Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 26, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 5-17
Design Studies

Wicked problems revisited

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2004.06.005Get rights and content

I revisit Rittel and Weber's essay on the ‘wicked problem,’ and relate it to more recent theories about rationality and professionalism. Perhaps the most provocative challenge comes from Deleuze and Guattari's difficult commentary on ‘the rhizome,’ which has currency within much design studio culture. I posit the controversial conclusion that ‘wickedness’ is not aberrant. It is formulations of professionalism which pay homage to the idea of formal rules, goal setting, and calculation as representing the norm of rationality, that present as deviations.

Section snippets

Wickedness defined

It seems as though some problems are tame, such as factoring a quadratic equation, traversing a maze, and solving the tower of Hanoi puzzle. The latter consists of three rods mounted on a board onto which are stacked coloured disks of various sizes. The goal is to move the disks from one rod to another to achieve a pyramidal stack in the shortest number of moves. The problem is well defined, with a single goal and a set of well-defined rules: disks must be relocated on a rod one at a time, and

Responses to the problem of rationality

Various responses have been proposed to ‘the problem with rationality,’ or rather, to use Rittel and Webber's provocative language for posing problems: the problem with rationality has already been framed according to various agendas.

Radical professionalism and the rhizome

A further example of theorising that seeks departure from systems thinking, and debates about professional rationality, is expressed in the writing of the French-language philosophers Giles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari (1930–1992). Their work, along with much other French writing, has been too easily dismissed by systematisers as jargonistic, anarchic, ludic, provocative, and generally difficult (Bricmont and Sokal, 1997). Amongst other projects, Deleuze and Guattari rail against the

Implications for design

To summarise, we can go further than Rittel and Webber did in their 1973 article. Wickedness is the norm. It is tame formulations of professional analysis that stand out as a deviation.

Rittel and Webber highlight the sociality of problem formulation. It is surprising that the tradition of which they are a part seemed so aloof from contemporary thinking in continental Europe at the time, notably the long-lived traditions of phenomenology, the politically seditious writing of the Frankfurt School

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