Topic 1: Design Methods
Wicked Problems and the Science of Design
Design Methods
Operations Research originated during the years leading to World War II and was developed to inform decision-making through the use of statistical tools, as well as other analytical methods. These thoughts informed the need for better managing the design process after WWII as the Cold War introduced new competitive pressures. The Design Methods movement was initiated with the “Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications,” held in London in 1962. We will discuss the emergence of these tools, along with the use of Design Research as a means to organize and understand the needs of people operating in complex systems.
Kings Fund Hospital Bed, source: Science Museum Group
Header image: Assembly of Liberator Express Transports (Wikipedia)
Assignments for the Class
Readings & Assignments
The readings for the week include:
ASSIGNED READING: Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Rittel and Weber, 1973 (Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company)
SUPPLEMENTAL READING (SCAN): Exploring Consumers’ Brand Image Perceptions with Collages - Implications on Data Collection, Data Analysis and Mixed Method Approaches, Marc Florian Herz, 2010 (Researchgate)
Assignments for the week are as follows:
CHOOSE A DESIGN METHOD: Find a design or other relevant method that you find interesting and discuss:
Why is this design method relevant to our work as designers?
How does the method help designers to understand the context of the problem?
How does the method help us create new insights?
Why do you find it interesting?
101 Design Methods is in the library or elsewhere
PREPARE FOR IN-CLASS WORKSHOP: Gather photos for a photomontage:
Collect imagery that describes your personal relationship to design
Imagery should be a mix of personal and found items
Include people, places, and things that represent design to you
Read the attached article if you want more information on the activity
IN-CLASS WORKSHOP: Design Photomontage
Create a photo board of images that reflect your personal perspective of design. These images should include some personal photos, as well as brands that reflect your perspective on design, designed artifacts, influences, and people that align with your vision of design. Consider how you chose to become a designer. What inspired you?
Goals for the Class
Students will be able to articulate the context of the post-war period when design methods emerged. They should be able to describe how design methods, including research, are used by designers to create solutions for people’s problems. Students will know what “Wicked Problems” are and the limitations that these pose for designers. They should also understand the historical significance of the Kings Fund Hospital Bed. After our workshop, students should appreciate the differences between qualitative and quantitative methods in their practice.
The Sciences of the Artificial
“[T]he proper study of mankind is the science of design, not only as the professional component of a technical education but as a core discipline for every liberally educated man.”
Herbert Simon
The Semantic Differential
“The semantic-differential question was introduced in 1957 by Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum in the book The Measurement of Meaning.” Linguistics and semantics evolved as fields of study during the period after the war. The Semantic Differential uses bi-polar adjectives to measure meaning, opinions, and attitudes. The tool is most commonly used to assess product options and designs, as well as to understand complex topics such as brands and customer values. Other rating scales and visualization methods such as the two-by-two grid and spider graph are available to understand and present similar information.
Source and Image: Semantic Differential (Nielsen Norman Group)
The Ulm Influence
The Ulm School of Design (1953-1968) was founded to bring the political sphere and the designed environment together. “The HfG is not just a school where you are educated in a special subject; the HfG is more like a community whose members share the same intentions: bestowing structure and stability upon the world around us.” (T. Maldonado) Horst Rittel and Bruce Archer lectured on the use of design methods to support the design not only of products but the political milieu. Conflicts emerged between those who thought that design was more than the methods and those who promoted a wider vision.
Photo above: Pumping water in northern Ghana (Drexel University)
Photo left: HfG Ulm
from Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning
“The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, because of the nature of these problems. They are ‘wicked’ problems, whereas science has developed to deal with ‘tame’ problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about ‘optinaal solutions’ to social probIems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no ‘solutions’ in the sense of definitive and objective answers.”
Rittel & Webber
Wicked Problems
Rittel & Webber considered “Wicked Problems” to be ill-defined challenges that required “argument” or communication to create solutions. Conklin’s characterization is useful for understanding the challenges posed by these problems: “The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.” Buchanan provides some insight into a potential design process being proposed by Rittel in Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.
“Rittel sought an alternative to the linear step-by-step model of the design process being explored by many designers theorists. Although there are many variations of the linear model, its proponents hold that the design process is divided into two distinct phases: problem definition and problem solution. Problem definition is an analytic sequence in which the designer determines all of the elements of the problem and specifies all of the requirements that a successful design solution must have. Problem solution is a synthetic sequence in which various requirements are combined and balanced against each other, yielding a final plan to be carried into production”
As Buchanan discusses, this is ultimately not a linear process. Rittel also points to the need for collaboration with those experiencing the problem in order to effectively create solutions.
Image: Horst Rittel
The British Design Council developed the Double Diamond process in 2005. It visually articulates Rittel’s phases of design.
Characteristics of “Wicked Problems”
Rittel and Webber's formulation:
There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem — The information needed to understand the problem depends upon one's idea for solving it.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule — "This is the best I can do within the limitations of the project."
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad — Their assess- ments of proposed solutions are expressed as "good" or "bad" or, more likely, as "better or worse" or "satisfying" or "good enough."
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem — With wicked problems, on the other hand, any solution, after being implemented, will generate waves of consequences over an extended—virtually an unbounded—period of time.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly — With wicked planning problems, however, every implemented solution is consequential.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan — There are no criteria which enable one to prove that all solutions to a wicked problem have been identified and considered.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique — There are no classes of wicked problems in the sense that principles of solution can be developed to fit all members of a class.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem — Thus "crime in the streets" can be considered as a symptom of general moral decay, or permissiveness, or deficient opportunity, or wealth, or poverty, or whatever causal explanation you happen to like best.
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution — "Crime in the streets" can be explained by not enough police, by too many criminals, by inadequate laws, too many police, cultural deprivation, deficient opportunity, too many guns, phrenologic aberrations, etc.
The planner has no right to be wrong — Planners are liable for the consequences ofthe actions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to those people that are touched by those actions.
Thoughts to Consider
Consider if a design process is able to adapt to all “wicked problems”
The wicked problem of Covid-19 (2020), Greenpeace
“Indeed, since the book was published, a whole academic field has grown up around the idea of ‘design methods’ -and I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these so-called design methods. I am very sorry that this has happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design. In fact, people who study design methods without also practicing design are almost always frustrated designers who have no sap in them, who have lost, or never had, the urge to shape things. Such a person will never be able to say anything sensible about "how" to shape things either.”
Christopher Alexander, 1970 (via C. Kueh PhD)
Science and Design
Science has historically sought to understand the “way things are” whereas designers have focused “how things ought to be.” The distinction between Design Science and a Science of Design is subtle, yet critical. Since, “the origins of design methods lay in 'scientific' methods, similar to decision theory and the methods of Operational Research,” we have a multitude of approaches to understand how these disciplines interact. Scientific approaches can inform our methods. We can also systematically explore the efficacy of approaches. As we have seen since the beginning of the class, new methods in business, technology, politics, and social sciences have influenced our practice. Methodology need not consume practice. The Wicked Problems framework tells us that the analysis and the solutioning are not clearly delineated.
Image left: Krebs Cycle of Creativity, Neri Oxman (MIT)
Connecting cybernetics with the computing counter-culture and design, Dubberly & Pangaro (2015)
Design Deconstructed
In 1970, John Chris Jones published Design Methods: seeds of human futures to demonstrate that the design process could support both rational and intuitive processes. Highlighting four eras of design: “Craft Evolution”, “Design By Drawing”, “System Designing”, and finally “Socio-Technical Innovation.” With an eye to managing design, Jones set out to deconstruct the design process. He arrived at thee stages:
Divergence
Transformation
Convergence
Design Methods includes 35 methods to select from for each stage in the process. Jones describes design as “a social art” with a number of cross-functional participants. As we move into the topic of “Design Thinking”, these social ideas will play a central role.
Image left: Design Methods book
Image: The Design Council's Evolved Double Diamond (2019)
Thoughts to Consider
What factors should the design process consider?
Hippo Roller (1991)
“Indeed analysis of, and reflexivity about, the design process were as important to some of those involved as the resulting specification. For the project was as much about design as it was about beds. The King's Fund Bed was both test case and advocate for a new method of designing artefacts that was to replace unexamined intuition with overt, systematic and logical procedure, in fields ranging from product engineering and industrial design to architecture and town planning.”
Ghislaine Mary Lawrence
Design Research
Working with the Nuffield Foundation, Misha Black and Bruce Archer set to identify areas in the hospital where design could produce better outcomes. They identified four areas to explore.
“We identified four candidate problems:”
A soiled dressings receiver
The mal-distribution of medicines in hospital wards
A large number of hospital bed types (300+)
The abuse of fire and smoke control doors in public buildings
The proposal of a bed was dismissed and funding cancelled. Black asked the King’s Fund for financial support. The result of the extensively researched project was a hospital bed specification rather than a specific design.
Kings Fund Bed (1994), Science Museum Group Collection, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence
Designerly Approaches
Design Methods offer designers a way to manage complexity, define problems clearly, and assess outcomes of process and projects. Mixing methods to achieve both a rigorous consideration of the factors impacting a problem as well as a thorough exploration of design options allows us to remain grounded. Our challenge is to consider the balance of structure versus more social-oriented tools for exploring the problems people face in the world. Per Rittel and Horst’s perspectives on Wicked Problems, scientifically derived design methods may not offer better clarity on the problem space than less rigorous tools.
Image right: A Day in the Life Activity (Science Direct)
Thoughts to Consider
What factors were considered in the design of the hospital bed?
Designing the hospital bed (1957)