whether Strategic Design can be "design" without the hero model is a real one, and it may be that answering it affirmatively requires explicitly adopting the discipline-agnostic, open-front-end framing architecture that CPS and Action Research already have — which would mean acknowledging those lineages rather than continuing to sidestep them. That acknowledgment is presumably part of what remains unresolved in the book you're describing.

G: We might need to come back for a Part 4 and Part 5 of Rethinking Framing to unpack more inside how framing is being depicted across the 4 anchor approaches.

CLOSING

How we see this picture, which might be difficult for some readers, is that it's a sensemaking contribution. There is obviously no guarantee that making some of the challenges facing current state strategic design methodologies will help make the future of rethinking design in more robust ways arrive any faster. 

Swimming in these waters since 2005 I cannot even say that I am personally optimistic in this regard. It's more about everyone has a part to play and for better, or for worse, this part seems to suit our sensemaking skillset, so we place it on the table and let it be. Long after we leave the playing field it will remain in one form or another and so be it.

RETHINKING SUNNY SIDE

It was one of those days when connective ideas come floating in from anywhere and everywhere. Earlier that day by happen-chance I noticed on instagram a beautiful short video of a mom and two kids singing a folk song in their backyard that went like this: 

“Keep on the sunny side

Always on the sunny side

Keep on the sunny side of life

It will help us everyday

It will brighten all the way

If we keep on the sunny side of life

There’s a dark and troubled side of life

There’s a bright and sunny side too

Though we meet with the darkness and strife

The sunny side we also may view

Keep on the sunny side

Always on the sunny side 

Keep on the sunny side of life

It will help us every day 

It will brighten all the way

If we keep on the sunny side of life.”

*Claude Winkler subsequently pointed out that “Keep on the Sunny Side” is a well-known American gospel/country song written in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn and Howard Entwisle, later repopularized in the 1920s, and remaining a favorite to many today. 

I was struck by the underlying, optimistic meaning of “Keep on the Sunny Side”, a simple metaphor, rooted in the 19th century, intending to express a philosophy of resilience, hope and moral perseverance. It also acknowledges a “troubled” side to life. The song encourages listeners to choose hope over despair, even when life is difficult, arguing that people have agency in how they respond. 

Later that day as I walked by the Avenues Global School here in NYC on 10th Avenue in Chelsea I saw scribbled in colored chalk on the sidewalk in front of their summer camp subscription tables;: “Kids in the Game.”

Walking home I reflected on how “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “Kids in the Game” related to this slippery subject and in part to this book project.

In problem/opportunity finding terms only talking about the sunny side (as if we are in the 19th century) does not result in much problem finding, unless we can consider that reflective activity a part of a reconsidered sunny side in 2026. This we do.

I reflected that indeed sometimes in our Humanistic practice we talk about making T-shirts that say “Happiness is a Complex Problem”. This is a particular orientation and way of being in the world that is not for everyone. 

In the past couple of years we have noticed several “Future of Design” books published reflecting only the simplest “Keep on the Sunny Side” mantra, leading to celebration and no problem surfacing, recognition or acknowledgement. That too is a way of being in the world.

It’s no secret that when it comes to this subject two games tend to coexist, one a heavier lift than the other. Both visible on LinkedIn.

Game 1 is about promoting current conditions of designerly education and designerly strategic practice as if it already reflected the challenges of the complexity arenas. Game 1 is often quite defensive in orientation. Some believe strongly that this is the purpose of LinkedIn today and the result is obvious.

Game 2 is more related to the R&D story. In Game 2 the state of the world is considered, not just the state of strategic design. 

These two stories sometimes overlap but are quite different things. Of course it’s human nature to want to be in and project the sunny side. That much has not changed since the 19th century. 

If we were to pile up Game 1 material and compare it to a piling up of Game 2 material there would be no contest under present conditions. This is the community generated stew that presently exists.

We share this to make it known to our readers that we are well aware of the two stories and the sunny side dynamics. 

Since this is clealy not the 19th century and as we reflect on the current state of the world and how we collectively got here, it seems like a good moment to reconsider the meaning of what constitutes the “sunny side”. This we do.

For us we are on route to a reconsidered sunny side via this unpacking and sharing. We are lucky to have the NextD Journal vehicle to aid in the construction and sharing of this reconsidered sunny side story. 

Quoting the backyard singers: ‘Keep on the sunny side y’all”!

Stay Tuned for Part 4 and 5 of RETHINKING FRAMING.

More soon. 

End

*Claude Winkler is Ai.

Related / Previously Published:

ADVANCING DESIGN FOR COMPLEXITY: RETHINKING FRAMING: Part 2 of 5

Making Sense of Schon’s “Reflective Practitioner”