RETHINKING WICKED 2
- Admin
- Oct 8
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 9
Making Sense of What Rittel / Webber Missed
Welcome back. Noting the response to the earlier posted Part 1 of Rethinking Wicked, we summized that some additional sharing might be helpful to our readers. This Part 2 remains a chapter-in-progress. "Wicked Problems" is a little like “Double Diamond” in the sense that it has become a concept around which many odd interpretations that impact methodology evolution do appear. In the case of wicked, the headspinner is not so much the terminology, or the original Rittel/Webber intention, but rather the various giant leaps of logic statements around the term being combined with a cavalcade of subsequent, continuous downward spiraling redefinitions.
In the interest of confirming the existence of forward-motion on the time line, perhaps this might be a good moment to point out that there are several not-so-secret handshakes involved in the emerging practice community regarding the reinvention and R&D around Design for Complexity. One of those psychological handshakes that some folks don’t like to talk about, due to the sensitivity around scholarly authorship, is that many in practice do not use the term Wicked Problems, and haven't for years.
Not only has it become a giant hairball but if you subscribe literally to what professors Rittel, Webber and decades later Buchanan had in mind, what they wrote about, there is no need to be working on the reinvention of designerly methodologies applicable to more complex contexts beyond product, service, experience. There is no need for adaptive reskilling and no need for the graduate design education programs to change. No need for new programs. There is no need for the cross-community Think-Blending that is underway, geared towards augmenting design methods in the face of complexity. Taking the Rittel, Webber, Buchanan rhetoric literally, the work is done and we can all go home.
In contrarian to that thrust, the handshake is essentially, a wink and a nod, as in: Lets park the Wicked Problems Hairball along with the giant assumption statements affiliated with it being made by various parties and get on with the work of methods reinvention in the real world.
To engage in that recognition handshake is crossing a gateway out of Extending/Magicing and into Reinvention. As we pointed out in the previous chapter, not everyone is going to make that trip.
The dynamics around whether that crossing is necessary or long past due, continue to evolve in the community at diverse clock rates. The strategic design community is never in one place at one time.
TAKEN AT FACE VALUE
Lets keep in mind that in 1973 Rittel, Webber and later in 1990 Buchanan were all highly regarded academic scholars. To move ourselves closer to understanding what happened regarding the slippery slope of “wicked” it's useful to pay close attention to the words used by Rittel and Webber in their work, before others arrived with a diversity of ambitions.
If we take at face value that Rittel, with the best intentions, once wrote: “Most design challenges — in architecture, urban planning, social systems, and innovation — are wicked in nature”...and “Wicked problems are a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated..”, that can help us.
From the NextD Geographies perspective, apart from the generalized term “innovation”, what Rittel is referring to there is primarily Arena 4, societal changemaking. Taken at face value, without any creative enhancements, that does not mean that the challenges typical of Arena 1 and Arena 2 are wicked. That expansive reinterpretation is one of numerous twists in the story that has not been well explained by the graduate design academies. Of course, talking up “wicked” without an organizing ecology for design present in the room is a futile exercise.
Apparently Rittel also said: “The problems that [urban] planners— and by extension, designers— deal with are inherently wicked. They are ill-defined, and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution rather than for solution.”
What we take note of there are two things: the gigantic “by extension” commentary and the odd focus on “judgment”.
Decades later when Buchanan wrote about the wicked subject in 1990-1992, he did not question or call for a recalibration of Rittel but rather he went in the direction of amplifying much further the somewhat vague notion of “by extension” with his interpretation: “Rittel argued that most of the problems addressed by designers are wicked problems”…and then more directly: “All design problems are wicked problems.” and “All design problems are indeterminate and therefore wicked.”
The die was cast by Rittel/Webber and amplified in recasting by Buchanan, cascading forward and still reverberating today, continuously shading towards the vibe of magic thinking. Numerous academic permissions for engaging in giant leaps of logic were embedded there.
MISSED LANDSCAPE OF CHANGEMAKING
It’s not difficult to see in the Rittel/Webber text that they were primarily engaged in argument differencing design from “sciences and engineering”. That argument was their focus for an extended period. They were not engaged in an expansive survey articulating the various parties already engaged with complex “ill-defined” problems, in cocreated problem intervention, or organizational and societal changemaking. Rittel’s arguments present a picture that there were three approaches at the possibilities table in 1973, “Sciences, Engineering and Design”. That was clearly not the case. Was "urban planning" the center of gravity for the subject of “ill-defined” problems and collaborative cocreation in 1973 and decades later 1992? See anything wrong with that picture? The wicked manifesto was a creative attempt to broaden, in the self-interest of design, and its academies, while presenting a narrow picture of who was at the capabilities table. That miss was extended via the various later arriving Buchanan texts including his 1992 essay; Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. The window into changemaking was never widely opened. So be it. That was the mode of that era and that moment. Of course many of the terms piled into the wicked materials such as complexity, complex problems, ill-defined, ill-structured, indeterminacy were not in 1973 or 1990 and are not today unique to design. The Rittel/Webber/Buchanan picture was about academic differencing, not practice-based think-blending, not taking advantage of what others already knew. Some good news is that miss can now be recalibrated via cross-community think-blending. For those opening the aperture via think-blending the landscape of possibilities becomes more clear.
MISSED REAL CONTEXT
In 1973 and still today, perhaps as much as 95% of the design practice community active primarily in Arena 1 and Arena 2 operate from the assumption of jumping off from a “brief”, which is a defined or semi-defined problem/challenge, often generated before the design team arrives. There are decades of absence from challenge framing predisposition embedded in graduate design education, cascading into the practice community. Still today if you ask graduate design students to draw their process, often what they draw begins AFTER the brief arrives. That's the real context. It seems improbable that Rittel and Webber were not aware that this was the case? How that historical predisposition gets translated into being experts in complex challenge framing remains a mystery, an argument stretch that flies best inside the design community. Oddly the actual context for the vast majority of design professionals in 1973 is missing in the Rittel/Webber wicked materials. The implications of that particular miss were enormous and still reverberating.
MISSED FRAMING TRANSPARENCY
In 1973 and still today most graduate schools of design teach what we refer to as discipline-based-framing, meaning a product designer learns how to frame product challenges, a service designer service challenges and an experience designer frames experience challenges. Deeply rooted in design, discipline-based-framing does not scale well to complexity. One does not need to be using the term wicked to see that it is typical of the challenges encountered in the geographies of organizations (Arena 3) and societies (Arena 4) to be fuzzy at the outset, meaning work is going to be required to determine what the constellation of challenges actually are. Being geared up to engage in those complexity arenas means not having to wait for a brief, or disciple-based guessing but rather engaging in open cocreated challenge framing. It is a chunk of complexity related clarity that could have been part of the Wicked Problems landscape of materials created by Rittel and Webber in 1973, or more precisely by Buchanan in 1992 but that clarity, that transparency has long been missing in the design community. “Houston” we have a disconnect. To be talking up Wicked Problems but still assuming discipline-based framing taking place in assumption-boxed methods is straight-up and rather wild confusion-making. Other options now exist in the Design for Complexity emerging practice community.
MISSED ACTUAL METHODOLOGY
With all due respect, Rittel and Webber did not make it clear that the Wicked Problem formulation was primarily a philosophic construct that called out for a corresponding method/approach that could operate at the same problem scale. There was nothing in the Rittel “First Generation Process” tabled in 1972, that would have been considered revolutionary at that point in the multi-community Innovation Methods Evolution Timeline, (See Innovation Methods Mapping, the book) or in sync with their own stated wicked definition. The intervention process, not future-casting process, that was tabled by Rittel in 1972 was a list of words describing 8 phases; 1. Understand the Problem, 2. Gather Information, 3. Analyze Information, 4. Generate Solutions. 5. Pick a Solution, 6. Implement, 7. Test and 8. Modify. ODDLY THERE WAS NO FRAMING THERE. In the later arriving widely read Buchanan essay “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” there was lots of philosophy inserted and no process at all. In the absence of actual methodology Buchanan tabled the abstraction of “Placements” in that 1992 essay.”Placements are a source of new ideas and possibilities when applied to problems in concrete circumstances. As an ordered or systemic approach to the invention of possibilities, the doctrine of placements provides a useful means of understanding what many designers describe as the intuitive or serendipitous quality of their work….The doctrine of placements will require further development if it is to be recognized as a tool in design studies and design thinking.”
In the practice community it is not that big a secret that the elephant in the wicked problems living room was/is that the methodology part of wicked was largely aspirational. The headspinner is that today, decades later, the wicked problems terminology is most often being connected in the design community to down-stream product, service and experience design methods, necessitating the term "Wicked Problems" be retrofitted in order to sync up. Apart from what is going on in the reinvention-oriented emerging practice community, that is the often heavily defended current state of strategic design, not so well explained by the graduate design academies. The missing-in-action of corresponding methodology continues to be at the center of the Reinventing Design / Design for Complexity Movement.
MISSED HERO FADING
Perhaps the most difficult thing to get at, around the wicked question is the hero dynamics embedded in 1973 era architecture, city planning and design in general. In that model the designer was both the content expert and the process expert. (Known as Mixed Mode in our Innovation Methods Mapping book 1) As it became more clear that high degrees of collaborative cocreation was the new normal in the context of complex organizational and societal changemaking the designerly communities, including architecture, struggled with that shift. With the process role of facilitation rising, the designer as hero model began to look out of place. While architecture was once considered a leading contender for cocreation leadership, other communities of practice were already at the table, equipped with defuzzing cocreation methods and without the hero dynamic. There is nothing in the wicked materials to suggest any awareness that such a moment was taking place and it’s a moment that the design community still struggles with. It's a moment that is part and parcel of every practitioner involved in the Design for Complexity emerging practice community today. How to meet that moment directly impacts what design is becoming now in the face of rising complexity and that might look quite different from what it used to be during the hero eras. It seems probable that few practitioners engaged in Design for Complexity today are chasing/advocating/modeling the hero model. (See 50 Key Findings in this book.)
X: MISSED PRACTICE TONALTIES
In the above mentioned, hugely influential 1992 paper Wicked Problems in Design Thinking tabled long after the 1973 Rittel/Webber paper, we noted a difficult to explain miss that ended up having a huge impact that is still in the community. In that paper Professor Buchanan went so far as to depict no real difference between the altitudes of design. Reading across those vibes, that steering seemed to be more about faculty smoothing, not offending any department head colleagues, rather than acknowledging what was driving differences related to changing skills and methodologies. Here are the few smoothing sentences in that paper that launched the magic thinking movement, along with the suggestion that all design problems are wicked: “These four areas are also interconnected with no priority given to any single one. For example, the sequence of signs, things, actions and thought could be regarded as an ascent from confusing parts to orderly wholes. ..But there is no reason to believe that parts and wholes must be treated in ascending rather than descending order. Parts and wholes are of many types and may be defined in many ways.” Nowhere is there any mention of the changing scale of problems in that text. Of course injecting tenure-track smoothing sensitivities into the mix of how best to think about the geographies of design and their implications was not a good fit when it bumped up against considerations of real world practice, facing an increasing array of complex fuzzy challenges. To be fair, it seems unlikely that the implications of that good faith smoothing were anticipated in 1990-1992 when that essay appeared. The Buchanan smoothing vibe has been taken advantage of to the max and is still very much embedded in, entangled in magic thinking today which was probably not his intention. In practice, departmental politics and tenure-track egos are not in the mix of how we in NextD Journal think about the emerging future of design and what needs to be done to participate there. An added headspinner in that paper is that the author actually points out that having a supplied brief can take the wickedness out of wicked problems but then fails to point out that most of the design community in 1992 was brief-based. The tonalities of Design for Complexity practice today tend to be based around the difficult recognition of rising complexity of challenges and continuous change, often expressed as VUCA and not around inter-academy political smoothing considerations. Difficult subject.
CLOSING
Looking at that giant "wicked" hairball one might ask: Does the 1990s insistence that all design problems are wicked problems take the previously Rittel/Webber described “wicked” out of wicked? Is wicked being dumbed-down while the catchy term is being advocated/marketed?
Common sense tells us that recognized wicked problems such as inequality, poverty, homelessness remain significantly different, not just from so-called tame “math and chess" problems, but rather different from framed challenges found in product, service and experience design. The fuzziness on the front-end plays a big role in wickedness.
If your boss hands you a brief describing a new product challenge facing your organization, is that the same as tackling poverty and homelessness? Common sense would suggest; probably not. Among the possibilities for forward paths is to get off the magic thinking merry-go-round and return to a common sense view of complexity, problems, challenges, opportunities and if you so choose, wickedness.
Has the design community itself become a giant hairball? Imagine the deliberate downsizing of wicked taking place in the context of concern being expressed for reductionist thinking….:-) Always good to have a sense of humor in this business.
Time to buckle up!
The upshot of the various historical hits, misses, side-steps and omissions is that much work remains to close the gap between broad ambitious philosophical design statements and actual methods so that brings us back to the recognition handshake.
This book is about what the issues are for those who have made that handshake and are on their way, however bumpy and imperfect that trip might be.
Always big thanks to everyone everywhere who made historical and contemporary contributions to this shifting subject in order for this evolution to take place, at a multitude of different speeds and on a diversity of logic tracks.
End.
BEYOND MAGIC THINKING / FIVE THINGS
Five things you can do to get off the magic thinking merry-go-round and get on the other side of the GIANT Wicked Hairball:
Coming soon!
Related Previously Published:
Chapter-in-Progress
Chapter-in-Progress
The Rittel “First Generation Process Model” (1972) was included in our first cross-community survey book Innovation Methods Mapping on pages 98 and 99.