Greetings all. Just catching up on some of my Sunday reading here in New
York now that the world has taken a turn for the better we hope.
I was intrigued by this short thread that subsequently turned into a quite
different thread focused on information.
I will briefly comment on the wicked tame thing here and on the
information aspect on the other thread.
With all due respect I am often baffled by confident statements that
"Designers deal
with the problems that cannot be tamed." Lets be careful what we are talking
about here.
At best it is a statement about a relatively small segment of the design
community.
This appears to be largely a suggestion rather than a statement of
fact as to a significant degree it flies directly in the face of historical
and present day proportional realities of design practice and certainly of
design
education.
It is I think important for design educators in particular to resist the
temptation to create idealized notions of design ignoring what
design has historically been and largely is today, even acknowledging the
significant diversity of approaches that are out there. Orienting entirely
via
idealized notions, old or new, prevents the community from coming to terms
with how design education must change, indeed is changing in some locations
and why.
At NextD we try to keep separate promotional statements about design from
the much needed problem finding statements. The promotional positioning
coming on strong from the design consultancies and from the design schools
Understandably seldom reflect problem finding within the community. In list
dialogue we
often see these yin and yang views entangled to the point where a new
generation of designers are oriented in the promotions rather than in the
realities of design and the many challenges still facing us, particularly
around design education.
If design education was already teaching designers how to take on unframed
wicked challenges we would not have created NextD in 2002, we would not
still be
seeing significant interest from mid-career designers now facing new
realities without adequate skills/tools and we would not still be having
this conversation. There remains a significant lack of alignment out there
between the challenges facing us on planet earth and what we continue to
teach in design schools. While awareness has been significantly raised in
the last five years and much improvement has been made, with many new
programs coming on stream, significant gaps remain.
Much of design practice remains confined within what we call the brief
business. Briefs are defined, framed problems. Taking a wild guess I would
say that 90% of design schools around the world still reflect this tradition
and remain engaged in teaching process tools and skills that not only assume
a design brief but are specifically, systematically geared to jumping off
from that downstream framing. (Often that framing is being done by others
with no design background.) This is the opposite of gearing up to jump off
from wicked, fuzzy situations, whether they be fuzzy problems or
opportunities. These two starting points imply/demand two different
mindsets, toolsets, skillsets. As many discover when they transition from
one to the other, these are not interchangeable starting points.
A relatively tiny portion of the design community is engaged upstream on the
other side of problem framing and there is virtually no discussion of that
practice space on this list.
It is no secret that there are now several generations of designers out
there in the marketplace at mid career who were trained to tackle framed
brief shaped challenges but find themselves facing, and being asked to lead
in a now highly complex rather unframed world. There is heroic adaptation
occurring across the design communities of practice today but lets not get
that confused with what people were actually taught in design schools indeed
are still being taught to a significant degree. Adaptation has historically
been placed on the students shoulders rather then on the shoulders of the
design education institution but that old game is also changing rapidly due
to rising awareness among marketplace enlightened graduate and post-graduate
students. While design schools continue to pour new graduates into the
workforce
year after year, the vast majority remain ill-equipped to work in the
practice realm
of wicked problems as what they have learned remains based in the brief
business.
Unless we come to terms with what it means from a process perspective to
work upstream from briefs no amount of promotional posturing will help
capture leadership opportunities for designers. In contexts where no change
in design education has occurred, framing designers as magically capable of
tackling wicked problems conveniently sidesteps the need for change in
design education that is in general still lagging far behind the huge rise
of interest in and need for the enlightened application of design around the
world.
Regards
...
GK VanPatter
Co-Founder
RETHINK THE THINK
Humantific
NEW YORK / MADRID
http://www.humantific.com
...
Co-Founder
NextDesign Leadership Institute
New York
NextD
DEFUZZ THE FUTURE!
http://nextd.org
...
> From: Chris Rust <[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Chris Rust <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:07:53 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Information in Designing - wicked and Tame
>
> Klaus Krippendorff wrote:
>> it might be useful to use the word wicked and tame in rittel's sense --
>> until someone proposes a better definition.
>>
>> saying that the problem posed by wicked problem is to tame them assumes that
>> tame problems are the ideal case. rittel defined wickednes by its
>> untameability, calling for different methods
> I agree very strongly with Klaus, my attempt to distinguish designing
> and engineering was based on repeated (if not very rigorous)
> observations that many engineers have a "taming" instinct which leads
> them to confuse the two. Designers deal with the problems that cannot be
> tamed, and every tame problem can turn wicked if the external situation
> changes.
>
> best wishes
> Chris
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