https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/reviews/on-design-thinking/

Design is a talismanic word with nearly infinite meanings. Design and the ideas that travel with it, in other words, make up a discourse. > “not just what it looks like and feels like” but “how it works.”

Of all these developments, the idea of design as a broadly applicable way of thinking—the idea of “design thinking”—may end up being the most influential.

For Rittel, design problems’ wickedness meant that they could never be subject to a single process of resolution. There could be no one “method.” Textbooks tended to break down, say, engineering work into “phases”: “gather information,” “synthesize information and wait for the creative leap,” et cetera. But for wicked problems, Rittel wrote, “this type of scheme does not work.” Understanding the problem required understanding its context. It wasn’t possible to gather full information before starting to formulate solutions. Nothing was linear or consistent; designers didn’t, couldn’t, think that way. If there was any describing the design process, it was as an argument. Design was a multiplicity of critical voices batting a problem around unknown terrain until it formed itself, or not, into some kind of resolution.

This methodlessness, Rittel believed, was a wonderful thing. It entailed, he wrote later, an “awesome epistemic freedom” (the italics are his), without algorithmic guardrails or rules of validity. “It is not easy to live with epistemic freedom,” he wrote, and so designers often sought out sachzwang — practical constraint, inherent necessity, “a device to ‘derive ought from fact.’” But they shouldn’t. Without methodological constraint, design had room for heterogeneity. It had the capacity to surprise. “Nothing has to be or to remain as it is,” Rittel wrote, “or as it appears to be.”

• What I find really interesting, is while there is no ‘one way to design’, focusing on design as the method might be the wrong thing in itself. If we take principles over process, the questions becomes: how do we create environments to create better decisions?

It was design for a service economy: memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details.

You face wicked problems by struggling with them, not by solutioning them. You argue, you iterate, you fail, you grieve, you fight.

But design isn’t magic. To address a wicked problem is to look for its roots — and there’s no hexagon map for getting there.

To design, really design, is to acknowledge those divergences — and then to listen one’s way, and push one’s way, to somewhere new. Such battles from competing positions can be truly wicked, Rittel believed, but it’s better to fight than to obscure irresolution with optimism. He had a point. Design may come in an elegant package, but it doesn’t always make things right.