The Wicked Problem of Overthinking the Concept of Design

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Buchanan (1992) contracted and dilated his diatribe on “design thinking” in his article entitled “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking”. His description of liberal arts thirty years ago was derived from the literature of Dewey and others from decades earlier. As Buchanan wrote during a time when the world wide web was exponentially growing with hopes of creating greater efficiencies in the workplace, broader access to information of all kinds, and a new virtual economy that would see money markets, banks, and stock exchanges take full reign of deregulation to ensure an unprecedented flow of wealth to the one percent, little did he realize that his warning of not using “integrative disciplines of understanding, communication, and action” would carry little-to-no value into the twenty-first century. Few needed to hear to this warning. Reality had already swallowed his vision and spat it out to design thinkers in specialized and practical ways that would influence culture and legislation, causing the kind of disparate and divisive society we face today. The lofty notion of using design thinking to enrich human life has been for the most part an exercise in the enrichment of a few lives and the social-consumerist slavery of everyone else.

Even Buchanan’s interpretation of Dewey is flawed in the context of the today that is thirty years on. In the integrated and complex nature of today’s resulting realities of design thinking, Dewey may have actually been referring to the interconnectedness  that design thinking has brought to the way both specific segments and the larger society as a whole function. Dewey espoused the notion of science as an art and in so doing, he revealed his previously narrow idea of science for it is now becoming more common knowledge that many of the highest and most complex sciences are highly creative in their very nature. Take, for example, the study of calculus; in its highest form it resembles music composition where formulae can be applied and arranged in innumerable ways to arrive at novel solutions to a complex problem. Dewey attempted to redefine the concept of “technology” in this way, however, such a semantic redefinition did not stick, and most of us still consider technology a practical thing (like a piece of hardware or a formula) that can be used to create something or solve a problem.

Buchanan descends further into unravelling a notion of design thinking that becomes at most an intellectual exercise akin to peeling an onion; what begins as an attempt to understand more ends with the teary-eyed realization that it is an examination of all the same stuff leading only to the new knowledge that the essence of design thinking is an artistic process. His reward perhaps is some stinging pain for having presented an argument that, although it has some intellectual merit, does little to change the course of our inventive pursuits. His notion of a problem of integration carries very little plausibility in today’s information-rich age. Even before the internet, I was made aware of the interconnections of how design thinking had thrust art and science together using technologies and the mother of invention (i.e. human necessity) as its primary vehicle.

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I am reminded of a 1978 BBC television series rebroadcast by TVOntario in the early 80’s that I watched with great interest as child. It was called Connections and was hosted by James Burke who connected technologies from different eras in human history in a kind of evolutionary form that Buchanan does not seem to perceive in his need to analyse a problem that at the onion’s centre simply does not exist. One later 1994 series revival episode explained how IBM’s punch card electric tabulation system used on Ellis Island for processing immigrants (and later used under exclusive contract with the Nazis in their concentration camps to create prisoner records, and even later sold to Scantron to improve standardized testing design in schools) was only possible through the invention of the hot air balloon. The show used integrated design thinking to explain the connection through a chain of inventions between the two. It was fascinating. I still remember the show to this day. The series showed how the integration and communication between culture, technology, and design thinking combined an intricate complex and interdependent web of invention and innovation. There seems to be then a lack of understanding that Dewey and subsequently Buchanan placed upon the wider modern public as though we somehow lack such vision. Buchanan naively states, “[W]ithout appropriate reflection to help clarify the basis of communication among all the participants, there is little hope of understanding the foundations and value of design thinking in an increasingly complex technological culture.” (p. 8). He contends that this lack of reflection and understanding of design thinking is a problem.

So, what if there is no problem? What if there never was a problem of integrating the various nuances of design (including the four branches as described by Herbert Simon or otherwise)? What if Buchanan is in search of a problem? If this is so, then all arguments are semantic and only serve to offer a solution and make a point that is essentially moot. To say that “it is surprising that no one has recognized the systematic pattern of invention that lies behind design thinking in the twentieth century” (p. 12.) is an insult not only to the BBC show Connections, but also to most free-thinking individuals who have made their own connections in the pursuit of solving problems both personal and societal. Design thinking might even be reduced to describe the process of learning and even child development, aspects of which may be useful to the teaching profession.

To think that specialized scientists might have a problem with design thinking is nonsense. It is perhaps the divergent yet integrative nature of design thinking that has always been the catalyst for most innovation, especially when disparate specialists converge. In today’s data-rich age, Buchanan’s thirty year-old ideas about design thinking proposed should be put to rest. Integrating divergent technologies and ideas has perhaps always been the only way to design solutions and innovative tools for society’s benefit. What is wicked is the 1972-Rittel-derived conclusion that Buchanan makes in respect to solving the design thinking puzzle; that the solution lies in embracing the indeterminant nature of the process and not in defining the steps toward a solution. In other words, seeing a problem that might not even be there could be the spark of invention that drives the engine of design thinking, an effort that might very well prove itself an intellectual conundrum if not a futile exercise of circular thinking in the end, leaving the thinker bereft of purpose.

Reference

Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking Design Issues: MIT Press, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 5-21