Rather than a linear technology that acts directly on the cause of a problem, design is more concerned with a “phronesis”, a practical wisdom of considering the whole situation, setting the context in which the technology functions, and improving the relationship between humans and the technology so that the technology can fulfill its original purpose. For example, rather than developing drugs that directly address the etiology of disease, design seems to be more concerned with making the drugs easier to take for infants and the elderly, and with labeling so that there is no mistake about which drug to take.

If a linear approach based on linear cause-and-effect relationships is like the process of composing a melody on a staff, then design is more like an on-the-spot effort to maximize the effect of the composition, or what modern French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari call “arrangement.”

This view of design gained strength from the 1960s, when people became aware that a simple cause-and-effect approach, in which science discovers the cause of a problem and engineering technology eliminates it, can exacerbate the problems of life and society by neglecting factors outside the assumed framework. Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Louise Carson and The Limits to Growth (1972) by Donella H. Meadows et al. can be cited as examples of awareness of such issues.

It was Horst Rittel, Professor of Design Methodology at Ulm School of Design and Professor of the Science of Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who proposed the idea that the essence of design is in its complex interaction with the environment as a methodology of design.

In his 1973 co-authored paper “Dilemmas in the General Theory of Planning,” (1973) Rittel argues that the usual technical procedure would be to define the problem effectively, enclosing it in a certain framework, and to construct a means-ends linkage for its solution. However, according to Rittel et al., such a model in which logic and causality overlap (the linear model A→B) assumes that it is possible to determine in a straightforward way whether the language describing the problem corresponds exactly to the objective situation in question and is reasoning according to the explicit rules already established, as in a chess problem, in the form of “true or false.” As long as this assumption holds, Rittel calls them “tame problems.”

By contrast, Rittel says that most social problems cannot be enclosed in a tame framework. As soon as a linear cause-and-effect framework is set up to solve them, external factors outside the framework play a crucial role and the problem cannot be effectively controlled. Each factor is multilayered by numerous feedback loops, thus transforming the effectiveness of the means to the goal from time to time. The procedures for problem solving are universally unsustainable, idiosyncratic, and nonlinear, and thus lack the scientific condition of refutability. He defines such kinds of problems as “wicked problems.”

According to Rittel, the security of a city is a typical example of a wicked problem. Even if, for example, the number of perceived crimes is reduced by increasing the number of police officers, it is not easy to say that this is the right type of problem and the right means to solve it. This is because the decrease may have been caused by other factors (e.g., economic improvement or improved welfare and education programs), and even if the number of crimes is reduced, the reality of public safety may have worsened, as crime has gone underground. In other words, in “wicked problems,” a contextualization that problematizes the meaning of the framework itself always could arise outside the framework that defines the recognition and solution of the problem, and thus their truthfulness and refutability and the means to solve it are always suspended.

Rittel says that in wicked problems, the problem itself is defined in a way that is indistinguishable from its solution. For example, a problem based on the Hobbesian-liberal view of crime, that all people are wolves, would already anticipate solutions such as more police officers and surveillance cameras. A framework based on the Benthamian and social view of crime, that crime is the result of poverty, would anticipate the solution of strengthening the economy and welfare policies. If this is the case, then the perception of the problem and the means of solving it in a wicked problem depends on the so-called worldview of the person who designs it, and therefore it can only be judged not based on “right or wrong, true or false,” but on the basis of “good or bad” in terms of its social sensitivity.

Rittel’s argument about “wicked problems” accurately captures a problematic core inherent in modern science, technology, and policy methods. Their very frames make it difficult to solve the problems in question. Design is a technology based on sensory apprehension as well as public evaluation, in the sense that it attempts various non-linear arrangements of the elements of reality in society, since they are composed of multiple feedback loops in a pluralistic and fluid manner.

(KOGA Toru)

Related Classes

Design Futures Course, Philosophy of Design

References

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari（1980）, Mille Plateaux, Minuit.
• Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber (1973), Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences 4, Elsevier.